From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Italian designer, see Gaetano Pesce

Mark Pesce in Sydney, Australia circa 2006

Mark Pesce, (born December 8, 1962, in Everett, Massachusetts, USA) (pronounced /ˈpɛʃi/) one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality is a writer, researcher, teacher, hack and shameless self-promoter. The co-inventor of VRML, he is the author of five books and numerous papers on the future of technology.

Biography

Pesce briefly attended MIT. He dropped out in 1982, working at various software engineering jobs before he joined Shiva Corporation, which pioneered and popularized dial-up networking. Pesce's role in the company was to develop user interfaces. His research in this area would lead him deeper into the questions posed by virtual reality, and in 1991 he founded the Ono-Sendai Corporation, named for a fictitious company in the William Gibson novel Neuromancer. The company's R&D included the development of a key technology for the emerging industry and earned Pesce his first patent for a "Sourceless Orientation Sensor," which is used to track the motion of persons in virtual environments.

This development springboarded Pesce into the development of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), with which his name has been synonymous ever since, and into a career which has included extensive writings for both the popular and scientific press, teaching and lecturing at universities and conferences around the globe, performances, presentations, and films.

On 21 October 2003, Pesce relocated to Australia, where he continues to live.^[1] He is currently an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Sydney and is a judge on The New Inventors, a nationally televised television program in Australia. He is currently developing a new project called Hyperpeople.^[2]

VRML

In 1993, Pesce formed the VRML Architecture Group (VAG) for the further development of VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, which Pesce presented to the world in 1994. The purpose of VRML was to allow for the creation of 3-D environments within the World Wide Web, accessible through a web browser. Working in conjunction with such corporations as Microsoft, Netscape, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Sony, Pesce was able to get the industry to accept the new protocol as a standard for desktop virtual reality.

Teaching

Pesce began his teaching career in 1996 as a VRML instructor at both the University of California at Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University, where he would later create the school's certificate program in the 3-D Arts. In 1998, Pesce was asked to join the faculty of the University of Southern California, as the founding chair of the Graduate Program in Interactive Media at the USC School of Cinema-Television. From January 2004 through January 2006, Pesce was the senior lecturer in Emerging Media and Interactive Design at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in Sydney, Australia. He now holds an Honorary Appointment at the University of Sydney. The video available on Google Video "Piracy is Good?"^[3] is a lecture by Mark Pesce at the Australian Film Television and Radio School about the future of TV distribution in the age of P2P networks.

Books

• Mark Pesce, The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century. projected publication date mid-2009.
• Mark Pesce, Programming DirectShow and Digital Video. Seattle, Washington, Microsoft Press, May 2003.
• Mark Pesce, The Playful World: How Technology Transforms our Imagination. New York, Ballantine Books (Random House), October 2000.
• Aaron Walsh and Mark Pesce, Core Web3D. New York, Prentice-Hall Publishing, June 2000.
• Mark Pesce, Learning VRML: Design for Cyberspace. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ziff-Davis Publishing, 1997.
• Mark Pesce, VRML: Flying through the Web. Indianapolis, Indiana: New Riders Publishing, 1996.
• Mark Pesce, VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace. Indianapolis, Indiana: New Riders Publishing, 1995.

• Introduction to Celia Pearce, The Interactive Book. Indianapolis, Indiana: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997.

Anthologies

• Richard Metzger, editor, The Book of Lies. New York, Disinformation Press, August 2003.
• Mark Pesce, et al., Game On: Head Games. London, Barbican Center Books (Corporation of London), March 2002.
• Vernor Vinge, et al., True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. New York, TOR Books, December 2001.
• Russ Kick, editor, You Are Being Lied To. New York, The Disinformation Company, March 2001.
• Loren Buhle, Mark Pesce, Vinay Kumar, et al. The Webmaster’s Professional Reference. Indianapolis, Indiana: New Riders Publishing, 1996.

Articles (available online)

