First broadcast of music from Columns of Air was on: New Sounds, WNYC, with John Schaefer, Monday, Nov 24.  You can listen to the show as a Real Audio stream here.

Columns of Air album release live event was: Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2003; Joe's Pub, NYC

The Buzz Band, a multicultural jamband my friends and I are putting together, performed at SOBs NYC Thurs Nov 20- early show.  Here are some photos from that show.

Played a wild show with Living Colour at their Bimbo's gig in SF Nov 26.

Barbara Higbie and I recreated our duet from the 1980s for the floating concert to celebrate the Heraclitus' homecoming.

Computer Science seminar NYU- Monday Nov 24, 719 B'way, 12th fl.

Played  in  an  experimental  Persian jazz band in SF on Nov. 7.

First talk on Magic Window project given at this NSF conference.

Finally added some images of vintage VPL VR equipment from the 1980s in answer to many requests- will add more and better photos and documentation soon.

Edge.org Summer Postcards for 2003 are up.  My postcard is about clannishness and has an interesting photograph.

On Sept 9 gave a talk for Bay CHI, titled "Why VR has not (yet) become a widespread technology."  This list of the top 11 reasons  was read by most attendees in advance.

Was asked to chair the "Luminaries" meetings (which were sponsored by SGI) at Siggraph 2003.  My followup letter, sent to participants after the meetings, proposes that there are some trends in real time 3D interaction research that deserve scrutiny- particularly the new obsession with GPU shaders.

Latest spat on edge.org: Some of my colleagues feel that the scientific community will be improved if atheists start playing an "oppressed minority" role to try to look sympathetic.  I doubt it.

The Wave magazine named me "one of the 10 smartest people in San Francisco", but you have to put that in context: The guy who invented Chia pets also made the list.

Here are the slides for the talk I gave at PARC on Phenotropics.

Here's an interview about my mysterious new high risk computer science project, Phenotropics, from the main Java website.  And here is the inevitable slashdot riot.  Most of the cranky complaints are about one particular issue, and in this case I have to say the critics are absolutely correct.  I goofed by not catching an incorrect number when I checked the interview for accuracy.  The number was stated as 10,000,000.  It should clearly have been higher.  But that value isn't important to the idea.  If you want to know what this is all about, read the interview!  Many thanks to all the people who have written extended comments on the ideas in the interview and sent them to me directly.  I will read and respond- might take me a while!

Assorted 2003 Spring/Summer event links:  Course on medical technology at Dartmouth, talk on the next millennium of human communication at ideaCity conference in Toronto, talk for the semiconductor manufacturer's association, keynote on enterprise IT, Music/Virtual Reality performance at Rochester Institute for technology, talk at "Mind States" conference, keynote for Armed Forces information technology conference.

Here's the second part of the interview on the java website.  This portion covers some of my earlier activities, like VR.

If you missed this seminar on Phenotropics, here are my characteristically sloppy slides.

Edge.org asked for my thoughts on the death of Dolly the sheep.

The good news:  The folks at Encyclopaedia Britannica decided to honor Virtual Reality as one of history's greatest inventions.  They erred in listing me as its sole inventor, however.  The really bad news is much worse:  Muzak made the list along with Virtual Reality.

Here's streaming audio of a lecture I gave titled "Technology and the Future of the Human Soul" for the Dowmel Lecture Series in Great Barrington, Mass.

I mouthed off yet again to the NY Times about the music industry's latest attempt to use "artificial intelligence" to create pop music hits.

Here are pictures from the 2003 TED scientists' dinner.

I spoke at the Future of Life conference.  Here is a picture.

Here's my answer to this year's edge.org question, in the form of a mock letter to the President.

Some 2002 links:

I spoke at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Here's an interview with me that focuses on my life as a musician and composer.

Here's another interview on various topics.

Here's an interview associated with a conference coming up called PopTech.  I'm told that the Poptech website will eventually offer streaming video of my talk and piano concert.  And here's another poptech interview- I love that this interviewer thought I was talking about contraband instruments instead of contrabass ones!

There's a lot of material derived from this interview with me in the new book "What's Next; Exploring the New Terrain for Business".

I appear and am heard (as a pundit, not a musician) in the new concert/video/performance piece "Three Tales", by Steve Reich and Beryl Korot.

You can hear a recent talk I gave at Yale here (note there are two separate links, for the two halfs of the talk).

