1. Further Reading & Viewing

If you have tips drop me a mail, or make edits directly and let me know.

MAN, MACHINE AND WHATS IN BETWEEN

Richard Bolt. Put that There: Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface. Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques(SIGGRAPH '80). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 262-270

Demo 1, Demo 2

Steward Brand. Space war. Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. Rolling Stone, Dec 7 1972.

On the surface this 1972 Rolling Stone article is just about a bunch of geeks playing computer games on university mainframes, but it actually provides a good account of the history of computing until then, and how a typical seventies attitude to bringing computing to the masses was making mind and matter ready for the computer and web revolution to come. The first computer games in the sixties, Stanford AI lab, Xerox Parc, Alan Kay and the Dynabook, the 500$ computer, etc.

Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha. Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art: A Historical Perspective. Leonardo Vol. 12, pp. 17–28, 2002.

Doug Engelbart Institute.

Papers, videos and a lot more on one of the founding fathers of modern day computer systems, GUIs and the mouse, as early as in the sixties.

Douglas Engelbart. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223, October 1962.

This paper is more forward looking and provides a conceptual framework what an a system for augmenting human intellect should do and what it could look like.

Douglas C. Engelbart and William K. English. A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect. AFIPS Conference Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference/, San Francisco, CA, December 9, 1968, Vol. 33, pp. 395-410.

In this paper Engelbart demonstrates his key personal networked workstation with a lot of features that only relatively recently have become commonplace; he presented remotely to the conference which was also a first, a full movie recording along with a rich set of background is available. He also gave a Google Tech Talk 39 years later looking what actually became reality.

Klint Finley. Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time

Siri eat your heart out

Honeywell Kitchen Computer or H316 pedestal model.

For some strange reason it never succeeded, this 1969 10k USD kitchen computer that required a two week course to operate it's toggle-switch input and binary light output to store and retrieve recipes.

Alan Kay (talk). Sketchpad, Grail, the Dynabook. QuickTime video. [Duration: 8'36.] From The History of the Personal Workstation, 27 May 1986.

Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. Personal Dynamic Media, 1977. Reprinted in Wardrip-Fruin (2003).

The first notebook, later video of an early cardboard mock up dating from 1968. Also a 2010 article reporting on a discussion with Alan Kay whether 'Steve Jobs stole the iPad'.

J.C.R. Licklider. Man Computer Symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics,volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960

Ivan Sutherland. Sketchpad, a Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. PhD Thesis, MIT, 1963. Reprint University of Cambridge 2003.

SketchPad was the first object oriented drawing system, see also these videos: video 1 (commentary from Alan Kay), detailed demo part 1, part 2. SketchPad helps a user to solve a (visual) problem by making incremental steps, and the computer 'understands' what the user is trying to achieve.

Space: Virtual, Artificial, Augmented and Real

Triumph of the Nerds. 3 hr PBS documentary from 1996 on the birth of computing industry (Youtube).

A. M. Turing. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 236 (Oct., 1950), pp. 433-460

REALITIES

ARQUAKE, YouTube movie.

One of the first AR games.

Timo Arnall. Robot Readable World, The Film.

Aspen Movie Map, Architecture Machine Group, MIT Media Lab, 1979. Wikipedia, Youtube, and one more.

Allows the viewer to take an interactive tour through Aspen, Architecture Machine Group @ MIT, 1979. Streetview avant la lettre, see also Google Holodeck

Kevin Bonsor. How Augmented Reality Works. How Stuff Works.

Jack Burnham. Software - Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art. Exhibition Catalogue, Jewish Museum, New York, 1970.

Exhibition with works from a.o. Ted Nelson, and the MIT Architecture Machine group of Nicholas Negroponte, the predecessor to the MIT Media Lab, who created a block world built by robots, but wrecked by gerbils.

Pavel Curtis. Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text Based Virtual Realities, 1992.

Myron Krueger. Interview with Myron Krueger, Museum of Natural History, Vernon, 1988.

One of the first artists to create real time interactive 'responsive environments', a.k.a 'artificial reality'. Key works include Metaplay and Videospace (movie1, movie2, movie3) in the 1970s.

MortonHeilig.com

Morton Leonard Heilig. El cine del futuro: The Cinema of the Future. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 1.3 (1992): 279-294. English translation of El cine del futuro, Expacios, 1955.

Myron Krueger. Responsive Environments. From AFIPS 46 National Computer Conference Proceedings, pp 423-33. Reprinted in Wardrip-Fruin (2003).

Keiichi Matsuda. Hyper Reality.

Concept film about a future augmented on digital steroids (or LSD).

Cade Metz. Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Big Bet That Facebook Can Make VR Social. Wired Business, Feb 21 2016.

