"I thought I could create perfect things on the computer, but then I realized that was a lie," says John Maeda, director of the Aesthetics & Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab and author of Maeda @ Media, a weighty collection of designs, projects, and unpublished sketches due out in October from Rizzoli (and distributed by Thames & Hudson in Europe). "When I started programming, the computer was simple. It's not anymore. This book represents all the complexity that I tried to plow through."
Although most of Maeda @ Media's 480 pages look back over the code-based case for computer as design machine, the book itself - as object - suggests Maeda's movement from the virtual to the physical. "The challenge was to make it an interesting object," he says. "The edges of the paper seemed like a lonely place, so I wrote a sentence around the edges of the book."
Where is this antidigital path taking Maeda? For the moment, at least, to an old machine room in the basement of the MIT gym, where he can experiment with hardware. As Maeda puts it, "I want to make computers that are a form of art."
ELECTRIC WORD
Shadow Warrior
New Maeda
Ticker Transplant
Sonic Room
Open Shuttle
Capturing Eyeballs
