The legendary work of the MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group has now been collected in a new book, Creative Code, by Professor John Maeda. The 240 page paperback is crammed full of eye candy by the group's master digital visualization artists. John rebooted the group in 2003 to become the Physical Language Workshop, so this book serves to encapsulate part of an important era in digital media. My only wish is that some of the actual working code examples from the book aren't offered on a CD, or collected on the book's web site. The permanence of digital media artworks is a serious issue. Digital art pieces in the past have been developed in specific coding environments and hardware platforms, which over time become obsolete. Ultimately, all we are left with is paper books. Ironic.

Creative Code will get my juices going again for my next visit to the lab this coming Sunday and Monday.

I also see that John has started a CLOG (Code Log). I'm happy about this, but I don't know when the boy rests given that he's teaching classes, working on an MBA, authoring a children's book, speaking at conferences, continuing his personal experiments, helping to raise four daughters and chasing corporate sponsors like me. I need some of the magic pills he must be taking.

- mike lee - washington, dc