The Slow Messenger project by the Near Future Laboratory explores the concept of delayed communication in an era dominated by instant messaging. By delivering messages one character at a time, it challenges our perceptions of immediacy and encourages reflection on patience and anticipation in our interactions. What I was trying to explore with this project was the idea that slowing down communication could lead to a deeper appreciation of the message itself. In a world where we are accustomed to instant responses, the Slow Messenger invites us to reconsider the value of waiting and the anticipation that comes with it. Alot of work for a bit of a joke; this goes into the category of "theory object" — a thing that you must make and perhaps, like writing can be a way of thinking by going through a bit of a struggle to get the thinking turned into writing, building a thing can be a way of thinking through an idea. In...

Digging around in the archives, I found this project from 2004 called MobileSCOUT. It was a public art project that collected audio narratives of local surroundings, personal rituals, and public sightings using mobile phones. Participants could leave voice messages describing the flora, fauna, or behaviors they observed in their environment, creating a collective audio tapestry of everyday life.

Developed in collaboration with my PDPal friends Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow, MobileSCOUT leveraged VXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language) to create a voice-based application that allowed users to interact with the system through voice commands and touch-tone inputs.

This project was an early exploration of using mobile phones as tools for public art and storytelling, predating the smartphone era and the widespread concept of mobile apps. It was an experiment in utilizing the technology available at the time to create a collective audio tapestry of everyday life.

Wondering about what it is to be a futurist and recounting my own varied reluctance to claim the term over the years, I decided that being tough on the term itself was missing the point. Instead, maybe we should look to people who embody the essence of futurism through their work and impact rather than their credentials or self-presentation. There is a certain kind of braggadocio that can adhere around the term that, sure..that can be off-putting or seem shallow or thin. But, ultimately, I’ve resolved to accpet that the future needs more people who care about it, whatever you think about the term. So rather than gatekeeping the term or debating its legitimacy, we should focus on the actual practice of futures work and the tangible contributions people make to shaping what’s possible. Maybe actually..everyone should be a futurist. Imagine if we all took an active stake in what comes next, change, and imagining the world otherwise?

Somehow, in the age of tech bros playing at being sci-fi visionaries, the deeper, subversive power of science fiction is getting lost. From Tokyo’s neon-lit streets to the avant-garde sounds of SOPHIE and Oneohtrix Point Never, it’s clear we need to reclaim sci-fi’s radical imagination to shape futures that truly matter. This was a post that has been severely broken (TLS issues that cannot be worked-around) on Protein.xyz and so purely for the sake of avoiding link-rot I am reposting it here. This post from Protein.xyz explores why sci-fi literacy is more crucial than ever, urging us to look beyond the spectacle and engage with the genre’s rich tapestry of ideas that challenge, inspire, and envision better worlds.

Pussy Weevil — a "proto-Tex-Avery" animated character with a malleable and virtually indestructible form. A vile, reactive persona that mutates, spits, and glitches. Exhibited at Bitforms Gallery May 15–June 19, 2003, and Ars Electronica 2003. Pussy Weevil is an individual software animated character that responds to the viewer’s distance or proximity. The piece involves choreography in space and deals with subject / object relationships vis-a-vis the viewer. Pussy Weevil ignores you, outrageously derides you, tries to scare you but it runs away in fright if you get too close. Pussy Weevil questions how digital characters can be affected by interactions in analog spaces and examines the relationship between the real and computer made worlds.

A review I wrote of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992) back while in the masters program in the Engineering School at the University of Washington, Seattle and figuring out my voice in the whole..postmodern aesthetics + critical theory (or whatever..) idiom.

The volume is a pretty awesome multidisciplinary anthology exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and humanity at the close of the twentieth century. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, the book examines how advancements in biotechnology, surveillance, and artificial intelligence have reshaped the body and societal consciousness.

Includes contributions from fields such as philosophy, architecture, and science, essays by Judith Barry, J.G. Ballard, and Donna Haraway critique the commodification of life and the evolving relationship between humans and technology. Incorporations challenges readers to reflect on modernity’s impact and the cultural frameworks shaping the future.

I have been wondering about the ways in which an “index” page on a website could be reimagined such that it harkens back to when the index on a website was more like an indexical representation of a body of work, rather than the more contemporary approach in which the page needs to be more optimized for search, SEO, and algorithmic discovery. In that context I set out to prototype and experiment with what this might be without overthinking things. This prototype is an exploration of what an “index” page is as a series of “cards” that represent different content pieces. The metaphor of cards looms large in my mind as I really used ot love going to the Princeton Public Library and, when I could, the Firestone Library at Princeton Univeristy and browing the card catalog, mor invested in the exploration and serendipity of discovery, and anxious about the fragility of these paper cards (wondering how losing one could result in an...

A week or two back, I was talking with a young musician wondering what it means to make music now, in the age of AI. They paused mid-sentence, sort of rolling around some notes it seemed they had prepared pre-call. I thought maybe they were waiting for some insight, or just for someone like me to make sense of the noise and confusion that surrounded their sense of their own future as a creative artist. What followed was an extemporaneous story about a design fiction project involving a box of artifacts (that felt as if they had come) from the 1980s that served as a "record album" in a non-traditional format. What I think I intended was for this tale to highlight the importance of refusing default containers and embracing audacity in creative expression. Later that week, I saw Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, a film that challenges traditional narrative structures and invites viewers to experience it as a sonic album. This...

In this episode my friend Tom Guarriello joins me to unpack a deceptively simple question—why do some things matter more than others? How is it that “brands” are rarely just products. Tom describes how they’re meaning-machines: coffee cups, clothes, grocery aisles, and the everyday objects we carry through life are the things that quietly scaffold identity, aspiration, and sense of belonging. Choice arrives instantly; explanation comes later. Tom’s “meaning stack” helps us understand the rise of culture brands those brands that don’t just sell products, but stage worlds: concerts, exhibitions, lifestyles, and point-of-view. We discuss Tom's new book which gets into all of this and more. Check it out: ”The Meaning of Branded Objects” available now.