NA/SA: New Art/Science Affinities

"I read this book. It's pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy."

&#8212 Bruce Sterling

In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to work on a strange collaborative project called a "booksprint." A booksprint, I discovered, is a fairly new practice, derived from the world of open-source software "codesprints." In this version, a group of writers work exhaustively for a week on a shared project, which is then made into a book at the conclusion of their session. In seven days, our group of sprinters turned an idea&#8212"let's write a book about the intersection between art, science, and technology!" &#8212into a 190-page, full-color, nattily-designed compendium of the current moment in art/science affinities.

The book in its developmental stages.

We wrote collaboratively in shared, networked documents, ensuring that the finished book would have no single author. Of course, we all have our specialities: Régine Debatty the international new media blogger was our encyclopedia of projects, Andrea Grover the project leader our thesis synthesizer, Pablo Garcia the image-hounding ...