Thursday, May 06, 1999

Art Directors Club "Organic Information" exhibit


Sometimes it's easy for me to get lost in my stream of consciousness
 as I rattle on about things of the world to friends. David Small (of
 Small Design Firm, Inc.) facilitated the whole process with his art
 installation of "Stream of Consciousness" at the "Organic Information"
 exhibit that opened at the Art Directors Club on May 6th. A joint
 effort between the ADC and the Aesthetics and Computation program
 at the MIT Media Lab, and sponsored by Intel, there were about 12
 computers on narrow racks with two or three projects streaming,
 flashing, intriguing and fascinating the guests. Vivian Selbo, Larry
 Aronson, Rachel Kaberon, and Jim Carrier (of Tolerance USA, who
 also stopped by my CWC event) were milling and looking and
 thinking and discussing the inspiring work. Larry, Rachel and I spent
 some time talking about Linux as an operating system and he educated
 us a bit more on the advantages of mod_perl, perl, and differences
 between these programming languages, apache servers and other
 goodies like that. Larry definitely knows his stuff and has done a great
 job administrating the WWWAC mailing list and transferring the
 servers from Echo, configuring machines and keeping the bits and
 bytes flowing properly. I also spent some good time chatting with
 Craig Kanarick (Razorfish) and Grace Colby (gracecolby.com) who
 were grads of the school, and met Richard Oakley (IBM in Boca
 Raton), Brent Hood (President, Tangent) and Nat Connacher
 (Connacher Design). Richard Winkler of Curious Pictures came out as
 did Lara Stein and Alex Jacobson of shop.com. I also, finally met
 creative recruiter and masterwoman behind the scenes at Wert &
 Company, Judy Wert! We'd of course known about each other for
 ages, but just never met. So I finally got to meet her and her husband,
 a rabbi. Just before departing, Jeff Newalt of the ADC introduced me
 to the masterman behind the scenes (and in front too) of all this
 creativity, John Maeda, Sony career development Prof. of Media Arts
 and Sciences, assist. Prof. of design and computation at the MIT
 Media Lab, author, designer and Dad.