Christopher T. Linder

chris@lumitonestudios.com   |   (412) 448-8398   |   Somerville, MA   |   christophertlinder.com 

Summary

I am an interactive artist dedicated to fostering wonder, delight, and connection through art installations. With a background in Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Art from Carnegie Mellon University, I leverage over 20 years of experience in the video game industry as a company founder, engineer, designer, artist, data scientist, and manager. My expertise in interactive design, honed in the game industry, allows me to create art projects that connect people to their environment and each other in novel ways, enabling them to form or deepen connections. My projects, such as Undertone and Touchtone, transform public spaces into dynamic, inclusive environments that invite participation and foster community.

Interactive Art Projects

https://christophertlinder.com/projects 

Undertone: 2025-present (Belden, CA)

• Designed an underwater, music-responsive light work composed of six 5 m LED assemblies engineered for moving water (sealed, strain-relieved, field-serviceable).
• Deployed in the Feather River for the Priceless Festival; integrated Undertone with two stages so river light patterns followed live sets in real-time.
• Led river-safe anchoring, power distribution, and show-control integration; coordinated installation with festival production and safety teams.

Priceless Forest Stage (with Stark Raven Fabrication): 2025 (Belden, CA)

• Co-designed the DJ booth with Stark Raven Fabrication and installed a Lumitone music-responsive lighting system.
• Built a custom bridge to the stage’s lighting controller, enabling the lighting designer to sync the booth’s color and state with the broader stage look in real-time.
• Cohesive visual language across the stage with music-responsive lighting illuminating the dance floor from the DJ booth.

ManRay Chandelier: 2025-present (Cambridge, MA)

• Music-responsive chandelier whose lights and patterns adapt to the room’s soundscape.
• Patron-operable controls (not staff): abuse-resistant hardware, bounded parameters, and safe fallbacks bring interactive art into a nightclub context where it’s rarely available.
• Permanent installation integrated with venue power and maintenance workflows.
• Venue reports a shift in guest circulation and congregation, with guests spending more time near the chandelier.
• Fully documented UL-listed components to support electrical code compliance.

Between Beats: 2025-present (New Alliance Gallery, Somerville, MA)

• Designed and built the non-invasive heartbeat sensing and real-time signal-processing pipeline that detects beats from two bodies simultaneously.
• Developed custom software that drives the visual engine (expanding/interfering circles) and a complementary sound engine: heartbeats trigger percussive beats while layered synth voices follow a separate, related algorithmic structure.
• Engineered electronics, calibration routines, and low-latency communications to ensure robust performance in a live gallery setting.

Starfire Lodge: 2024-present (Morongo Valley, CA)

• Site-specific, music-responsive architectural lighting integrated with the home’s finishes and design aesthetic.
• Created an LLM-driven, voice-enabled natural-language interface, allowing users to speak naturally to select and refine palettes.
• Dual-mode control (physical interface + app) supports easy adjustment for guests as well as fine control for owners.
• Discreet hardware, UL-listed components, and concealed cabling deliver a built-in, architected look rather than an add-on.

Filaments: 2024-present

• Custom warm-white light elements that softly pulse with music for an atmospheric, non-color-changing approach.
• Modular format supports chandeliers, suspended groupings, or landscape deployments; designed for calm, high-CRI glow and low visual noise.
• Intended for venues seeking subtle, music-linked ambiance without overt “light show” effects.

Lumitone Event Lighting: 2024-present

• Portable Lumitone rig for clubs, performances, and private events; fast load-in and minimal footprint.
• Real-time music analysis drives colored lighting fixtures for cohesive motion (beyond simple beat hits).
• Custom built operator-friendly controls for on-the-fly tuning.
• Scales from small rooms to larger stages.

Neuralink's Cyberpunk Bar (with Stark Raven Fabrication): 2021-present

• Helped design and build an immersive sound-responsive bar using a first pass of the Lumitone system.
• Installed system that controls and powers 3,137 individually addressable LEDs on-site.

Clouds for Discovery Gateway Children's Museum (with Red Flower Studios): 2020-present

• Created a system able to sense the movement of museum guests and use that information to control LEDs contained within eight cloud sculptures.
• Designed all electronic systems for LEDs, controllers, and sensors.

Touchtone: 2015-present

• Created a generative music system activated by skin-to-skin contact which outputs MIDI to control various synthesizers, turning human touch into a musical instrument.
• Created system to control multiple incandescent light sources in time with music created by participants.

J.O.A.N. (with Rx): 2015-present

• Designed, built, and installed the electronic control of the flame effects, as well as associated fire safety systems.
• Contributed to the flame effects’ plumbing and fabrication.

Somatone: 2013-present

• Created multi-user collaborative movement-controlled musical instrument based on active Doppler radar.

Toxic Bloom (with Ethan Garner, David Dowling, Joel Greenwood, and Ecco Pierce): 2008-2017

• Created control systems based on the Kinect and Wii for an interactive fire sculpture where participants' gestures are manifest in bursts of colored flame.

Pyrocardium (with False Profit Labs): 2007-2009

• Designed and programmed flame response to participants' heartbeats.
• Contributed to the flame effects fabrication.

