Joey Bargsten
About
PhD, University of Iowa
Email: jbargste@fau.edu
Areas of Expertise: interactive digital media, immersive and generative visuals and audio, performative media, procedural and microtonal music software, new media studies, and virtual reality
Joey Bargsten teaches courses in interactive digital media. His research interests combine intermedia and audiovisual interaction with live performance, 3D interactivity, and virtual reality, ranging from transmedia opera to dance with motion-reactive visuals.
Bargsten won a Miami Knight Art Challenge Awards for the presentation of his transmedia opera MelanchoLalaland™ . He was a Finalist in the 2021 American Prize in Composition (Opera/Theatre category) for the work.
In 2021, he won a Gold Award in the Hermes Creative Awards for directing and editing three promotional videos for the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies (SCMS) undergraduate programs.
His experimental digital films have appeared in festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Atlanta, Tokyo, Munich, Kyoto, Athens, and Sofia. He won the audience award at the Stuttgart Filmwinter Expanded Media Festival for his interactive media art site BAD MIND TIME™, a work featured in exhibitions of digital art internationally since 1998. His experimental feature meme™ REZEREX™ (2025) was nominated for the Best Composer in a Feature Film Award at the New York Independent Art Film Fest (2025), and won the award for Best Music in a Feature Film at the Kyoto Independent Film Festival (2026). His short LOOMERZ™ (2024) won both Best Experimental Film and Best Composer in the Munich Short Film Awards (2026).
Video Features
Recent Publications
Narrative and Spatial Design through Immersive Music and Audio . The IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, 5th Annual Workshop on Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments (2020).
Experimental Media Voodoo: A Practicum for Digital Art, Music, and Text,
Austin: Sentia Publishing LLC (2018).
"Re-Imagining Microtonalities: Prototyping a Bohlen-Pierce Synthesizer in PureData" (2016)
"Gesture and Performance with Kinect, Quartz Composer, and PureData" (2014)
Recent Exhibitions and Performances
Liminal Music for a Backrooms Experience (2026) experimental film featuring generative visuals and music notation, played by the Con Brio String Quartet. Liminal Music was awarded SemiFinalist in the Experimental Film category at Atlanta Movie Awards and Tokyo ShortFest film festivals (2026).
meme™ REZEREX™ (2025) experimental feature film, Kyoto Independent Film Festival. Winner, Best Music in a Feature Film Award.
IXION #2 "The EyeCandy™ (2021) fake stereoscopic film premiered at The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival, New York City (December 2021), and exhibited at Brainwash Film Festival, Oakland CA (August 2022) and VASTLab, Los Angeles CA (November 2022)
Polysemic , multimedia performance exhibition featuring Kyle Motl, Matt Baltrucki, Carlos Dominguez, and Joey Bargsten. Ritter Gallery, FAU (November 2019)
Animated Music Notation—Group Exhibit, Monash University, in conjunction with the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation & Representation (TENOR) and the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC). Melbourne, Australia, (July 2019). Work exhibited: mNotation™ generative music notation software.
MelanchoLalaland™ , Multimedia Opera, performed at Miami Beach Cinematheque (September 2015). Scenes from the opera performed at FilmGate Interactive Conference, Miami (February 2015)
Courses
DIG 3110: Fundamentals of Multimedia ( Student examples)
MMC3711: Interactive Multimedia (Student examples) (Undergraduate & Graduate)
VIC4943: Multimedia Practicum
MMC6715: Studies in New Media (Undergraduate & Graduate)
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