Gift of Charlotte and Alan Artus

John Maeda is a pioneer in digital art. His book, maeda@media (2000), documented his complete oeuvre while also stressing the importance for designers top understand the computer as a medium, not just a tool. Maeda was previously the President of the Rhode Island School of Design and the director of the Aesthetics + Computation Group (ACG) at the MIT Media Lab.

Linear Way, created in 2005, is the visualization of Maeda’s philosophical thinking around digital art, as expressed in a publication he released the same year, Creative Code, which presented works produced over a seven-year period by Maeda and his students in ACG. The book categorizes works along pertinent design issues such as information visualization, digital typography, abstraction, interaction design, and education.