Selected Presenting & Funding Partners: Neuralink, Discovery Gateway Children's Museum; Boston First Night; FIGMENT Boston; Burning Man; Coachella; Maker Faire; Priceless Festival; Firefly Arts Collective; Yuri's Night at NASA Ames Research Center; Oakland Fire Arts Festival

Professional

Lumitone Studios - Founder: 2023-present

Somerville, MA  |  lumitonestudios.com 

Left the game industry after 20 years to follow my dream of creating interactive and immersive art full-time. Created Lumitone Studios as the commercial studio arm of that venture to focus on high-end, site-specific, music-responsive lighting

Studio focus

• Installations: site-specific, music-responsive lighting for bars, lounges, galleries, and homes.
• Events: portable music-responsive lighting rig for rapid, on-site deployment.
• Emphasize subtle, colored motion that shapes atmosphere.
• Natural-language interface for palette selection and refinement for on-the-fly color tuning.
• Patron and staff operable controls with bounded parameters and safe fallbacks.

Technical & compliance

• Custom hardware/software, real-time music analysis, low-latency control, and show-control integration.
• UL-listed components with full documentation; NEC-aware wiring and installation practices.

Selected installations

• ManRay Chandelier (Cambridge, MA)
• Starfire Lodge (Morongo Valley, CA)
• Undertone (Belden, CA)
• Priceless Forest Stage (Belden, CA)
• Cyberpunk Bar (Neuralink campus)

Scope of work

• Concept → prototyping → fabrication → installation → calibration → documentation and training.
• Integration with existing audio/lighting systems; maintenance-friendly design.

Demiurge Studios - Co-founder, Head of Data Science: 2002-2023

Boston, MA

Studio Founding and Leadership

Co-founded Demiurge Studios in 2002 with classmates from CMU, growing it into a 100+ employee studio spanning 19 states and 5 countries. Collaborated with top studios like Marvel, Sega, Blizzard, Riot, EA, Gearbox, Epic Games, Psyonix, and Harmonix while also developing original products and IP. Held diverse leadership roles across engineering, production, live operations, and data science.

Head of Data Science

Created the data science department in 2015 in response to shifting industry trends and the availability of data in our first games-as-a-service product, Marvel Puzzle Quest. Grew a team involved with all our live products, directly working with game directors and studio leadership.

• Skills and methods:

• A/B testing, causal inference, linear regression, time series forecasting, natural language processing, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, clustering, deep learning

• Revenue Estimation Tool for Marvel Puzzle Quest

• Developed forecasting model to predict daily revenue based on scheduled game events and design decisions
• Model was highly accurate, consistently estimating revenue 2-3 months in the future to within 5% of actual realized monthly revenue
• Incorporation of tool into design workflow improved Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU) by 20% year over year from 2019 to 2021

• Created a market analysis tool from Steam data aggregating play patterns and game ownership to identify game similarity across genres as well as potential market opportunities for unfilled spaces. This utilized both UMAP and k-means clustering as well as custom heatmaps and distance metrics. The tool was used to help direct exploratory efforts for new IP as well as to focus direction in early development.
• Assessed ad campaigns for mobile games to ensure target Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) based on predictive Lifetime Value (LTV) models.
• Created analytical reports and built dashboards for internal and external use.
• Wrote and oversaw the writing of regular reports to game directors, covering a wide variety of topics from assessments of in-game virtual currencies to player surveys.
• Mentored team, teaching programming in R, new statistical methods, and dashboard creation.

Novel Interfaces

Worked on a variety of novel human-computer interfaces, pushing the bounds of how humans interact with games

• Kinect - Unannounced Projects: 2010-2012

• Spearheaded engineering efforts to process data from the device and turn it into reliable game inputs
• Brought three projects to functional vertical slice

• Emotiv Brain-Computer Interface: 2008-2009

• Pitched original game idea to Emotiv for use with their EPOC EEG headset
• Coordinated development between Boston-based Demiurge game team and San Francisco-based Emotiv EEG headset team
• Created a demo game for the 2008 Game Developers Conference

• Wii - Brothers in Arms: Double Time: 2006-2007

• Ported Brothers in Arms to Wii and added gesture and motion controls

Additional Projects

Contributed across data science, engineering, production, and design to the following projects:

• Marvel Puzzle Quest, Sega Heroes, WWE Tap Mania, Aliens: Colonial Marines: Bug Hunt, Shoot Many Robots, Green Day: Rock Band, Word Fu, Mass Effect (PC), Frontlines: Fuel of War, Medal of Honor Airborne, BioShock, Brothers in Arms, America's Army: Rise of a Soldier, Clone Bandits, FlipTrip
• 10+ unannounced projects

Speaking, Publications, and Community Service

• Spoke on panel “The Scientific Revolution of Mobile Gaming”, Pax East - 2017
• Linder, Christopher, Al Reed, and Chris Sturgill. "Create a Vehicle Model for Unreal Tournament 2004; Add a Vehicle to Unreal Tournament 2004; Modify the Behavior of a UT2004 Model." Gaming Hacks, edited by Simon Carless, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2004:  Hacks #82-84.
• Spoke at high schools about video games and interactive art as community outreach

Education

Carnegie Mellon University / B.S. in Cognitive Science with a double major in Computer Science; minor in Art (2001). Pittsburgh, PA

Selected Coursework: Interactive Media: Creation and Design, Robotic Art Studio, Machine Learning, Concept Studio II (Art), Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology

Skills

Languages: Python, C++, Arduino, Processing Language, R, SQL, Lua, Java, JavaScript

Platforms: Arduino Uno, Teensy, ESP32, iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Xbox 360, Xbox, PS3, PS2, Wii

Tools: Microsoft VS Code, Microsoft Visual Studio, Git, EasyEDA, Photoshop, Unreal Engine, Unity Game Engine, RStudio, R Shiny, Tableau, Google BigQuery, AWS, Amazon Redshift, Mixpanel, Perforce, Jira, Airtable