As an occasional emissary for new-media arts, I increasingly find myself pointing out how some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists. In some instances, we can pick out the unmistakable signature of a single person’s original artistic idea, released into the world decades ahead [...]

Below are some resources about the “Chinese Painting Village” phenomenon, such as Dafen or Wushipu in Shenzhen, which employ about 10,000 artists and produce more than 60% of the world’s oil paintings. The information below may be ‘of interest’ to arts educators and/or students, particularly those studying painting. I am grateful to Clement Valla for [...]

“When a violinist plays, which is incidental: the arm movement or the bow sound? Try arm movement only.” — Yoko Ono, ‘To the Wesleyan People’, 1966. [I'm grateful to Dawn Weleski for finding this quote].

The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the contrast [...]

I’m grateful to Stewart Butterfield for making me aware of this quote by John Adams, which I here repost from his Sylloge blog, for the purposes of my own reference and safekeeping:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and [...]

In The Illusion of Life, classic Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston present their highly influential “12 Rules for Animation“, which have all sorts of implications for interactive technologies. I just came across Ollie Johnston’s more specific 12 Rules for Expressions, which I reproduce below. Two rules which particularly caught my eye (pun) are [...]

I’m proud and delighted to announce that Ben Kinsley, one of my MFA students at the CMU School of Art, has finally gone live with his first-of-a-kind project, “Street with a View” – in which he and collaborator Robin Hewlett choreographed a neighborhood-wide performance intervention into Google Street View. Here’s the AP article about the [...]

Amanda Schaffer has written a sly and compact survey of some infosthetic artworks in a new Slate article, “Viz Whiz: How artists are mining data sets to make you see the unseen“. It’s a good introductory article for educators, with discussions of influential projects by creatives like Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Harris, Ben Fry, and [...]

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” [...]