Aaron Straup Cope

Aaron Straup Cope is from Montréal but these days you can find him in New York, where he works at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Musuem.

Before that, he was living in San Francisco and working with Stamen Design. And before that, he was working on Flickr …before it all went to hell in a handbasket. At each of these places, Aaron has left a trail of machine tags and maps in his wake.

I remember waaaaay back, before any of those young upstarts, when Aaron worked on the Mirror Project at the turn of the century. The fact that the Mirror Project is still up and running after all this time is testament to Aaron’s interest—nay, obsession—with personal archives …although his particular penchant is for the more personal kind, like Parallel Flickr and Privatesquare.

Aaron has a love and a knowledge of food that is truly awe-inspiring. But that’s not the (only) reason I’ve asked him to speak at dConstruct. He’s speaking at this year’s dConstruct because I don’t see why the Museums and the Web conference should have him all to themselves.

And if you aren’t yet convinced of his bona fides, you should know that Aaron Straup Cope is one of the Directors of Revolving Technologies at the Spinny Bar Historical Society.

I saw Aaron speak at the infamous New Aesthetic panel at South by Southwest a couple of years back. Here he is talking again about stories from the New Aesthetic with the motive of the algorithm is still unclear.