The web site of Brandel Zachernuk

About me

Hello! I am a creative technologist with over 25 years of experience in building novel interaction on the web. I'm an ardent participant in the Near Future Laboratory and Future of Text communities. I post sketches of interactive work periodically on Twitter, CodePen, and, occasionally, ShaderToy. You can find about about my professional work at LinkedIn.

I work at Apple in the Vision Products group on Spatial Web Technologies, where I prototype and advocate for new opportunities to express and understand over the web with the capabilities that this new generation of machines can support. On a personal level, my work is informed by taking a long view of technological development (back to the origins of writing and beyond), a firm belief in embodied cognition/extended mind, and the nearly-limitless for human neuroplasticity and adaptiveness under the circumstances that mixing these ingredients together can create.

For more clarity on what that means, take a look at my 2022 Portfolio page, which covers work informed by my interest in embodied cognition, writing as a technology - and just happens to be what I used to get my current role! ;) Alternatively, you can learn more about these foundational concepts from the links below.

Resources

Articles

Wikipedia articles on

Sunny Bains - Mixed Feelings

Bains covers a range of sensory prosthesis, and the interviews that she conducts with users of the technologies show how deeply integrated they can be to our perception.

Videos

Andy Clark - Extended You

Clark is the co-author of the paper originally proposing Extended Mind. There are many other videos of his thinking, as well as several excellent books, this is probably the best place to start.

David Kirsh - Thinking with the Body and other things

Kirsh has done extensive research on using the body to think, starting with his 1994 paper on expert players of tetris who will turn the blocks just to see where they'll fit. He coined the distinction between 'epistemic' and 'pragmatic' activities, which I like a lot.

Barbara Tversky - Mind in Motion: How action shapes thought

Tversky has researched the use of gesture within the internal process of thinking, and helps show that much of the gesturing we'd think we are doing for others is actually useful to us and our thinking. This talk is a brief overview of her book of the same title, which is excellent.