High Lonesome

Impossible is a starting point.

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What I Do

You have an idea. Maybe you've already been told it can't be done. Maybe you haven't asked anyone yet because you already know what they'll say.

I'm the person you call anyway.

For nearly a decade I've kept Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return running - not by having every answer, but by refusing to stop until I find one. I work across the full range: interactive lighting, projection environments, sensor systems, animatronics, custom fabrication. If it plugs in, moves, responds, or glows, it's probably in my wheelhouse.

I'm not an agency. Not a software house. Not a firm. I'm one person with a very deep bag of tricks and a genuine problem with being told something isn't possible.

Selected Work

Sirens: Secret Passkeys & Portals

AV and systems integration for the whole room. Three 72-inch portrait displays run as a single 6480x3840 canvas. The lighting inside the center column and across the room is mine, along with the systems that tie it together.

Artist: Virgil Ortiz - Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

CJ's Temporal Lobby

Touch the bust and the whole room flips. A depth camera watches for the hand. Then the eyes start spinning, the lights and the radio go red, the videos cut to a different story, and the music changes to match.

Artist: Janell Langford - Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

The Woven Crystal Cave

The goal was crystals that react to people dancing. Computer vision came first and couldn't hold up in the room's low light. A pair of Kinect Azures came next, then a spinning lidar. The final system is fourteen discrete lidar sensors on two Teensys, following movement through the tunnel and feeding nine universes of LEDs, so the crystals around you change color as you move.

Artist: Zulian Tuohey Martinez - Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

Ancestral Crypt

Leave an offering and the Oracle responds. A load cell under the bowl registers every gift. An Arduino reads it and hands off to a Raspberry Pi, which triggers Pepper's Ghost video inside the two glycerin-filled bottles the Oracle holds, so the answer appears to float in the liquid itself.

Artist: Lauren YS (Squidlicker) - Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

Catacombers All-Way

A hallway of mirrors and monitors, fed by cameras overhead, so visitors watch themselves move through it from above. The system runs in modes: pose estimation that places graphics on people's heads as they pass, a ghost mode that renders everyone transparent, and a Halloween mode that composites public-domain horror films over the live feed.

Artist: Edie Fake - Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

Nicolae's Shed

No artist on this one, just a loose concept and some household logic: nobody gets to run experiments in the bedroom. So Nicolae's gear moved out to the shed, including a five-laser prototype of the Beamspace laser harp. It got company out there: a plant that talks when you touch it, and a synth in a Galaga-style cabinet that plays samples of the House's own narrative audio and video.

Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

Necro Techno Flesh Complex

The room is built around a glowing dome with an animated world inside it. Nothing you could buy did that at our size for our money, so the first prototype was a lampshade. The installed version is a dome coated in rear-projection paint and mapped in TouchDesigner. The lampshade is retired. The dome isn't.

Artist: Flesh Dozer - Meow Wolf - House of Eternal Return

Fractal Dozen

Crack an egg and it dives into the Mandelbrot set, from a frame as wide as the observable universe to one narrower than the Planck length, rendered live, even on a phone. A phone GPU holds about seven digits; the bottom of the dive needs more than sixty. The CPU computes one reference path to 77 digits, and the GPU only tracks how far each pixel strays from it, each pixel carrying its own exponent. Every dive is plotted fresh.

Crack one open
Artist: Jeff Teague - Inspired by Meow Wolf's Eggs In Space

About

Jeff Teague

I grew up in Roswell, New Mexico. I still live close enough to the desert that I can hear it at night.

I've spent the better part of a decade keeping things alive that probably shouldn't work - running on custom solutions, lateral thinking, and a deep suspicion of the word "impossible." High Lonesome is what I do outside the House.

Get In Touch

Tell me what can't be done.

Especially if it's weird.

jeff@highlonesome.tech