In the eighth footnote for Sanford Kwinter’s essay “Flying the Bullet,” which accompanies the slim volume “Conversations with Students” by Rem Koolhaas, is a brief enumeration of different names for Samadhi-like states in which an interactant “becomes one” with an interactive system. I quote:

“Class four behavior” in Stephen Wolfram; “poised systems” and “edge of chaos” in Chris Langton and Stuart Kaufmann; “separatrices” and “catastrophe sets” in Ralph Abraham and René Thom; “bifurcation regimes” and “far from equilibrium states” of chaologists and thermodynamicists; “singularities” in Deleuze and Guattari; “flow” in Csikszentmihalhyi and optimal experience theorists; “one-over-f” systems in signal theory; the state of “highest or fulfilled tension” in Zen Buddhist disciplines . . . the list is beautiful, and long. 

After 16 months of being offline, the Alphabet Synthesis Machine is now back. The ASM was commissioned in 2001 by Art21, and created in collaboration with Jonathan Feinberg and Cassidy Curtis. Huge props to Jonathan for getting this up and working again in his spare time.

The ASM had gone down due to a disk crash at my host. This taught me a thing or two about the fragile web we live in, and got me thinking grim thoughts about mortality (my own, and that of my data). Needless to say, to abuse a quote from John Gilmore, the Internet did not interpret my disk crash as censorship and route around it; instead, I found myself with the unglamorous prospect of resuscitating and maintaining a project from seven years ago. [I was reminded of a story Maeda once told me, about a significant pioneer of Japanese kinetic art, who gave up making sculpture in his later years because he got fed up receiving phone complaints about broken artworks in the middle of the night.] Well, web-wizard Mr. Feinberg came to the rescue and the ASM is restored (a tiny window into pre-911 Net.art!). The remaining casualty: several thousand user-created alphabets from 2003-2007 have been irretrievably lost.

I’m delighted to announce that I will be conducting weeklong workshops in Computational Arts at two gorgeous locations:

• Shakerag Workshop Center, in Sewanee, Tennessee. Workshop in interactive and computational arts and design: June 22-28, 2008.
   
• The Anderson Ranch Arts Center, in Aspen, Colorado. Workshop in interactive and computational arts and design: August 4-8, 2008.

These workshops will be taught using Processing and will accommodate all levels of skill, from introductory to advanced. I’ll be covering themes such as interactive art, information visualization, audiovisual systems, and computer vision. There are still plenty of seats left in both workshops. Hope to see you in the mountains!

Infovis samurai Martin Wattenberg has just launched a major revision to Bewitched.com, the documentation site for his research and art. Finally, one place to find all of his projects, and lots of new ones, too.

I thought I’d share the following, a favorite quote from an article by Gabriella Hima:

The inmost aspiration of the author is the reader’s response. Electronic writing should be an appeal to the reader to take part in the creative process, to co-write the literary composition - the work. If once literature turns from an Aufschreibsystem into an Umschreibsystem, Myron Krueger’s allusion to McLuhan’s slogan - “response is the medium” - will become true. And then we could share McLuhan’s enthusiasm about the effects of media, when he wrote: “Nothing ever printed is as important as the medium of print.” We might say, regarding the possibilities of telematical media: Nothing ever said in response is as important as the invention of the medium of the response.

 This is one of two clippings on my office door at CMU. The other quote is this one.

I will be presenting in the “Electronic and Emergent Media Art” panel at the College Art Association (CAA) Conference in Dallas on Wednesday, February 20th, at 2:30pm. I’ll show artwork created by my students and colleagues in the Electronic Time-Based concentration area of the CMU School of Art, where I teach. I’ll also be available to discuss our current new-media tenure-track/visiting faculty search with anyone who is interested.

Welcome to Flong! This Wordpress blog syndicates brief announcements and other updates about my activities and observations. More generally, I’m delighted to announce that the revised Flong web site was launched on November 30th, 2007. I’m deeply indebted to Chris O’Shea for his assistance in designing and engineering this site.