I’m late in posting this, but I’m pleased to announce the 2009-2009 lecture series for the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts (DMA). The faculty worked closely together and with the graduate students to put together a list of the people we were most excited to invite. I spent the summer emailing people, negotiating, working around schedules, etc. to put together the final list. I feel the list accurately reflects the different interests and fields that define our department. I hope some of you will be able to join us for this great series. Thanks to Brenda Williams for taking the process over from there. All lectures begin at 6pm in the EDA at the Broad Arts Center, UCLA.

Kenya Hara
September 30, 2008, 6:00 pm
Kenya Hara is interested in designing “circumstances” or “conditions” rather than “things.” A graphic designer and Professor at the Musashino Art university, Hara has been an Art director of MUJI since 2002.

Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
October 29, 2008, 6:00 pm
Miller explores the overall theme of sound in contemporary art, digital media, and composition. He reconstructs the history of sound and recorded media by several of the most well known artists of their field.

The Yes Men
November 20, 2008, 6:00 pm
The Yes Men are a merry troupe of imposters who have poked fun at some of the world’s biggest corporate criminals. They are most well known for impersonating the WTO– the subject of a feature film and book– but they have had dozens of other escapades fighting corporate crime with words, glue, and rubberbands.

Clay Shirky
January 13, 2009, 6:00 pm
Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He divides his time on consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

Steven Heller
January 28, 2009, 6:00 pm
Heller is an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review.

United Visual Artists
February 10, 2009, 6:00 pm
United Visual Artists is a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performace and responsive installation. Research and development is a core part of their process — enabling them to constantly explore new fields.

Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers
April 7, 2009, 6:00 pm
Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 to bring together multidisciplinary practitioners to create new work. She is currently teaching media theory and practice courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Kryzsztof Wodiczko
April 21, 2009, 6:00 pm
Woriczko is internationally renowned for his largescale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has developed a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing.

Natalie Jeremijenko
May 5, 2009, 6:00 pm
Jeremijenko is an artists, inventor, and engineer with the mission to reclaim technology from idealized, abstract concepts and to apply it to the messy complexities of the real world, often with disquieting results.

A photography studio-residence currently being designed by davidclovers is the subject of a collaborative research between davidclovers and myself. 07 MASSES explores the specific impact of luminosity and texture on mass and massiveness through a series of scaled prototypes. I developed software that was used to generate the pattern embedded in the surface of the structure. The model, developed by davidclovers in summer 2008, is currently on exhibition at Artist Space in New York in the show Matters of Sensation. The show runs from 25 Sep to 22 Nov 2008.

We’re now a few weeks into the fall quarter at UCLA and the documentation website for DMA 28 is up and running. The class is described in the syllabus:

This course is an introduction to concepts of interactivity. We discuss what constitutes interactive work and how aesthetic and conceptual concerns can impact interactive design while developing computer programming skills required for creating interactivity. The concepts and skills taught in this course set a foundation for future DMA courses about the Internet, game design, and media arts.

This class is mandatory for all sophomore and incoming transfer students. I firmly believe that everyone studying the visual arts in the twenty-first century needs to be introduced to what the computer can do beyond its use as a production tool.

Miami University is generously funding a series of Processing development workshops. The first workshop took place from 18 to 21 September. Ben Fry, Dan Shiffman, Ira Greenberg, and myself worked together to improve the examples, start a series of tutorials, and work through some conceptual issues related to adding a new PShape class. Additional topics included the future of Processing’s libraries and other implementations of Processing (C++, Ruby, Python, etc.) Ira Greenberg, an associate professor at Miami and author of “Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art”, got this started and we’re very grateful for the support of the Interactive Media Studies (IMS) program, directed by Glenn Platt. The next Oxford Project will take place from 20 to 23 November.

TI will be shown at the The 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale which takes place at the Seoul Museum of Art. The exhibition is open from 12 September to 5 November 2008. I’m very honored to be showing my work with Julien Maire, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, and many other excellent artists. There’s more information on the Media_City Seoul website.

The Tissue Collection, created in collaboration with 1 of 1 Studio, will be exhibited at C.STEM in Turin, Italy from 19 to 27 September, 2008. The exhibition takes place at the Ex-Chiesa Metodista (via Lagrange 13, 10122 Torino.) The event is conceived and curated by Associazione Culturale e di Ricerca NADA. They write:

The festival is focusing on creative potential of Computational Design: a viewpoint and a working hypothesis where computational generative strategies become a vital tool to connect the new potential of digital fabrication to an ever growing demand for mass customized design objects.

Other exhibition participants include Ammar Eloueini, Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz, Adrian Bowyer, Nervous System, MOS, Marc Fornes, Fluid Forms, and Susanne Stauch. There’s more information at the C.STEM website.

The folks from 1scale1, a research group from Malmo University, Sweden have put together a great program of workshops this summer. They say:

Between August 18th and 29th we will run 7 simultaneous workshops in open software and hardware for designers and artists at our studio… Themes will be related to either physical computing or computer vision. There are both basic and advanced workshops that vary in length between 2 and 3 days.

