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
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.
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.
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
Thomas Watson. Awesome Computer History Github.
REALITIES
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.
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
Eric Saarinen. Great Big Mirror Dome, 1970.
Movie on a project by E.A.T.(Experiments in Art and Technology).
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
Founded in 2005, part of the University of Oxford Faculty of Philosophy and the Martin School. Current Director is Nick Bostrom (AI Ethics philosopher).
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 ).
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.
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.
AI
See also the Futures section above
Charles Arthur. Robot panic peaked in 2015 – so where will AI go next? The Observer, Sunday 27 December 2015 .
Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. In: Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey (editors). The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Nick Bostrom. What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? TED, 2015
Rodney Brooks. The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions. MIT Technology Review, 2017.
Boer Deng. Machine ethics: The robot’s dilemma. Nature 523, 24–26 (02 July 2015)
Thomas Dietterich and Eric (2015). "Rise of Concerns about AI: Reflections and Directions" (PDF).Communications of the ACM 58 (10): 38–40.
Maureen Dowd. Elon Musk's Billion Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse. Vanity Fair, April 2017.
I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965
Jeff Goodell. Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1. Rolling Stone, Feb 29 2016.
We may be on the verge of creating a new life form, one that could mark not only an evolutionary breakthrough, but a potential threat to our survival as a species
Jeremy Howard, The Wonderful and Terrifying Implications of Machines that Learn, TEDxBrussels, December 2014.
Eric Horvitz. One-Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Reflections and Framing. Stanford University, 2014.
Vinod Khosla. Is AI and existential threat to humanity?
Question on Quora, with a range of comments from well know AI researchers such as Yoshua Bengio and Andrew Ng.
Alexis C. Madrigal. The case against killer robots, from a guy actually working on artificial intelligence. Fusion, Feb 27, 2015.
Quotes Andrew Ng, Baidu & Stanford: “I don’t work on preventing AI from turning evil for the same reason that I don’t work on combating overpopulation on the planet Mars”
George Musser. Consciousness creep.
Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness. Aeon, February 2016.
OpenAI and it's in augural statement: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and the OpenAI team. Introducing Open AI. December 11, 2015.
Vijay Pande. Artificial Intelligence 'Black Box' is nothing to fear. New York Times (Online), Jan 25, 2018.
Michael Sainato. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates Warn About Artificial Intelligence. The Observer, August 19, 2015.
Kevin Slavin. How algorithms shape our world. TedGlobal, 2011.
Alan Yuhas. Would you bet against sex robots? AI 'could leave half of world unemployed'. The Guardian, February 13, 2016.
BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
See also the FUTURES section above
Jeff Akst. Let's Talk Human Engineering. The Scientist, December 3, 2015.
Article on the December 2015 Human Gene Editing summit, where scientists were discussing ethics of and limits on human genetic engineering.
Jeff Akst. Year in Review: CRISPR Blossoms. The Scientist, December 16, 2015.
CRISPR is a relatively new technique allowing for low cost, very precise gene editing
Le Cong, F. Ann Ran, David Cox, Shuailiang Lin, Robert Barrett, Naomi Habib, Patrick D. Hsu, Xuebing Wu, Wenyan Jiang, Luciano A. Marraffini, Feng Zhang. Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems. Science 15 Feb 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6121, pp. 819-823 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231143
Seminal paper on CRISPR-Cas9, 1 of 3.
Jennifer Doudna. We can now edit our DNA. But let's do it wisely. TED Global, London September 2015
One of the inventors of CRISPR-Cas9 explains what it is, and makes a case for discussing the ethical implications.
Editing humanity. A new technique for manipulating genes holds great promise—but rules are needed to govern its us. The Economist, August 22, 2015.
Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity. Science 17 Aug 2012:Vol. 337, Issue 6096, pp. 816-821. DOI: 10.1126/science.1225829
Seminal paper on CRISPR-Cas9, 2 of 3.
Prashant Mali, Luhan Yang, Kevin M. Esvelt, John Aach, Marc Guell, James E. DiCarlo, Julie E. Norville, George M. Church. RNA-Guided Human Genome Engineering via Cas9. Science 15 Feb 2013: Vol. 339, Issue 6121, pp. 823-826. DOI: 10.1126/science.1232033
Seminal CRISPR-Cas9 paper - 3 of 3.
Amy Maxmen. The Genesis Machine. Wired, August 2015.
Story the on invention of CRISPR-CAS9, the latest breakthrough in low cost and precise gene editing, gene drives to change the genetic make up of entire populations. and the potential impact. See also CRISP (Wikipedia), a movie explaining CRISPR-CAS9 by MIT, the various Science papers quoted, and the articles by Zhang and Zimmer referenced below.
Sarah Zhang. Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA. Gizmodo, May 2015.
Carl Zimmer. Breakthrough DNA Editor Borne of Bacteria. Quanta, February 2015
NARRATIVE
Chris Anderson and Michael Wolf. The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet. Wired September 2010.
Discussing the end of the web and the rise of apps and social networking.
Tim Berners Lee. Information Management: a Proposal. CERN, 1989.
Whilst building on a lot of a history, this paper is often quoted as the launching paper for the web.
Jorge Luis Borges. The Garden of the Forking Paths. Translation from "El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan", 1941 [Wikipedia entry]
Short literary story, considered to be an early example of a story with a hypertext structure.
