“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 Jason [...]