Rich Gold of Menlo Park died in his sleep on January 9, 2003. 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. In the 1980s he was director of the sound and music department of Sega. 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. 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. 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.
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