I played Persian-style contrabassoon (somehow), glass harmonica, and other instruments in Richard Horowitz's soundtrack for Sussan Deyhim and Shirin Neshat's performance piece "Logic of Birds", which played at Lincoln Center and elsewhere this Summer.

Remembering Stephen Jay Gould.

I wrote a chapter for a new book called The Next Fifty Years : Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (edited by John Brockman). My chapter speculates about what complexity studies might look like in the next half century, and how that might influence both biology and ultra-large-scale software architecture.  Here's Wired Mag's take on it.  This interview summarizes the material in the chapter.  Here's a little piece about the stuff from CIO Magazine.  I've decided to use the term "Phenotropics" to describe this and related material.

Here are the powerpoint slides from my recent UC Berkeley lecture on Phenotropics.  And here's the abstract:

Title:  Should Computer Science Get Rid of Protocols Altogether?

Abstract:   Computers are finally beginning to connect to the physical world with a little of the facility displayed by living organisms, which are generally able to interact reliably with an environment even though unplanned elements are often present.  Medical instrumentation, robotics, and advanced user interfaces have all been improved recently by using techniques such as pattern recognition and predictive filtering.  But operating systems and programming languages are still conceived of in the terms of mid-twentieth century engineering, in which sending signals on wires between slow machines was the central metaphor, and the protocol was the only solution.  Perhaps it is time to take some of the advances from recent systems that interface to the real world and apply them to the world that remains strictly inside the computer. Components in such systems would connect together through pattern recognition of each other instead of adherence to protocols.  This approach might be called “phenotropic”.  While the phenotropic idea is still not fully formed, there are reasons to hope that phenotropic systems would display more useful failure modes, facilitating adaptive systems and avoiding crashes, and might also grow to larger sizes than traditional protocol-adherence-based systems. 

Since Wired reported it, I guess I can as well: I helped brainstorm the future world for the new movie Minority Report, by Steven Spielberg.  Here are some of my thoughts on how it came out.  I also discuss some of the specific gizmos from the movie in my "Summer Postcard" on edge. SEED Magazine is running an abrreviated version of that postcard.

This book has a chapter on my "Half-manifesto."

If you're interested in computers and education you might enjoy this article.  Please note that I did not write the abstract and that I would never willingly use the word "impacted" unless I was describing a meteorite. Here's an online version.

Some other press links: Here's part of an interview for the Italian magazine e-art.  Here's an interview in German from "Machina X".  Here's another German article about me and Eyematic.  Some of my thoughts about the attacks (transcribed from a quick phone interview) were run in Salon.

It's always worth checking in on the latest debates on edge.org.  The current one is about science-as-culture.

A collaboration between me and the French artist Phillipe Parreno is up at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris this Summer.  It concerns the ways that aliens and cephalopods might perceive human beings.  The curator is Hans Ulrich Obrist.

You are invited to read my rant about why there doesn't seem to be any current musical youth culture.  It will be a chapter in a book DJ Spooky is putting together.

If you happen to be a student at Dartmouth, you might want to look into a course Dr. Joe Rosen and I are offering this Summer:
Virtual medicine and cybercare   Engineering 013   MWF 12:30 to 1:35 (June 21 to August 23rd)

A new book claims I'm one of the 1000 "most creative" people in America.

I gave a variety of talks and played a concert (with Hand Made Techno) for this year's World Economic Forum (or "Davos") meeting in NYC.  The NY Times made me seem a little more critical of the protestors than I really was.  Here are some pictures from the concert.

Hand Made Techno (with Will Calhoun) has been playing at assorted pseudo-reputable downtown NYC joints, like Joe's Pub.

I gave a keynote talk at this year's NAMM.  I also played a comic musical performance there using facial expressions only, using the Eyematic algorithms.  AND I played winds for a crazy set at the House of Blues with Living Colour fronted by Geroge Clinton (!), with Sheila E., some of the Los Lobos guys, and other characters.  I'll get some photos of that up soon.

I gave the keynote for the 10th annual Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference (as I had done for the first one a decade ago).  It's thrilling to see this field mature.

The Guardian (London) ran a weekend profile of me

TechTV produced a documentary about me- haven't seen it, but it has inspired a torrent of email.

 

The following are links from 2001:

 
I am delighted that the NSF accepted a proposal I put together with colleagues at UNC and UPenn to move tele-immersion research into a remote, real-time, terascale implementation.

The NY Times reported on some views of the definition of life, including my own.

