#foundational

40 items tagged foundational.

• Anna Hook — Artwork and writings by Anna Hook — greeting cards, ink drawings, and short essays. My mother's work, kept here so it stays reachable.
• Childhood Memories — A reflection on childhood in post-war Italy — freedom, magpies, and life in a small town.
• Anna Hook — Bianca — A short film by Anna, in her own hand — the ink drawings she is known for, set moving.
• About Anselm — Creative technologist. Veteran developer, sometime investor, occasional team lead.
• Amazing — Books I gave five stars on Kindle. Sourced from my own ratings, not a guess.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities — The founding text of human-scale thinking — observation over ideology, sidewalks over master plans.
• Intellectual — The shelf I actually think with — systems, power, myth, story, collapse, and a couple of technical books that changed how I build.
• Essays — Longer thinking — on systems, power, ecology, and design at human scale. Some are new, some are decades old and left as written.
• Beyond Human: Rewilding the Internet — The web was seeded as a monoculture. What would it mean to let it grow wild again — many species, many niches, edges that matter.
• Human-Scale Design — Borrowing from Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander: systems, like cities, work when they are legible and lovable at the scale of a person.
• Social Trust Graphs — Trust is not a score. It's a graph — directional, contextual, decaying — and most systems flatten it into a number and lose everything that mattered.
• Avoiding Concentrations of Power — On the role of tokens, and the difference between a mechanism that distributes coordination and one that merely re-centralizes it under new branding.
• Helping People See Better — Simulation and modeling as prosthetics for intuition — tools that let a person feel the shape of a system they could never hold in their head.
• How Do You Organize Your Life? — How do we organize the critical data objects in our lives — and what would a better answer look like? A long look at the attention we lose to the sheer work of examining things.
• Writing a Social Content Engine with RDF — Building a social content engine on RDF, in 2004 — semantic web thinking well before it was fashionable.
• Artificial Life — Some Thoughts — Thinking about artificial life, written in 1996.
• Artificial Life: Biochemical Life and Limits — On biochemical life and its limits. March 1995 — the earliest surviving piece.
• Poetry — Poets I was reading in 1996 — Yvonne Trainer, Karen Connelly, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Eliot — with notes on why.
• Stepping Off a Plane — Late autumn, Bucharest, 2012 — arriving somewhere dressed for the wrong life.
• A Still Life with Midjourney — Looking at my mother Anna's creative and artistic practice, up until her death — and at what the new image machines do to that lineage.
• Eulogy for a Dog — We had to put down a family pet.
• Our Uneasy Relationship with Knowledge — A survey of the kinds of knowledge we have, how we feel about them, and what new technologies like the web do to that.
• Anselm Hook — Recent things — writing, travel, projects, notes — newest first.
• An Email Thread With My Dad About Gravity
• Notes — Short things. Half-formed thoughts, kept small on purpose.
• Everything I build is event-driven now
• Writing-on-Stone — Hoodoos on the Milk River and the largest concentration of rock art on the North American plains.
• Argentina, 1999 — Theo and me, 1999.
• Mexico — A caving expedition to Chiapas with the Alberta Speleological Society. The written account survives; the photographs do not.
• Press & Interviews — Other people writing about, interviewing, or introducing me — and a few talks. Links out; the work itself lives elsewhere on this site.
• Design Fiction: Anselm Hook, “Slowcode” — Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond covering Slowcode — writing less, slower, and meaning it.
• Interviewed by Tish Shute — A long-form interview on augmented reality, the browser, and the shape of a spatial web.
• Orbital Foundation — A late-binding, data-driven toolchain — an event bus, declarative 3D, and a manifest pattern where a whole app is a list of files.
• Lightsuit — Wearable LED fashion, hand-built for Burning Man 2011 — 300 addressable lights, an Arduino, and a lot of sewing.
• Interviewing Jennifer Hook — A family interview.
• Whitney Timberline — Climbing out through the timberline on Mt Whitney — the trip for my 50th birthday.
• Whitney Forester Hike, Day 3 — Day three over Forester Pass — the Mt Whitney trip for my 50th birthday.
• Grand Uncle Gerard — Family history, recorded.
• Family Archive — VTS 01 1 — Transferred home footage.
• Family Archive — VTS 01 2 — Transferred home footage.