Archive for 'Features'
Features
Because writers have to eat, and because I sort of enjoy it, I sometimes write featue stories for institutional publications, mostly interviews and other corporate communications pieces, but also a smattering of magazine journalism. There’s also a series on Art and Technology that has been used in university courses that I have posted here, since it is out of print and hard to find online.
Read More..>>The Coffin Path
Part travelogue, part literary history, part memoir, this essay offers a glimpse into the power of literature and nature to heal the human body and soothe the human spirit. This piece is still in the works, but I wanted to post it for all those who have asked for it.
Read More..>>Technology for Art’s Sake
While covering a supercomputing conference in San Jose, California, I stumbled upon an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art that I found infinitely more interesting than supercomputers. Sure enough, two stories came of it that began to change the course of my career, though I’ve never revisited the subjects again. I’m grateful to the editorial staff at IEEE Spectrum for humoring me in my discovery; it certainly wasn’t what they bargained for!
Read More..>>The Engineer as Catalyst: Billy Klüver on Working with Artists
This article first appeared in the July 1998 issue of “IEEE Spectrum Magazine.” It was a real privilege to interview Billy and to see his passion for work and his delight that people were still interested in what he had done. He died in 2004.
Billy Klüver has a lot in common with the more accomplished electrical engineers of his generation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, is a veteran of Bell Laboratories, has been an IEEE member since 1943, and holds several patents. Unique to Klüver, however, is the almost surreal story of a quiet scientist, thrust from the serenity of the lab into the burgeoning art scene of New York City in the 1960s.
The Web is like an 8-track tape
I found this in my archive and just had to post it here. It’s a review of Internet World ‘97 for the February 1998 issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine, where I briefly contributed to a column called Websights. As I post it now almost 10 years later, I think oh my, how young and naive we were.
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