Rich Gold

Rich Gold is a composer, inventor, artist, cartoonist, lecturer and researcher who in the nineteen seventies, co-founded the "League of Automatic Music Composers", the first network computer band. As an internationally known artist he invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism, an example of which, "The Party Planner", was featured in Scientific American. He was head of the sound and music department of Sega USA's coin-op video game division and the inventor of the award winning "Little Computer People" (Activision), the first fully autonomous computerized person you could buy. For five years he headed the electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of, among other interactive toys, the Mattel PowerGlove. He also worked on Captain Power, the first interactive broadcast TV show and ICVD an early CD based video system.

After working as a consultant in Virtual Reality he joined Xerox PARC, where he was a primary researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. He was a co-designer of the PARC Tab, helped launch the successful LiveBoard project and was the inventor or co-inventor on ten patents. In 1992 he created the PARC artist-in-residence program (PAIR), which paired fine artists and scientists together based on shared technologies (the book "Art and Innovation", MIT Press, describes the project). He created and managed the multi-disciplinary laboratory, RED (Research in Experimental Documents), which looked at the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering. One of RED's projects, called "Experiments in the Future of Reading", was featured at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation where it was viewed by over a half million people and is now touring the United States after winning the Gold and Silver awards for interactive design from I.D. Magazine. These reading experiments, presented as fully readable interactive devices, were based on the concepts of "Total Writing", an anti-convergent theory where the media itself becomes authorable. Rich Gold is a Fellow at The World Economic Forum, a Regent's Lecturer at UC Berkeley and as an Applied Cartoonist and Provocative Speaker gives talks all over the world on his work, the pragmatics of knowledge art, the patterns of contemporary innovation and how to build Evocative Knowledge Objects (EKOs.)