Max Mathews (1926–2011) Interview with Geeta Dayal for Frieze
Max Mathews Radio Baton Demonstration
Rhizome contributor Geeta Dayal recently interviewed Max Mathews for Frieze magazine. Sadly the pioneer of digital music (creating MUSIC in 1957) passed away three weeks later. It's a fascinating conversation going over the history of computer music and Mathew's many high profile collaborations, while explaining the creative energy at Bell Labs at the time.
Your boss actually encouraged you to take time off from work to write MUSIC? Bell Labs sounds like it was an amazing place.
Bell Labs was a golden era. Golden for several things. One was that the research money to support it was gotten as a tax on the earnings or the profits of the telephone companies. We got it as a lump sum. The vice president in charge of research, William O. Baker, insisted that there be no strings attached to the money and that we could use it in the way we thought was best. So a lot of very important things were done with this support, or byproducts of things that were used in telephony. There were the radio telescopes, and the measurement of the background radiation with the very low-noise antennas that we developed that supported the Big Bang theory, and there was of course the transistor. And there were all sorts of speech codings that are still very important, and error correcting codes. The departments originally only hired Ph.D. physicists, mathematicians, and maybe a few chemists. Then they gradually let in some engineers. The whole research department, the position you took was a member of staff – MTS, member of technical staff. That was the highest position in the research department! [laughs]...
What’s your attitude about how difficult it was for you in the 1950s to make computer music, versus making computer music ...
BLDGBLOG Interviews Nicholas de Monchaux, author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo"

For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. They regarded the prospect of taking an earthly atmosphere with you into space, inside a capsule or a spacesuit, as very cumbersome and not befitting what they called the evolutionary progress of our triumphal entry into the inhospitable realm of outer space. The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program.
But then the actual spacesuit—this 21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company, using hand-stitched couture techniques—is kind of an anti-hero. It’s much more embarrassing, of course—it’s made by people who make women’s underwear—but, then, it’s also much more urbane. It’s a complex, multilayered assemblage that actually recapitulates the messy logic of our own bodies, rather than present us with the singular ideal of a cyborg or the hard, one-piece, military-industrial suits against which the Playtex suit was always competing. ... — Nicholas de Monchaux, author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo" in an interview with BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh.
3D ASCII Animated GIF from Japan

Japanese tech news publication Weekly ASCII has an animated gif tutorial including this 3D ASCII gif.
Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog at MoMA

Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968–1974
April 18–July 26, 2011
Le Révélateur - Bleu Nuit (2011) / Video by Sabrina Ratté
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Improving Prometheus
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The Editorial Fellow is ideally based in New York and must be able to commit to 16 hours of work per week for 4 months, beginning in Summer 2012. This position is unpaid, but academic credit may be arranged. The Editorial Fellow will coordinate and assist in production of Rhizome's website and weekly newsletter Rhizome News. Fellow will support daily publishing and maintenance of the blog, as well as researching and writing editorial essays, reviews, and opinion pieces.
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NA - Further Thoughts
Thanks so much for these comments. You are right that the New Aesthetic is a broad conversation, but James Bridle's investigation is definitely political, unfortunately many of his points have been missed in the ongoing metacommentary. It seems a lot of people are confused by the visuals, which aren't *the* the New Aesthetic so much as artifacts *of* the New Aesthetic.
The NA Tumblr was Bridle thinking out loud, and something to consider in tandem with his writing/talks. Meanwhile, the conversation about these ideas has gone on for over a year now, over a number of blogs, mostly based in London
In addition to James Bridle's talks and notes, this is what I recommend reading to understand what the New Aesthetic conversation is really about:
Aaron Straup Cope's notes from SXSW:
http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2012/03/13/godhelpus/#sxaesthetic
Chris Heathcote: A New Fashion Aesthetic
http://anti-mega.com/antimega/2012/04/02/a-new-fashion-aesthetic
Many, many BERG posts:
http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/05/13/sensor-vernacular/
http://berglondon.com/blog/2012/02/06/robot-readable-world-the-film/
http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/08/03/the-robot-readable-world/
We are the droids we’re looking for: the New Aesthetic and its friendly critics by JJ Charlesworth
http://blog.jjcharlesworth.com/2012/05/07/we-are-the-droids-were-looking-for-the-new-aesthetic-and-its-friendly-critics/
Honor Harger:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1204&L=new-media-curating&F=&S=&P=20818
Tom Armitage:
http://infovore.org/archives/2011/05/21/waving-at-the-machines/
Greg Borenstein:
http://urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2011/06/07/on-the-future-and-poetry-of-the-calibration-pose/
Natalia Buckley:
http://ntlk.net/2012/04/12/on-the-new-aesthetic/
Other notes from SXSW are linked here:
http://booktwo.org/notebook/sxaesthetic/
this was my favorite New Aesthetic tumblr post, btw:
http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/21437296950/i-used-to-go-to-the-trocadero-in-central-london-as
Editorial Fellow
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