Here is some stuff I’m digging for the week of September 26th, 2009:
1. Porcupine Tree The Incident
2. Southern Lord records (more specifically, Sunn O))), Boris [with Merzbow], Oren Ambarchi, Pelican, etc.)
3. This package:

4. A big pile of Daniel Menche CDs from Soleilmoon
5. UT library
6. Rediscovering Sub Rosa’s Subsonic series, including CDs by duos like Justin K. Broadrick and Andy Hawkins, Caspar Brotzmann and Page Hamilton, Bill Laswell and Nick Bullen, Lou Barlow and Rudi Trouve, et al.
7. My thrift-store copy of Dune (the very picture of “classic”):

8. Naked Raygun What …

The much-discussed, much-explored interface between humans and machines is seemingly our final frontier. Comparing the interface to the Victorian novel and the 1950s television show (both of which shaped society’s understanding at the time), Steven Johnson wrote, “There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.” The graphical user interface has come to represent all of the many processes going on inside the computer — and the way we interact with each other through them.

I ventured to Atlanta again this year for Georgia Tech’s Digital Media department’s Winter Demo Day, and it definitely re-greased the mental wheels. When you’re stuck while thinking about technology and media, an event like this is sure to shake things loose.

Steven Johnson calls him “the Lou Reed of the new gaming culture.” Eric Zimmerman hops through the realms of game design, academe, writing, game advocacy, and entrepreneurship as if he’s playing a game of hopscotch. And, in many ways, he is. He’s spent the last decade designing award-winning games, teaching at places like MIT, New York University, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design at the New School University, as well as writing continuously about gaming — much of which can be seen in four recent books: RE: …

When venturing into new territory without a proper map, McKenzie Wark is the kind of guy you want to have around. His intuition in such cases provides a beacon to the next viable vantage point.
Wark’s intuition has shown up in his books, Virtual Geography (Indiana University Press, 1994), The Virtual Republic (Allen & Unwin, 1998), Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (Pluto Press, 1999), and Dispositions (Salt Publishing, 2002), among others.

My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
When I last spoke with Rudy Rucker, his nonfiction collection Seek! and science-fiction novel Saucer Wisdom were just finding their way into bookstores. Since that time, Rucker has been hacking on a video game programming toolkit called the Pop Framework and keeping a low profile on the science-fiction scene. After bouncing a few emails with him, it was obvious that we needed to do another interview and shed some light on his latest projects.

After graduating from the University of Georgia with a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, John Eikenberry turned to the web to continue his career. His thesis focused on “using semantic networks for keyword analysis and document classification,” which was achieved mainly by developing independent agents. His current work is centered around a bot/agent development environment.