All of my work ends up sounding like a train somehow. — Matt Heckert

I first became acquainted with Matt Heckert’s work through issue #8 of Andy Jenkins’ Bend zine. There was a picture of Survival Research Laboratories‘ “Walk-Peck” machine and it was credited to one Matt Heckert. This was the Summer of 1986. Matt has long since departed from SRL with his work and his work’s aims. Read more

The Massachusetts Institue of Technology has been host to the leaders of innovations in many fields: Artificial Intelligence, media and communication technology, open source development, and on and on. One of its lesser known areas of bleeding-edge innovation has been pranks and hacking. Well, Institute Historian T. F. Peterson is here to set that straight with Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. Read more

I’m not much of a painter, but I found this canvas by a dumpster on my way home from campus one day here in San Diego. I had a tube of black and a tube of white acrylic paint left from my last stint attempting to paint, so I decided to try a new one. This piece was inspired by Kate Hayles’ book Writing Machines, code poetry, and (obviously) Noam Chomsky. Read more

When time like the pyramids has worn away
All the mountains and the valleys of the words we say
We have got to make sure that something remains
If we lose each other, we’ve got no one to blame
– Oingo Boingo

Sitting at the computer on a Sunday night (as I have been most of the weekend), I was just thinking about why I do this and my other websites. I remember an essay by Andy Jenkins from an old issue of his Bend zine where he pondered the same thing. He finally came to the conclusion that if he counted all the amazing people he’d met from doing Bend, he had a pretty good idea of why he did it in the first place. Read more