Rich Gold (Richard Goldstein) of Menlo Park died in his sleep on January 9, 2003. Born on June 24, 1950, he received a B.A. from SUNY-Albany, and an M.F.A. from Mills College.
Rich Gold was a digital artist, inventor, cartoonist, composer, lecturer and inter-disciplinary researcher who in the 1970s co-founded the League of Automatic Music Composers, the first network computer band. As an internationally known artist he invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism, an example of which, The Party Planner, was featured in Scientific American. In 1979 he married his soul mate, Marina LaPalma.
In the 1980s he was director of the sound and music department of Sega USA's Coin-op Video game division and the inventor of the award winning Little Computer People (Activision), the first fully autonomous, computerized AI person (which turned out to be an inspiration for the development of The Sims). From 1985 to 1990 he headed an electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of the development of several interactive toys, including the Mattel PowerGlove. He also worked on the first interactive broadcast TV show of Captain Power, an early CD based video system and an artificially intelligent talking robots. In 1991, Rich and Marina's personal lives were transformed when the light of their life, their son, Henry Chase was born on May 30th.
After working as a consultant in VirtualReality he joined Xerox PARC in 1991, where he was a scientific researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. He was a co-designer of the PARC Tab (the precursor of the PalmPilot), helped launch the successful LiveBoard and was the co-inventor on eleven patents as well as directing the ubi-comp patenting effort. In 1993 he founded the influential PARC Artist-In-Residence program (PAIR),in which fine artists and scientists collaborated using shared technologies. Later that year, he created the multi-disciplinary Laboratory RED (Research in Experimental Documents) which studied the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering and then creating exemplars of those genres. One of RED's most successful projects, called Experiments in the Future of Reading (XFR), included the design and development of several new interactive reading devices. XFR was installed at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation in 2000 where it was visited by over a half million people; XFR is currently touring the United States after winning the Gold and Silver awards for interactive design from I.D. Magazine and being featured on ABC Nightly News. The XFR reading experiments were based on the concepts of "Total Writing," an anti-convergent theory where the media itself becomes authorable and has meaning.
Rich Gold was a provocative speaker who lectured throughout the world on the future of the book, the nature of engineering, creativity, innovation and Evocative Knowledge Objects (EKOs). After leaving Xerox PARC in 2001, he became a principal at the product design company Polaris Road. During 2002 he finished a book called The Plenitude (The Present Press).
See www.richgold.org for a list of his writings and talks.
He is survived by his wife, Marina LaPalma, son, Henry Chase Goldstein; his parents, Herbert and Phyllis Goldstein of Buffalo, NY; his sisters, Patti of Oakland, CA, Judy of Buffalo, NY, Anne (Peter) Goergen of Allegany, NY, and his brother Andrew (Patty) of Buffalo, NY, and four nieces and nephews.
A memorial service will be held on at 1:00 pm on Monday, January 13, 2003 at the Insight Meditation Center of the Mid-Peninsula (1205 Hopkins Ave, Redwood City). For more information see: RichGoldMemorial.onomy.com.
The family prefers that donations be made to the Henry Chase Goldstein Educational Fund, 526 Hopkins St., Menlo Park, CA, 94025. For donation information see: RichGoldMemorial.onomy.com/HenryFund.html
