John Maeda — Reactive Books

1999

Artists: John Maeda · Year: 1999 · Medium: Interactive software works distributed as physical-book-plus-CD-ROM packages · Substrate: Four Reactive Book titles: The Reactive Square (1994), Flying Letters (1996), 12 o'clocks (1996–97), Tap, Type, Write (1998); each a printed book paired with a CD-ROM containing interactive Java software · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA / Tokyo, Japan · Institution: MIT Media Lab; Digitalogue (publisher) John Maeda's Reactive Books series, published in Japan by Digitalogue between 1994 and 1999, is one of the foundational bodies of work in the interactive-media tradition that Processing would later formalize. Each book in the series is a physical printed object paired with a CD-ROM containing an interactive program: The Reactive Square (1994), Flying Letters (1996), 12 o'clocks (1996–97), and Tap, Type, Write (1998). The software was written in Java, was genuinely interactive, and used sound and user-input in rigorous formal ways that commercial CD-ROM publishing at the time did not. Maeda was at MIT Media Lab through this period, where he ran the Aesthetics and Computation Group — the research unit in which Ben Fry and Casey Reas would later produce Processing. The Reactive Books are the artistic precursor to that pedagogical project. Maeda's argument, across the series, was that the computer could be a medium for book-like experiences: pacing, structure, intimacy, contemplative single-user reading. His interactive works did not try to be games or entertainment; they tried to be books that you read by touching. Maeda's subsequent career has been institutionally prominent — presidency of RISD, leadership at Automattic, various design-industry roles — but the Reactive Books are his most durable artistic contribution. They are preserved by MoMA and are shown in computer-art retrospectives regularly. He continues to write and lecture on design. Lore John Maeda completed his MIT Media Lab PhD in 1996 and was hired immediately as an associate professor of design and computation, where he founded the Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG) — the small lab that would train Casey Reas, Ben Fry, Golan Levin, and dozens of other 2000s software-art figures. The Reactive Books series of CD-ROMs (Flying Letters, Tap, Type, Write, Mirror Mirror) was published commercially by Digitalogue in Tokyo between 1995 and 1999 — the books reached a Japanese audience first and only entered Western design-school curricula several years later. Maeda's wife Kris Maeda has been his consistent collaborator on the visual-design side of his projects throughout his career. He left MIT in 2008 to become president of the Rhode Island School of Design and has held senior design-leadership roles in tech companies since. Sources • Maeda, John — Reactive Books I–IV (Digitalogue, 1994–1999) • Maeda, John — Maeda @ Media (Rizzoli, 2000) • MoMA — Maeda collection