William S. Burroughs. The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin. The Third Mind, pp 29-33. Viking, NY 1978. In: Wardrip-Fruin (2003).
Revised from an earlier version in 1961, it discusses how everyone can create random new non-linear texts by techniques of cutting up, folding, reaarranging and sampling text.
Vannevar Bush. As We May Think. Reprint from The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945. Interactions, March 1996.
Probably feeling a bit guilty for inventing the military industrial complex during the war, Vannevar Bush turns to a new peaceful imaginary invention, the Memex, conceptually very close to the internet but completely analogue.
Lynn Hershman. The Fantasy Beyond Control. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. 267–273. New
York: Aperture/BAVC, 1990. In: Wardrip-Fruin (2003).
One of the first artists using interactive video, for instance in 'Lorna'
Janet Murray. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press, 1997
Janet Murray. Inventing the Medium. In: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds). The New Media Reader. The MIT Press, 2003.
Theodor H. Nelson. Excerpt from from Computer Lib / Dream Machines, 1970–1974. In: Wardrip-Fruin (2003). Full version: Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now / Dream Machines: New Freedoms through Computer Screens—A Minority Report, Hugo's Book Service, 1974; rev.ed, Redmund, WA: Tempus Books/Microsoft Press, 1987.
Theodor H. Nelson. "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate", in Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, New York: ACM, 1965, pp 84-100, IA.
See also this Monoskop page on Ted Nelson for more references. As well as his personal website.
Jason Schreier. Game Theory Series Probes Videogames’ Big Questions. Wired Game | Life, February 2011.
Interactive Storytelling in Games
Alex Wright. The Web that Wasn't. Google Tech Talks, November 2007.
Interesting talk about the precursors of the web, starting at 1883. The presentation focuses on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team. See also this short movie about Paul Otlet, visioning the web in 1934.
CREATURES
Mediatech workshop by Peter van der Putten and Maarten Lamers
Cynthia Breazeal and B. Scassellati, B. (1999), "How to build robots that make friends and influence people". IROS99, Kyonjiu, Korea.
See also the Kismet Homepage
Theo Jansen. Strandbeest. The latest (Dec 2015) strandbeest is Animaris Proboscis, these are some kids growing up on land before being released on the beach,
SOCIAL
Dan Ariely. Predictably Irrational, : The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Harper Perennial (Revised and Expanded Edition), 2010.
Pavel Curtis. Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities. DIAC, Berkeley, CA, 1992
Sebastian Deterding. Persuasive Design. Presentation at reboot 11, Copenhagen, June 2009
Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab
B.J. Fogg. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann; 1 edition (December 30, 2002).
Daniel Pink. Drive: The Suprising Truth About Whatt Motivates Us.
Jesse Schell. The Art of Game Design. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.
ART SCIENCE
Lex Bohlmeijer. In gesprek met Robbert Dijkgraaf, De Correspondent, Soundcloud [Interview in Dutch].
Robbert Dijkgraaf is a well know research but also spent time at the Rietveld Academie. He discusses the similar nature of arts and science, why scientists are turning from observers to researchers that study a reality that they create themselves, and the importance of autonomous science at the fringes of research.
Bergit Arends and Davina Thackara. Experiment: Conversations in Art and Science. The Wellcome Trust, 2003.
Sian Ede (ed.). Strange and Charmed: Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London 2000.
Sian Ede. Art and Science. Tauris 2010.
David Edwards/ Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Stephen Wilson. Art + Science Now. Thames and Hudson, 2010.
CREATIVE CODING
OpenFrameworks
Open Frameworks website
Open Frameworks download
Set up instructions
Open Frameworks videos on VIMEO
Open Frameworks videos on DevArt
Open Framework projects on the Creative Applications Network
Processing
Processing.js, a Processing javascript port (translates Processing code to Javascript on the fly)
p5.js, a Processsing inspired Javascript library, plus a Youtube course by Daniel Shiffman
Pure Data, open source visual programming similar to Max
Raspberry Pi, a cheap single board computer
Touchdesigner, semicommercial software for professional creative coding
VVVV, a commercial package for live programming in a mixed visual-textual programming environment
Wekinator, machine learning for creative purposes, based on Weka
FABRICATION
Makerbot, Robots that make things. Website and Google Tech Talk.
OpenSCAD open source CAD tool.
Personal Fabrication for Dummies
Various methods for personal fabrication
The Nature of Code, great online book introducing topics such as forces, particle systems, fractals, agents and more.
Things that Think (MIT Medialab)
Ultimaker 3d printers
Squishy Circuits (Ted talk, see Vimeo and YouTube for other videos)
VisiCut, open source tool for laser cutting
Wire Bender (Vimeo, Build your own Make Magazine)
PROJECT GALLERIES & ARCHIVES
Archive of Digital Art, 1979-now
Compart, center of excellence in digital art
Cybernetic Zoo, archive for cybernetic animals and early robots
Foundation Philippe Langlois, primarily a historical archive
Medien Kunst Netz / Media Art Net, historical archive
Media Art Tube on YouTube
Monoskop, a Wiki on arts, media and humanities, also with quite a few historical references
OpenFrameworks Gallery
Processing Exhibition
Rhizome ArtBase, archive of digital art
Stupid Hackathon, stupid shit no one needs and terrible ideas
Visualcomplexity.com, a collection of visualizations of networks
INSTITUTIONS
For a range of institutions on risks of AI, singularity, etc see the Futures section