Mark Pesce
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Mark Pesce, (December 8, 1962) one of the early pioneers in practical Virtual Reality, is a writer, teacher, and high technologist living in Sydney, Australia. The co-inventor of VRML, Pesce has a prodigious output of publications ranging from Wired to Feed to Salon to Mindjack, and he's the author of seven books and numerous papers on the future of technology.
Brief Bio
Born in 1962, Pesce briefly attended MIT, but typical of hacker-entrepreneurs of the period, he dropped out in 1982, working at various software enginnering jobs, before he joined start-up company 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 Modelling Language (VRML), which his name has been synonymous with 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. He is currently an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and is a co-presenter on "The New Inventors" a nationally syndicated television program in Australia. He is currently developing a new project called [Hyperpeople].
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 USC New Media Department. Until January 2006, Pesce was a lecturer in Interactive Media at the prestigious Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in Sydney, Australia. He now holds an Honorary Appointment at the University of Sydney.
Books
- Mark Pesce, hyperpeople. Creative Commons Press, projected publication date September 2005.
- 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.
- Celia Pearce and Mark Pesce, The Interactive Book. Indianapolis, Indiana: Macmillan Technical 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.
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
- [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 Terrence McKenna and others, August 2001
Selected Performances & Presentations
External Links
- [Mark Pesce's personal homepage]
- [Mark Pesce's professional homepage]
- [WebEarth: A Seminal VRML application]
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