Speaking of the Times, my spoof that appeared in the Times about encoding their archives in the "junk" portion of NYC cockroach DNA has inspired some actual research in invisible ink, oddly enough.  Here's an essay about my dear roaches by a French intellectual.  Here's where the Times Capsule Archival Cockroach project was unveiled. It was also turned into a physical exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Here is the text of the original proposal, which contains humor omitted from the final reportage.

I debated the future of immortality with Bill Joy and some of the other usual suspects at a Fortune Magazine conference, and they also published some of my thoughts after the attack.

As some of you might know, I live five blocks from Ground Zero in New York City. I'm fine, though the loft was slightly damaged.

As it happens, I gave GBN an interview about terrorism and the Taliban a month before the attack. Download it here as PDF.

I played a virtual reality+music gig at the Institute for Contemporart Art in London on November 19.

Hope you caught the PBS broadcast of my composition The Navigator Tree. Here's a review of the show that appeared in the LA Times.  The latest news: it just won a CINE Golden Eagle award.  (The show, "Continental Harmony". was a documentary about a series of millennial compositions that were commissioned by the NEA and the American Composer's Forum.  A piece of mine, The Navigator Tree, was featured.  It combined divergent tuning systems from various ensembles from around the world (a gamelan, a bell choir, a taiko drum group, a Chinese harp) in order to find a new sort of harmony.  It was also a memorial to what might have been the largest tree ever seen by human beings, a giant redwood that was destroyed to make way for housing developments in Oakland California in the middle of the 19th century.  The show included interviews, an investigation into the tree's stump, which survives, and rehearsals- as well as the performance.)

I was honored to receive this year's Watson Award from the CMU College of Fine Arts.

I've failed to list music gigs in NYC on this page lately, but for the record, my crazy Summer band for 2001, with Krishna Bhatt, David Soldier, Robert Dick & Cyro Baptista played at Tonic on Wed, Jul 25.

In my spare time I'm the chief scientist of a new outfit called Eyematic.

Here are some text and video clips from a recent John Brockman-run rural Edge seminar on the fundamentals of information theory and society, and here is an article about the event that appeared in the New York Times. Here's a fortune mag tidbit with a picture. Here's a profile/interview that just appeared, in German, in Der Spiegel- it has some MP3 music clips.

It turns out that tele-immersion works! The April 2001 issue of Scientific American has a major article on it. Here are some pictures of tele-immersion from Oct. 2000. Here is a photo of an earlier demo (May, 2000). The Washington Post put tele-immersion on the front page of the "style section". MIT Technology Review's article on tele-immersion is here. New Scientist's report is here. Here's an article on tele-immersion and Internet 2 from the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times reports here. And Fortune Magazine's is here... Here's an article on Internet2 and Tele-immersion. And here's another article. And another.

The hullabaloo about The Half Manifesto, my rant on "cybernetic totalism" continues here. ...and here's Salon's factually confused, reasonably supportive, fashionably snide story on it. Ray Kurzweil has written a counter-manifesto here. Here's an essay about it in American Prospect. A version on paper is found in the December, 2000 issue of Wired magazine, starting on page 158. Here's Upside's article on it, and here's a lot of ranting about Upside's version of what I said on Slashdot. If you want to read an online, but edited version of the Manifesto, in which names are properly spelled, then you should choose Wired's online version.

Here's my Adweek interview- filled with typos plus they got my job title wrong, but I'm happy to see some of these ideas in print.

Hey, Slashdotters! I was indulging in SATIRE in that Washington Post article. Relax! Jeez! And, by the way, I have never smoked pot. And, as it happens, the $1 per crash idea should be credited to Ben Schneiderman.

Streaming video of a recent talk about technology and education is here.

Also at work on reconstructing ancient Egyptian music for the BBC...

Here's my latest column for CIO, about how the genetic future of our species will be governed by the outcome of the "software crisis".

 
Here's a review of my organocentric world technopop show with special guest Sean Lennon. Sean and I played a fun techno-ish set. I played a zillion weird acoustic instruments from around the world and Sean played electronics.

On March 8, 2001, at the Knitting Factory in NYC, this show happened (and happened well- Stanley Jordan showed up by surprise to sit in with us):

HAND MADE TECHNO

Jaron Lanier and Will Calhoun love electronic beats as much as the anyone, but who had the idea that the machines should be allowed to play themselves? What if those electronic sounds were played by human hands? Will has already conquered rock ("Living Colour") and jazz ("Live at the Blue Note"), and now he masters electronic percussion. Jaron has conquered technology (invented virtual reality, blah, blah), and now plays his own eerie, soulful melodies on strange instruments instead of sampling the sounds of anonymous third world people. Come hear dance music played by people!

