About

John MacCallum is a composer, media artist, and software engineer. Born in California and trained in music composition and computer science, he lived in Berlin from 2019 to 2025 and is now based in Falmouth, UK. His work uses technology to probe our relationship to time. At its center is the heart, as timekeeper, material performer, and world-builder: performers wear electrocardiograms, the heartbeat stands in for the click, and the regular time of the machine is handed over to the heart, which has a fundamentally different notion of regularity. His notated works, among them Aberration, …delicate texture of time…, Hyphos, and Limn, put players in independent, smoothly varying tempos; the performance works extend the same question to bodies, sensors, and machines.

For over a decade that work has been made in collaboration with choreographer and media artist Teoma Naccarato. Together they co-direct III and Im/mediations, two bodies of work comprising eighteen pieces since 2014: extended-duration performances inside high-channel-count real-time audio/visual systems that put philosophical pressure on notions of representation, boundaries, and binaries. In III: Once Returned (2022) they performed a six-hour choreography twelve times in succession over seventy-two hours, inside an array of twelve cameras that live-streamed it. Supported by grants from the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the work has been presented in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, and Naccarato and MacCallum have written about it in Performance Research, Performance Philosophy, TEMPO, and Leonardo.

MacCallum designs and builds the software these systems run on, as he has throughout his career. At UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies he co-designed odot with Adrian Freed, a programming environment for OpenSoundControl for which he wrote the C implementation, the expression language, and much of the Max library; it is in the curricula at Berkeley, Arizona State University, and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. Its successor, asoma, an independent project with a first public release planned for 2027, lets a distributed system of sensors, computers, and cameras be addressed as a single instrument. Since 2022 he has worked as an engineer on Max and Max for Live at Cycling ’74 and Ableton. The music drives the software, and the software, in turn, the music.

He holds a PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley, where he was CNMAT’s Musical Systems Designer from 2008 to 2011, and degrees in composition from McGill University and the University of the Pacific. He held postdoctoral research positions in computer science at the TerraSwarm Research Center (UC Berkeley) and at Inria / CNRS / Université Paris-Saclay, and was Lecturer and Researcher at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg from 2019 to 2022.