• Mark Pesce. “Sense and Sensitivity”, FLUX Magazine, February 2005
• Mark Pesce. “Social Impotence”, Internet. AU, January 2005
• Mark Pesce. “Out of Control: The Sequel”, Disinfo.com, December 2004
• Mark Pesce. “Rolling Your Own Network”, Internet. AU, December 2004
• Mark Pesce. repair.shtml “Reinventing Television”, Mindjack Magazine, May 2004
• Mark Pesce. “McBurners”, TRIP Magazine, October 2003
• Mark Pesce. “Reviewing Breaking Open the Head’, Journal of Cognitive Liberties, Winter 2003.
• Mark Pesce. “Year of Jubilee”, Entheogen Review, Winter 2002-3
• Mark Pesce. “The Revolution, Televised: The Future of Entertainment”, PC Magazine, September 2002.
• Mark Pesce. “Even Better than the Real Thing: The Future of Video Gaming”, PC Magazine, September 2001.
• Mark Pesce. “Xbox: 1,000,000,000,000 Operations per Second”, WIRED Magazine, May 2001.
• Mark Pesce. “Living Language”, FEED Magazine, January 2001.
• Mark Pesce. “Birth of a Station”, FEED Magazine, October 2000.
• Mark Pesce. “Toys and the Playful World”, The Sciences, August 2000.
• Mark Pesce. “Meet Big Brother”, SALON Magazine, July 2000.
• Mark Pesce. “Welcome to the Firehose”, in FEED Magazine, February 2000.
• Mark Pesce. “The Trigger Principle”, in FEED Magazine, February 2000.
• Mark Pesce. “Reductionism versus Holism: Multiple models of the Spiritual Quest”, in Technology in Society 21, 1999.
• Mark Pesce. “Magic Mirror: The Novel as Software Development Environment”, for Media In Transition, Comparative Media Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 1999.
• Mark Pesce. “Thinking Small”, in FEED Magazine, October 1999.
• Mark Pesce. “OSMOSE,” in Salon Magazine, 15 July 1998.
• Mark Pesce. “The Power of Babel,” FEED Magazine, February 1998.
• Mark Pesce. “Ritual and the Virtual,” Consciousness Reframed, Center for the Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, University of Newport, Wales, 1997.
• Mark Pesce. “Ontos and Techne,” in Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, April 1997.
• Mark Pesce. “The Great Leap Downward”, FEED Magazine, March 1997.
• Gavin Bell, Rikk Carey, Mark Pesce, et al. “The VRML 2.0 Specification,” in VRML 97 Proceedings, February 1997.
• Mark Pesce. “Proximal and Distal Unity,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Cyberspace, Madrid, June 1996.
• Mark Pesce. “Root, Trunk, Branch, Crown: Growing VRML,” in VRML 95 Proceedings, December 1995.
• Mark Pesce. “Ontos, Eros, Noos, Logos,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, Montreal, September 1995.
• Gavin Bell, Anthony Parisi, Mark Pesce. “The VRML 1.0 Specification,” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on the World Wide Web, Chicago, October 1994.
• Mark Pesce, Peter Kennard, Anthony Parisi, “Cyberspace,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on the World Wide Web, Geneva, May 1994.
• Mark Pesce. “Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, Texas, May 1993.

Film projects

• Man With a Movie Tube, short form video, January 2007
• Unbomb, short form video, August 2003.
• Body Hits (BBC 3), location producer, November 2002.
• This Strange Eventful History, feature length video about Burning Man, August 2002
• Becoming Transhuman, feature length video, inspired by Terence McKenna and others, August 2001

References

External links

• Mark Pesce's personal homepage
• Mark Pesce's professional homepage
• Mark Pesce's professional blog
• WebEarth: A Seminal VRML application

From Wikiquote

Mark Pesce (born December 8, 1962), one of the early pioneers of computable Virtual Reality, is a writer and teacher. The co-inventor of VRML, he is the author of seven books and numerous papers on the future of technology.

Sourced

• In some ways, I believe that we are moving into a post-historical period, for lack of a better term. A time when whatever functioned previously will cease to function, or at least will have to be re-thought and re-considered.
  • An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version

• I would almost consider myself a canonical child of Generation X... because I think there is an ethic and aesthetic that goes along with that generation, it may have something to do with the fact that "Never Mind the Bollocks" was released when we were 16-years-old and that was really the album that crystalized a generation.
  • An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version

• Basically, to sum up: We're a generation of anarchists, and we just haven't gotten our hands on the means of production yet so we can fetter the wheels. We haven't been handed the controls yet except to the Internet, which is why it looks like it does.
  • An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version

• I very much consider the Internet a garden, and I'm a gardener, and I plant things in it and I work within the framework of the soil, the seasons, the climate, and the temperature, to produce plants.
  • An Afternoon with Mark Pesce: The Uncut Version

• Communication becomes the defining characteristic of homo sapiens; we are the species that speaks. We utter the words that create our world, and have learned to take our words and translate them into the ethereal play of zeros and ones, lay them out, at the speed of light, first on a wire, then a radio wave, and lately, on a beam of light, so that the voice, once constrained by mouth and ear, now straddles the entire planet in thirty millionths of a second, messages pinging back and forth, not unlike the meeting points of a synaptic gap, using photons as neurotransmitters, and each network router the equivalent of a synapic junction, deciding whether to activate or extinguish each message that crosses the continents, connected now in a seamless, endless web of knowledge,more than two billion pages, more than any one of us could ever read or know, the collected and collective intelligence of a species that seems to have made information the central mystery of culture, the project of civilization, and the goal of being.
  • From the narration to Becoming Transhuman

McBurners

• I skipped Burning Man this year and realized something. It’s become a cult. And it’s about time we all woke up and recognized it.

• I have an axe to grind. I have a fight to pick. I have a hair across my ass. And I want to share.

• Doesn't it seem as though the thrill's gone out of it? Somehow Burning Man now feels like what Christmas becomes in your grown-up years: a lot of spending, a brief party, and twelve months of fond reminiscences.

Tales of Un-DARE-ing Do

• We all know the extent of the hypocrisy which surrounds the War on Drugs; that it is, at essence, a Class War, or, if you will, a Race War, which criminalizes the undesirable elements of society – precisely the rationale behind the Marijuana Tax Act, which provided the legal ammunition to expel with those pesky Mexican immigrants in Texas and California back in the 1930s.

• Cognitive liberty begins at home, behind your eyes and between your ears. The first act of liberation is to step forward, and be counted as one of us.

Toys and the Playful World

• A child now entering first grade has never known a world without the Web; I want you, just for a moment, to try to imagine a world without the telephone, without electricity. It’s difficult to do, because both of these technologies are entirely commonplace, woven into the fabric of our culture so intensely it becomes nearly impossible to imagine a time before they existed. As electricity is for us, the Web will be for our children; an invisible field of knowledge that surrounds them, and infuses the entire world with instant answers to their requests. Within a generation, it won’t be important how much you can remember; that will have been replaced by how agile you are at acquiring the facts you need.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Mark Pesce