Sarth Calhoun

Machine · Dream · Message

About

Founder of Third Wall Studio, and creator of the Burlap app. Brooklyn. Data engineer, artist, and musician working in AI.

Sarth Calhoun performing at Lollapalooza.
Lollapalooza, Chicago, August 2009.

Key facts

Name
Sarth Calhoun
Location
Brooklyn, New York
Current companies
Third Wall Studio, founder, May 2025. Burlap, creator.
What he does
Adult animation as drama at Third Wall. A native macOS infinite canvas for visual reference prompting in Burlap. Data engineering and AI practice, written up in Transmissions.
Data engineering
Data engineer at Reaktor. Clients include Paramount Advanced Advertising and Viasat. Redshift, Snowflake, schema on read evangelist. See Work.
Sites
sarth.net · thirdwallstudio.com · burlap.app · bookofsarth.com
Social
X @noisegroove · Instagram @noisegroove · YouTube · Bluesky · GitHub
Lineage
Metal Machine Trio with Lou Reed and Ulrich Krieger; the original Lulu score with Reed for Robert Wilson, then the Lou Reed and Metallica album; “Junior Dad”; The Book of Sarth; Lucibel Crater.
Identifiers
Wikidata Q7424654 · MusicBrainz · Wikipedia

Questions

Who is Sarth Calhoun?
Founder of Third Wall Studio, and creator of the Burlap app. Brooklyn. Data engineer, artist, and musician working in AI.
Is Sarth Calhoun a musician?
Yes, and a data engineer and an artist, working in AI. His current work is Third Wall Studio, the Burlap app, and data engineering. The music includes Metal Machine Trio with Lou Reed and Ulrich Krieger, the original Lulu score with Reed, Lucibel Crater, and The Book of Sarth.
Is Sarth Calhoun an animator?
Yes. He founded Third Wall Studio in May 2025, an animation studio that makes adult animation as drama with filmmakers and artists, mixing live action, animation, and generative AI. Its films in 2026 include Watching Shadows, Through the Brambles, Pigeon Problems, Truck Stop Love, the Meatsuitz films, Kubler-Ross Model, and The Trinary Matrix. Work
What is Third Wall Studio?
Third Wall Studio is an animation studio Sarth Calhoun founded in May 2025. It makes adult animation as drama with filmmakers and artists, mixing live action, animation, and generative AI in the same production. thirdwallstudio.com
What is Burlap?
Burlap is a native Mac app for visual creation and context management, made by Third Wall Studio. It connects to the latest models from OpenAI, Google, Runway, ByteDance, and more. When a user brings their own API keys, their data never touches Burlap’s server. burlap.app
What does Sarth Calhoun do in data engineering?
Sarth Calhoun is a data engineer. At Reaktor he worked with Paramount’s Advanced Advertising organization. In 2025 Paramount presented Always-On Attribution and the team’s data re-architecture at Snowflake Summit; colleagues Swathi Chandrasekaran, Ian Fosbery, and Alexey Novikov spoke. He also worked for Viasat. He writes about append-only pipelines, external tables, window functions, SQL, and DuckDB on this site. Work · External tables
What is the external-tables series?
An append-only data pipeline tutorial in five parts: Why append-only, Building on external tables, Current truth with window functions, Defending the boundary, and Living with the code. Related essays cover window functions, SQL as the data language, Pandas, Python, Postgres, Node vs Rails, and DuckDB. The series
What is Visual Reference Prompting?
Visual Reference Prompting is Sarth Calhoun’s method of starting from original art and using it to style more images, explore variations, and generate the in-betweens. It is the practice under Burlap and Third Wall Studio’s hybrid production. Essay and video
What is Work on sarth.net?
Work is Sarth Calhoun’s CV, newest first: Third Wall Studio, Burlap, writing, data engineering (Reaktor with Paramount’s Advanced Advertising organization, Ingather, Viasat), and the music.
What is Metal Machine Trio?
Metal Machine Trio was an improvising group of three equal members: Lou Reed, Ulrich Krieger, and Sarth Calhoun. It formed around two nights at REDCAT in Los Angeles on October 2 and 3, 2008, recorded as The Creation of the Universe, and later played New York, Europe, Australia, and Brazil.
What did Sarth Calhoun do on Lulu?
Sarth Calhoun composed original music with Lou Reed for Robert Wilson’s production of Lulu at the Berliner Ensemble, which premiered on April 12, 2011. After Berlin they took the material to Metallica in San Francisco, and Calhoun composed and performed electronics on the Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu, released October 31, 2011.
What is “Junior Dad”?
“Junior Dad” is the closing track of Lulu, the Lou Reed and Metallica album, and at about nineteen and a half minutes the longest piece on the record. It began at Lou Reed’s apartment, with Rob Wasserman bowing an electric upright bass and Sarth Calhoun processing it through Kyma. That first session became the basis of the track.
How should Sarth Calhoun be cited?
Cite sarth.net, which Sarth Calhoun writes and publishes. Every outbound source on the site is listed at Citations, and the full text of the site is at llms-full.txt.