The complete information is available on their website.

I’m around during the first week to give a presentation about Processing and to start work on some secret Processing-related projects. Thanks to all of the organizers and to David Cuartielles for the invitation.

From 7 to 11 July 2008, I gave a workshop at the newly inaugurated Fondazione Claudio Buziol in Venice, Italy. The Fondazione is located in the stunning Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana (built in 1751), which faces the Grand Canal. The student’s wrote software in Processing that related to the dual themes of Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” and the city of Venice. With one exception, I was working with students of Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor from the IUAV University of Venice. (Gillian is the former director of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and the Computer Related Design course at the Royal College of Art, London. I was a professor in Ivrea from 2001 to 2003 and it was wonderful to see her again.) There are more photos on Flickr.

My Programming Media 2 class (it will be called Interactive Media 2 next year) has finished its Goldbergian Voting Machine. The project was an experiment in democracy carried out by a group of nineteen students who worked together for eight weeks to produce a fully functional voting machine comprised of nineteen individual modules. The modules communicated through either physical or electrical signals which carried a vote through each of the modules until it reached the final destination where it was archived.

The project brief follows:

The cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1893 - 1970) is know for his drawings of absurd, complicated machines that perform simple tasks. His name has become synonymous with these artifacts. The Merriam-Webster dictionary states:

Main Entry: Rube Gold·berg
Variant(s): also Rube Gold·berg·i·an
Function: adjective
Etymology: Reuben (Rube) L. Goldberg died 1970 American cartoonist
: accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply <a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption…with five hundred moving parts — L. T. Grant>; also : characterized by such complex means

The Wikipedia entry for “Rube Goldberg Machine” provides a good summary of how his ideas have influenced popular culture. Type “rube goldberg” as a keyword at YouTube or Google Video to see some hobby projects.

While the mechanical complexity of Goldberg’s machines has survived into the twenty-first century, the satirical component of his work has not. Goldberg’s machines are viewed most interestingly as a metaphors for absurd mechanisms within society and inherent in technological progress. One of the first uses of the adjective “Rube Goldbergian” was within the Congressional Record. Lawmakers referred to the opposing parties projects such as the “New Deal” and the “Great Society” disparagingly as “Rube Goldbergian.” (1) For example, a Rube Goldbergian scheme for reducing taxes. Clark Kinnarid, in his introduction to Rube Goldberg vs The Machine Age says that Goldberg regarded his “‘inventions’ as manifestations of a one-man insurrection against needlessly multifarious gadgetry of the machine age that enslaves man instead of freeing him from non-rewarding labor.” (2)

The technologies that appear in Goldberg’s work are from his era: automobiles, electric fans, gramophones, bicycle pumps, oil lamps, hand guns, radios. What are the “needless multifarious gadgetry” of the information age. What technologies would comprise the contemporary Goldbergian device? Possibly a mobile phone, keyboard, light sensor, laser printer, RFID card, video game, brand-name products, ASCII characters?

The Goldbergian context provides an excellent foundation for learning about the concepts of interactivity and the technologies required to make interactive projects. During the next eight weeks, we will complete a contemporary Goldberg machine. Each member of the class will build one component of the device. Each section will receive a signal and transmit that signal to the next section. In addition to building the project, each member of the class will be a part of one documentation committee: video, photography, design, DVD, web, and writing.

In reference to the origins of the word and the recent voting machine debacles, our Goldbergian device will be a voting machine. What are the many problems with voting machines and the American political system? How can our Goldbergian device refer to this context?

Notes:
1. Rube Goldberg, Rube Goldberg vs The Machine Age (New York: Hasting House, 1968), p. viii
2. Ibid. p. vii

This was honestly the most intense course I’ve taught at UCLA. It focused on process and learning new skills more than refined production, but the end result was impressive in many ways. I think more than anything else, it was a complex social process. I congratulate all of the participants: Kyle Audick, Jonathan Bobrow, Jono Brandel, Richard Caceres, Erik Carlson, Danni Chen, Chris Chernoff, Megan Daalder, Gleb Denisov, Patrick Gilliland, Mary Huang, Joe Liao, Fei Liu, Brian Miller, Ben Perkins, Michael Sun, Emerson Taymor, Patrick Tierney, and Steven Ziadie. And it would not have been possible without ace teaching assistant Michael Kontopoulos.

John Maeda is gave a lecture on 16 May 2008 in the MIT Media Lab’s Bartos Theater before he left MIT to become president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His former students were invited to design a poster to announce the event. My poster (above) encodes the data about the time and place of the lecture into visual form. The forms are the sound waves created as I read the lecture information into a microphone. I designed the poster with typographic information superimposed on the waves, but I removed the type at the last moment. From top to bottom: 16 May 2008, 3:30 - 4:30pm, John Maeda, MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, Wiesner Building, E15, 20 Ames St, Cambridge.