The medium keeps changing. The itch doesn’t.

I’m Mike Hill. Since the late ’90s I’ve been building things that come alive — machines, shows, games, songs, and the occasional piece of furniture.

The list reads strange until you see the through-line. An autonomous off-road vehicle built for the DARPA Grand Challenge. Five singing skulls run by hardware and software I designed from scratch. An immersive horror experience — haunted mazes, immersive theater, live tabletop RPG — that I’ve created, built, and run every Halloween since 1998. Short films. Records. Artificial-life games where you set the conditions and let go. Wood-and-velvet gaming pieces milled on a CNC.

For years I had the label backwards. I’d call myself a designer who dabbled in code, or a woodworker who happened to build websites. But the constant was never the material — it was the building: the systems, the how-does-this-actually-work, the let’s-just-make-it. So I’ve stopped pretending. Technologist first; the rest are how it gets out into the world.

These days the games ship through coldboot.studio, the woodwork through the shop, and the haunt through its own front door every October. When I need to step away from the keyboard, I cut something real on the CNC or the laser.

I have a soft spot for systems with a little life of their own — and for things that reward a closer look.