The following entries are mostly from the year 2000:

In December 2000 I premiered an evening of new work for orchestra and virtual worlds in Wroclaw, Poland, for the WRO2000 festival. It was a wonderful experience! Michal Nesterowicz was the conductor. Here's the program and a picture.

on July 13 I played in the Lincoln Center Festival 2000: ELECTRONIC ENSEMBLES This was an odd-ball idea. An orchestra of historic 20th century electronic instruments, mostly played by their inventors, performing Terry Riley’s "In C". My instrument was a musical virtual world. I experienced being in a place where there was a dark, pulsing, organic "planet" surrounded by many, many moons that look like pearls. Inside the planet were variegated stones that made sounds when brushed with a whirling tattered object that looked something like a bejeweled Victorian fashion accessory. The audience saw my world on a video monitor, though I was wearing "vr goggles", of course.

The April 2000 issue of "Natural History" magazine had cuttlefish on the cover and some of my ranting about them reported in a story.

Here are my Edge comments on David Gelernter's latest stuff.

My  composition, The Navigator Tree, premiered. It was a commission from National Endowment for the Arts/American Composers Forum, featuring the Sonos Handbell Ensemble- and was part of the Continental Harmony project. Watch for the PBS television show about it.

Some television shows I was on can be sampled here and here.

Article on cyberstuff and poverty here.

Transcripts of my appearances on PBS' The News Hour here and here (on Microsoft antitrust questions); and here and here (on digital culture).

Yet another photo of me is found in this coffeetable book on Dreadlocks.

Solo piano recital happened March 30.

Gave a talk on the future of scientific method at the Annual AAAS conference.

 

The following are mostly from the year 1999:

 

I wrote a chapter in the new Malaparte book.

Notes from a lecture at Stanford; Article on Flutes; I gave a keynote speech at the MP3 conference;

Most amazingly, Palau, home of my beloved Giant Cuttlefish, has issued a postal stamp of me!

I've started work with Terry Riley on a collaborative opera to be titled "Bastard, the First".

Here are pointers to my NY Times Article and Manifesto on the future of the music business.

A past issue of The Sciences has a fun review article of mine about user interface design.

Concert with VR instruments on May 8 at Cooper Union Grand Hall, NYC.

Read my latest on Daniel Dennett and Memes.

On April 3 Lee Smolin and I gave a joint lecture on the topic of Time and the Present Moment, which was followed by a music performance in which I was joined by Sean Lennon- a joyous evening to inaugurate "UU", a new event series in Brooklyn, NY.

I played solos on various Southeast Asian instruments for Richard Horowitz's lovely soundtrack for Three Seasons, which just became the first film to win both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Sundance Festival.

Yet another twist in my anti-artificial intelligence ranting can be found in the latest issue of Forbes ASAP

"Elevator", a duet made up of me+Duncan Sheik played at the Knitting Factory in NYC, Sunday, Jan. 31th, main room, 8PM.

How about an instrumental lullaby in mp3 format for those dark winter nights: "Sleepwalking" is from a project in the works called "Music for Alien Children", a "Young Person's Guide" to the Earth's instruments. I am playing all the tracks. (Yes, this music is protected by copyright- please contact me if you want to do anything provocative with it.)

There's a chapter/photo of me in "Virtuoso", the new book by Ken Carbone, with photos by Howard Schatz. Here's CNN's report on it.

I gave the closing talk at the Doug Englebart tribute at Stanford.

A good recent talk I gave at the Toronto Film Center is available online. (URL coming soon.)

I was the guest editor of the October/November issue of Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress. My opening essay was illustrated with a photo that makes me look like Marylin Manson, somehow (I didn't choose it).

I am currently the lead scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative. (Finally a link to the new, lovely tele-i website!)
 
 Big News:   Sun buys VPL!

And Here's the NY Times' story

(and here's HotWired's take on it)

 Chromatophoria is my new VR/music band. See us as we were at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Here's another performance (at Cybertheatre Brussels), also archived on the net.

My orchestral piece Mirror/Storm was recently commissioned and premiered by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Wolf. If you are a conductor, please be in touch and check out the score.

VPL Software lives! If you are a die-hard user of Body Electric, Isaac, and RB2 Swivel, you will want to know about this.

Here's the recent Fortune Magazine profile.

Hotwired has a good recent audio record of one of my talks, given in San Francisco.

If you want to use any of this stuff commercially
or display it publicly, please contact me by email: