My career runs from cognitive science, through art, music, and the web. I recently published Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture and am on the scientific advisory board for the Institute of Music and Neurologic Function in New York City.

 

I am currently Associate Director at the World Development Endowment Foundation, where I am helping to plan and organize an effort to create a educational, cultural, and economic development resource center on Governors Island in New York City's harbor. Previously I was a Senior Scientist with MetaLogics, Inc., where I worked on knowledge representation and information design for web-based health services. In the past I have worked as a consultant and freelance writer and has taught on-line with Connected Education. I developed a web-based tribute to Martin Luther King that was recognized by Publisher’s Weekly and a tribute to Rahsaan Roland Kirk that was recognized in Esquire magazine. I have been a consultant to NASA, the U.S. Air Force, New York State, and private sector corporations.

 

I have taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and am internationally recognized for numerous scholarly articles, reviews, and technical reports on African-American music, literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, and technical communication. In conjunction with Richard Friedhoff I have written a book on computer graphics and image-processing entitled Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution.

 

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Check out my music video, featuring my photographs of graffiti:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtjPBq_qrhQ

 

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My online writing about graffiti:

 

Samurai Champloo: Anachronism, Revision, Hybridity, Eclecticism and All That (Note: This is about an anime series that had one episode about graffs, in pre-modern Hiroshima - ha!)

 

Shrine of the Triceratops

 

Grooves, Grafs, and Toons: Transnational Cultural Forms

 

3Tops II: Graffiti Update

 

Journey to 3Tops: Indiana SLuGS and the Land that Time Forgot (A little adventure with Plasma SLuGS & friend.)

 

Conversations Known and Unknown: Tales on a Wall (A graffiti war that took place across several walls in Jersey City)

 

Graffiti Aesthetics: Five Easy Pieces

Graffiti Aesthetics 2: Learning to See

Graffiti Aesthetics 3: Stylistic Identity

Graffiti Aesthetics 4: The Space of Writing

 

The following three posts represent my major statement to date:

 

Graffs in the Hood 1: The Story

 

How I became interested in graffs, a bit about my neighborhood and railroads, and how graff culture is like the nation-forming artistic circles of pre-modern Japanese and why that's important.

 

Graffs in the Hood 2: Analysis

 

A little about aesthetics, and why graffs will become the foundation of a world-wide visual culture in this century.

 

Graffs in the Hood 3: Guide to Photos, Sites, and Links

 

This is a guide to my graffiti photos, some notes about the different sites, and kinds, and other things.