Greg Miller. Tech Time Warp of the Week: The 1977 Tablet Computer That Took Up an Entire Room.. Wired Business, Jan 23, 2015.

Wired post on MIT Media Lab Spatial Data Management System

Jeffrey Shaw. The Legible City. Youtube movie.

Ivan Sutherland. The Ultimate Display. Proceedings of IFIP, 1965, pp 506-508.

Jeremy Turner. Myron Krueger Live. C-Theory 2002.

Interview with Myron Krueger.

Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille. Funky Forest, 2007.

A modern example of a 'Responsive Environment'.

HISTORIES

Steward Brand. We owe it all to the hippies. Time Magazine, vol 145, no 12, March 1995.

Editor of the Whole Earth Catalog reflects on the counterculture roots of Net culture.

L. Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (eds). New Media 1740-1915. MIT Press, 2003.

All media were once new. You can now with confidence say "Nice ground breaking project, but has already been done in 1798 and 1813".

Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media. The MIT Press, 2001.

A theory of new media, with a focus on narrative and the relationship between classical media theory such as film and literary theory versus new media. Author webpage at http://manovich.net/, Online version here

Lev Manovich. New Media from Borges to HTML. In: Wardrip-Fruin (2003).

R. Packer (ed.). From Wagner to Virtual Reality. W W Norton & Co Ltd, December 2002.

One of the best collections of classical 20th century papers on New Media (companion webpage)

Cordula Rooijendijk. Alles moest nog worden uitgevonden. Olympus, November 2010.

The early history of computing in the Netherlands (in Dutch).

Mark Trube and Reena Jana. New Media Art. Taschen, 2006.

Coffee table book with describing around 35 new media artists, with a focus on 1995-2005.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds). The New Media Reader. The MIT Press, 2003.

An even more extensive collection of 54 classical papers on New Media. Companion website at http://www.newmediareader.com/ (and here)

FUTURES

See also the AI and Biological Engineering sections below

Anthropocene (Wikipedia), What is the Anthropocene and are we in it ? Smithsonian.com.

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

University of Cambridge (UK) based institute, studies extinction level threats of present and future technology. Co founded by Jaan Tallin (ex Skype), Huw Price (philosopher, University of Cambridge) and Martin Rees (astrophysicist, University of Cambridge).

Richard Feynman. There is plenty of room at the bottom. Lecture given at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Transcript published at Caltech Engineering and Science, Volume 23:5, February 1960, pp 22-36

Forward looking talk about miniturisation and the nano scale

Future of Humanity Institute

Founded in 2005, part of the University of Oxford Faculty of Philosophy and the Martin School. Current Director is Nick Bostrom (AI Ethics philosopher).

Future of Life Institute.

Cambridge, US based institute founded in March 2014 by Jaan Tallin (Skype) amongst others and scientific advisors such as Nick Bostrom (University of Oxford), George Church (Harvard), Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley), Elon Musk (SpaceX & Tesla), Stephen Hawkins (Cambridge University) amongst others. Mission is '"to catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges". Focussing on keeping AI beneficial as well as reducing risks from nuclear weapons and biotechnology. See also this open letter on autonomous weapons.

James Hamblin, But what would the end of humanity mean for me? The Atlantic, May 19. 2014

Jeet Heer. The New Utopians. New Republic, November 2015.

Humanity Plus. Humanity Plus Magazine.

Joichi Ito and Kevin Slavin. Extended Intelligence. Draft of a MIT Medialab discussion on Extended Intelligence, PubPub, retrieved Feb 28, 2016.

Bill Joy. Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. Wired, 2000.

Seminal article arguing that robotics, genetic engineering and biotech will make humans endangered species - if we don't take care.

Floris van Kaayk. The Modular Body.

Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence.

The Long Now Foundation., with for example the 10.000 year clock (interview)

Luddite (Wikipedia)

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

The Maintainers: a Conference. April 7-9, 2016, Hoboken, New Jersey

Brian Merchant. You've got Luddites all Wrong. Motherboard, 2014.

Thomas More. Utopia, 1516. (Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, British Library Dreamers and DIssenters ).

Next Nature

Katie Peterson, The Future Library

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel. Hail the Maintainers. Aeon.

Anders Sandberg, We can programme you to live forever: The Register Winter Lectures, 2015

Singularity (Wikipedia)

Singularity University & Singularity Hub

SFTN: The Singularity, Futurology, and Transhuman Network. Reddit.

James Bridle. The New Aesthetic

Derek Thompson. A World without Work. The Atlantic, July/August 2015.

Transhumanism (Wikipedia).

Roey Tzezana. Singularity: Explain It to Me Like I’m 5-Years-Old. Futurism, March 2017.

Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (Wikipedia)

Vernor Vinge. Technological Singularity. VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.