excellent write-up matt, thanks.

i long to one day experience a bruce sterling talk.

Really nice summary - much better than my own feeble notes.

btw, in case you care, I'm the guy from Pixar who was commenting from the audience that you quote twice.

My group at Pixar owns the technological pipeline for early film development (Story, Editorial, etc.) and a central task for our group is to be "archiving" the film as it's being made, so that the artists working on the film can have a chance of seeing the forest for the individual trees they're working on - having the whole movie in their head, if you will, which typically only a few individuals (the writer/director, the production designer, etc.) might have had.

It's a hard problem, and we learn new things every month.

If we're lucky, the process artifacts that we build will continue to be useful after the film is done.

Thanks Michael! Sounds like pretty cool work.

An amazingly thorough post - thanks from someone who wanted to be there but couldn't. I really like this description of why digital artworks challenge the notion of an art-object; "...art—works, in other words, not embodied exclusively in physical artifacts, but which are either digital and therefore possessed of a logical ontology separate and distinct from the work’s instantiation in any one particular hardware system, or digital and physical hybrids." Can you give me a lead to a publication of yours where you go into this in more detail?

Hi Lizzie,

Thanks for reading!

The business about logical separation of processes from physical hardware is not my original idea at all, it goes back to Alan Turing's theories of computation and universal machines. Your best bet would be to look at some non-specialist books about computer science. I like Danny Hillis's The Pattern in the Stone.

That said, I discuss these ideas at much greater length in my forthcoming Mechanisms, due out in the fall from MIT Press.