Fred Lakin once got an MFA in design and decided to build an instrument for text-graphic improvisation. So he learned to program, fell in love with LISP, invented a truly visual form of LISP, spent a year as a visitor at the Stanford AI lab, and another year as a visitor in the smalltalk group at Xerox PARC. Then he founded The Performing Graphics Company. Then he worked at Stanford's Center for Design Research and the NASA AI Lab. Now he lives in a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains and writes novels about Veli's Graphics Bar.