Lots going on these days

Seems I have my hands in a bunch of different projects these days.

First of all, although I’m not going to FiTC Amsterdamn, I will be there in spirit. Well, even more than in spirit. More like in virtuality. If you are familiar with the band, Phlash5, you’ll know that they are performing in Amsterdam on Monday. About a week ago, Chris Allen asked if I could put together some visuals to display while the band plays. After discussing it, we came up with this mad scheme where I would actually control the visuals from Boston, via Red5! So while I’m sitting in the office Monday afternoon, messing around with this little control panel, I’ll actually be controlling these crazy experiments showing up on the big screen behind the band on Monday night, half way around the world. This project is a lot of fun, and I have some cool things planned. After the show, I’ll open up the project and show it in more detail so anyone else can play with it and control it.

Next up, I’m going to have an interactive piece in an art gallery. Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain (Boston) asked me to submit an interactive piece for a showing on Art and Math starting in March. I was going to try to recycle something from the old labs or some other experiment I had worked on, but wound up creating something brand new from scratch. After the show is over, I’ll probably post that for people to play with too. But will probably throw up a description, some screen shots, and maybe some photos from the gallery itself once the show starts.

On the book front, a few news items. One, I’m sure I mentioned before, is I am working on a book, Professional AIR with Chuck Freedman, Clint Modien, and Ben Lucyk. This is almost complete. I’m doing 3.5 chapters of that.

And I see that as of this writing, Amazon has not gotten the new cover correct… 🙁

Also, I was asked to be part of a book called, “Blogs: Mad about Design”, a 170×225 mm, 528 page compilation that “aims to be a shortcut through the web jungle to the most interesting and exciting blogs related to graphic design.” The book will be published in English and Spanish and distributed internationally. I’ll have some screenshots and a description and commentary on this blog. Yay!

Finally, when I was in Japan last year, I took about 900 photographs, of which about a third made it to my flickr account. I’m always fascinated with the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines there. So how cool is it that another publisher has asked to use one of my photos in a book called “Religions of the World”. This is a rich illustrated informational book about Religions and will be published in fall 2008.

And of course, I will be speaking in Toronto at FiTC in April on fractals and chaos, and have a whole cool new project related to that talk that I will announce soon.

Busy, busy, busy!