I have been reading The Secret Art: A Brief History of Radionic Technology for the Creative Individual, which makes a case for art as radionics (you can read the book’s excellent intro, here), and musing about how open-source and accessible development tools such as Processing and Arduino could facilitate a new era of designs in radionic and psionic machines. The idea is not new to me—I have been mulling it for a few years now—but as my Automagica Theoretica course comes to its official end this week, I am thinking much more about it.
I would love to see online, collaborative communities emerge around this sort of thing. Like the community of psionic machine enthusiasts that developed in and around Astounding Science Fiction (and later, Analog) in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, but more distributed and accessible. I would love to see it be open-source. Perhaps an interactive catalog of designs, like SourceForge for software, or Open Design Engine for open-source hardware (congratulations to those guys for a successful Kickstarter, BTW). Arduino lets you add knobs, buttons, and switches to pretty much anything—from cigar boxes to t-shirts. Or how about “soft” radionic devices running on our mobile telephones and tablet computers? My imagination boggles at the variety of apps one could develop for these media.
Who’s with me?
