Scott


He was a complete, utter, unabashed freak. He stole pot from where I kept it stored in my freezer. And although he probably thinks I never knew, I did. I just never cared. He was a wonderful, bubbly, chaotic pain in the ass.


He was also the very first person to create a VRML world that anyone cared about, Daniel's Room, a scene from the Children's tour through the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. It was that model - and the response that it engendered in the SIGGRAPH 1994 audiences who experienced it - which got VRML going, got SGI on board, got the whole bloody thing up and running.


A bit later in the year, Scott whacked out the model for the Cybersamhain (and wrote some of the ritual, too -- check it out for his cheeky approach to things spiritual), which Erik Davis would go on to immortalize in the infamous Technopagans article in WIRED. That model has always been intended to sit at the absolute, universal {0,0,0} of the collective online virtual world, its axis mundi.


That was his work. That was his genius.


He left San Francisco around the same time I moved down to Los Angeles; he moved to Florida - which he never really liked - and lost a leg to the brittle diabetes which shaped his life, and which, in the end, killed him. That he lived into his mid-40s is shocking: he had to be revived on two separate occasions when I knew him (his tales of heading out on the astral currents as he passed over were both hilarious and petrifying). He wasn't long for the world, knew he wasn't long for the world, but still did the best he could with the kooky and rather mystical-psychic set of skills the universe had handed him.


I learned of his passing on Sunday morning, through an email. Later in the day - and on Monday - I smelled incense burning in the neighborhood. Memory and scent came together, and I realized that this was the incense that Scott and Four always kept burning at their flat on 15th Street. It's come back as a reminder of him, and of those wonderful terrible years when I was becoming something utterly different than what I had ever thought I would be. A transformation due, in no small part, to his work.

Vale, Scott. I know (heh) we'll be seeing each other again. (And yes, you can imagine his silly cackle of assent as I wrote those words.)