Stage Crew Engineering with Pete Doherty

Pete Doherty unpacks the behind-the-scenes work that enables experiential projects to run. Pete frames creative technology as experience-making: building the kind of systems that power museum installs, gallery pieces, location-based entertainment, and other tech-enabled environments where the audience is meant to feel something.

From there, Pete shares a high-stakes red-carpet build with Fake Love: a wall of Windows hybrid devices used to showcase fan-submitted “light side / dark side” performances at the debut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The conversation highlights what success looks like in these moments: coordinated playback across a fleet of devices, networking reliability under pressure, and the practical reality that creative ambition often depends on careful operational engineering.

Pete then describes an ambitious multi-vendor integration: the Meta Store (circa 2020), built as a physical showcase for metaverse product demos at Meta’s Burlingame campus. We revisit the “stage crew engineering” theme: DevOps for reproducibility and recovery and using infrastructure-as-code to rebuild quickly. The episode closes with a peek into Pete’s prototyping preferences (Elm and its fork Gren) and candid notes on where AI coding tools help, and where niche stacks still stump them.

Links

• Pete’s website and case studies, including the red carpet wall
• Creative Tech Tips and Tricks
• Pete’s LinkedIn
• Terraform and Terragrunt
• Elm and Gren

Music

Published

Feb 3, 2026