:For the Italian designer, see
Gaetano Pesce
Mark Pesce, (born December 8, 1962, in Everett, Massachusetts, USA) () is a writer, researcher, engineer, futurist and teacher. The co-inventor of VRML, he is the author of five books.
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. 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., and a distributed social networking system called Plexus.
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?" 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
Category:1962 births
Category:Living people
Category:People from Massachusetts
Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Category:Computer graphics researchers
Category:Psychedelic drug advocates
Category:Computer science writers
Category:Computer science teachers
Category:Technology writers
Category:Virtual reality
Category:University of Southern California faculty
Category:Futurologists
