From the Way-Beyond-Hollywood Department:

Wiley Wiggins is an actor known for the Richard Linklater films Dazed & Confused and Waking Life (on which he also worked as an animator, using rotoscoping). He appeared in the Zellner brothers' movie Frontier and in David Zellner's Goliath, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

This year, he stars in Sorry, Thanks, which just got picked up Sundance Select VOD. He recently performed as the visualist for The Octopus Project's "Hexadecagon," an 8-channel audio, 8-channel video live performance. And he's dabbled in deep geekery for years, reaching back to Austin's early '90s underground phenom Fringe Ware and beyond.

What technology has meant the most to your work?

Cheap, easy, and powerful software taking the place of insanely expensive and complex hardware. There are more examples than you can enumerate--consumer video editing and compression software taking the place of edit bays, Audio DAW software on laptops taking the place of studios.

I'm also interested in fast prototyping of ideas in open software platforms, like processing.org and open frameworks. Ideas spring up very quickly there. There's a lot of new visual ideas coming from some of these communities that I'm especially interested in. I just started a group in Austin to try to help artists (myself included) to learn to visualize ideas in software.

It's called Austin Creative Code.

Do you think these developments have changed the world at large? If so, how?

This is a hard one to approach. The answer, obviously, is yes. But if you asked me to actually track all the ways that moving production into the hands of plebeians has changed the world I'd be hard pressed what to point out. The possibilities for creation are infinite now. On the other hand, there's an ocean of hilarious garbage on YouTube, and a ton of crashy open source software with abominable user interfaces.

What's the future look like for this stuff?

The entry bar gets lower and lower, and delivery devices get cheaper and more powerful. I fully expect that in ten years that every time I fart it will produce a cinematic 3D puzzle game that will be instantly playable around the world via brain implants. Just kidding. I really have no idea. We could all be digging in the mud for bugs to eat in a few years.

What are some scientific trends or theories have influenced your art, your work, and your life recently?

I'm interested in the study of human perception: stuff like gestalt and camouflage. One of the very cool things I have seen lately in the open software community is people recreating 1960s Op Art programmatically, stuff by artists like Bridget Riley and the anonima group, their ideas turned from painted theory into actual moving, functioning math.

Bridget Riley inspired code, originally by Casey Reas, with some minor modifications by me, is on openprocessing.org.

Have you ever read about a past theory or invention that never happened, or that died a premature death, that made you think "Oh MAAAN, I really wish I could have one of those?"

Three words: pneumatic tube internet.

Find WW online at wileywiggins.com.