Soft Where Inc.

Across performances, diagrams, and early computer graphics, Aaron Marcus explored how emerging media shape aesthetic experience. His work gave visual form to structures of mass communication at a moment when computers were beginning to transform how images and information were produced and circulated.

This preoccupation with media systems informs the first volume of Soft Where, Inc.: The Work of Aaron Marcus, which surveys his early practice, from conceptual and performative works to experiments with computer-generated graphics and other electronic media. An introductory text describes Marcus’s work as “concerned with making apparent the aesthetic possibilities of mass media communication,” with particular attention to the new forms enabled by computational technologies.

Marcus began working with what he called “computer-assisted art forms” in 1967, teaching himself Fortran and interning at Bell Labs while completing graduate studies in graphic design at Yale University. By the time this volume was published, he was an assistant professor teaching visual art, architecture, and urban planning at Princeton University.

Published in 1975 by West Coast Poetry Review in Reno, Nevada, Soft Where, Inc. was printed in a limited edition of 1,000 copies; a second volume followed in 1982. The cover features a reproduction of a hand-drawn diagram from Marcus’s 1973 “ritual chant,” Directions for Genesis 1 and 2, underscoring the book’s fusion of poetic structure, instruction, and visual form.