Author: Martin E. Rosenberg

Martin E. Rosenberg, an independent scholar, became Visiting Fellow at the Center For Transformative Media, New School/Parsons (NYC) for the academic year 2013-14. He specializes in the cultural implications of science and technology. He has focused mainly on the history of "emergence" in science, philosophy and the arts: Poincare, Bergson and Duchamp; Pound, and the epistemological foundations of fascism in reversible models of time; the novels of Thomas Pynchon, the nobel work of Ilya Prigogine in chemistry and physics, as well as the cognitive science of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Edwin Hutchins, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. He has authored numerous articles on Deleuze. His current research involves the relationship between theories of emergence in cognitive science, and the possible link between embodied and distributed cognition, through research on parallel processing with computers, jazz improvisation, cinema and the architecture of Arakawa and Gins. As a theorist, he has written on the relationship of metaphors (tropes generally) and epistemology, and the cultural work or agency of metaphors in trans-disciplinary inquiry.

He has had a sideline in theories of hypermedia design, especially the role of metaphors in the design and implementation of information systems. He has written on physics and hypertext, on the role of complexity theory in the design of icon-driven interfaces, and on the modeling of the problematics of trandisciplinary inquiry in hypermedia.

He is the co-creator of The RHIZOME Project 1989-92 (with Thomas I. Ellis); Chess RHIZOME 1998-9; and the Multi-object Oriented, Multi-User Domain classroom space MER's Fungal Palace at the Media Lab at MIT (1996-8). Several of his essays on hypermedia have been translated--into Spanish (Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy" 1994; 1997) and Portuguese: "Chess RHIZOME and Phase Space: Mapping Metaphor Theory Onto Hypertext Theory" 1999; 2002).

He was also co-Director of the first completely digital global academic conference, on the avant-garde architecture of Arakawa and Gins, which ran live from March 12-26, 2010, from a server at Grifffith University in Brisbane, AU, with celebrations April 30th at Barnard College/Columbia University, and May 1st at The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, where he gave the inaugural keynote lecture. The conference website:

He was originally trained in classical composition and jazz arranging and performance, has authored over thirty jazz compositions, and has recently committed to practicing until he's able to play and record again!