It is difficult to express the extent to which a thinking and writing process echoes with other voices, in concord, counterpoint, and at times happy cacophony. It would be impossible to express my gratitude and indebted- ness to all who have contributed, in their many welcome manners, to this project’s taking shape. I wouldn’t know where to begin. The book’s roots intertwine with the distant origins of the earlier Parables for the Virtual, nearly ten years its junior, itself in entangled gestation nearly as long before that. Neither would I know how to end, so wreathed is this book’s comple- tion in the germinating tendrils of an embarrassing number of concurrent books in progress, most of which will doubtless die on the proliferating branch. My thanks, first of all, go to Erin Manning, for living day to day with my inability to begin or end and for understanding—and helping me to truly understand—the joy that can come with being always in that proliferating middle. It is also due to her that my middling has become endowed with a milieu. Her founding the SenseLab, and her generously imaginative tending of its growth and transformations, has given me an environment for thought-in-action whose contribution to my life and work has been inestimable. Thank you, Erin, for the intensity of thought, creative joy, and “concern for the event” you bring to everything you do, and most of all to the life we share.