Stephen Travis Pope, is a composer of computer music, software developer, and social and spiritual activist based in Santa Barbara, California. He is affiliated with the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE), in the Dept. of Music at UC Santa Barbara, and the Graduate Program in Media Arts and Technology (MAT). His music and video compositions are released through HeavenEverywhere, and the NY-based Electronic Music Foundation released a triple-disc set (2 CDs and 1 DVD) retrospective of his music/video works in 2007. Stephen is also a practising Quaker, a conscientious objection counsellor, a trained Reiki practitioner, a facilitator in the Alternatives to Violence Project, and prison clergy registered with the California Dept. of Corrections.

In his 25 years experience in software research and development, Stephen has undertaken projects at the Vienna Music Academy, the Mozarteum, Stanford University, U. C. Berkeley, the Swedish Institute for Computer Science, the Technical University of Berlin, STEIM in Amsterdam, and U. C. Santa Barbara. He has over 100 publications on topics related to artificial intelligence, graphics and user interfaces, integrated programming environments, object-oriented programming, music theory and composition, distributed systems, and digital multimedia.

In parallel with his academic career, he has held technical and managerial positions at PCS/ Cadmus Computers in Munich, Xerox PARC, ParcPlace Systems (now Cincom), Predixis (now MusicIP) and Expertcity.com (now Citrix-Online) in California, and a variety of other US-based, European and Asian industry and defense organizations. Stephen lived in Europe (Austria, France and Germany) from 1977-86, and has spent several years there since then (Holland, Sweden and Germany).

Stephen’s primary multi-year research projects have revolved around the issues of models and languages for sound/music processing, tools for developing and deploying distributed real-time software, multi-channel spatial sound processing and performance, and signal analysis and statistical processing for music information retrieval.

 Links:      Home page | Heaven Everywhere | FASTLabInc

Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. He is the author of two books: The first, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; the second, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch.

He is the founder and director of two digital mapping projects that utilize GIS to explore the layered cultural histories of city spaces: Hypermedia Berlin (an interactive, web-based research tool and collaborative authoring environment for analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of Berlin) and HyperCities, a dynamic platform for linking physical space with geo-temporal information. His current research focus on the development of the geo-spatial web, augmented reality, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces.

At UCLA, he directs an initiative called “Media, Technology, and Culture,” which is charged with creating new intellectual tools, pedagogical and curricular practices, research methodologies, and disciplinary paradigms for the humanities in the 21st century. He is also the Chair of the Center for Digital Humanities Faculty Advisory Committee.

 Links:      Home page | Hypermedia Berlin | HyperCities

Sven Spieker is the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal devoted to the visual arts and aesthetic theory in Eastern and Central Europe. At UCSB he specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, postwar and contemporary literature and art (especially in Eastern and Central Europe), and media history. Spieker’s recent graduate seminars have included a seminar on the digital image at the intersection of art and science. In 2005, Spieker organized a two-day conference devoted to the same issue at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Spieker is the editor of a collection of essays on the uses of the administrative bureaucracy and its media in art and literature (Leidenschaften der Bürokratie: Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv. Berlin, 2004). His most recent publication is The Big Archive. The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of the Bureaucracy (forthcoming from the MIT Press, 2008). The book deals with analogue archives in art and science, mapping a conceptual field that allows us to say with greater precision where the boundary between analogue and digital archives might fall. For more information, visit Spieker’s web page.

 Links:      Home page | ARTMargins

Antoinette LaFarge has a particular interest in constructed realities, including computer-mediated performance, net-based improvisation, online role-playing games, avatar performance, playable media, nonlinear narrative, fictive art, and geofiction. Recent mixed-reality and intermedia performance works include Demotic (2003/2006), The Roman Forum Project (2003), Reading Frankenstein (2003), Virtual Live (2002), and The Roman Forum (2000). She has co-curated two groundbreaking exhibitions on computer games and art: “ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games” (2003) and “SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art” (2000) at UCI’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. She is the founder and artistic director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering online Internet performance troupe that has appeared at numerous international venues, including the 1997 Venice Biennale and documenta X. She is also the founder and director of the Museum of Forgery, a virtual institution dedicated to opening up the cultural dialogue around forgery and related practices such as appropriation. She is associate editor of the anthology Searching for Sebald (2007), and her critical writing and fiction have appeared in several books, including Benjamin’s Blind Spot (2001). Recent publications include “Media Commedia” (Leonardo, 2005), “25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds” (Anthology of Art, 2002), and “Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery” (Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2002). From 1995 to 1998 she served as Guest Editor of the annual Digital Salon issue of Leonardo.

 Links:      Home page | Roman Forum Project | ALT+CTRL | UCI Game Culture & Technology Lab

Brian Goldfarb is a digital media artist, curator, and Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. His research and visual media production focuses on media studies and contemporary visual and digital culture. His book, Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom, (Duke University Press, 2002), considers how media technologies were used in the second half of the 20th century to advance a model of pedagogy across the arts, education, and postcolonial politics in the United States and globally. Goldfarb’s digital art projects have been exhibited internationally, and on the Web. His Ocular Convergence, an interactive, fictional, and critical examination of digital prosthetics for enhancing vision, has been exhibited in museums throughout the US , Mexico City, Calgary, Paris and Johannesburg. Goldfarb was education curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC from 1994-7, where he organized “alt.youth.media” (Fall 1996), an exhibition of computer art, video, and popular print media (zines) by and for youth.

Goldfarb’s current projects include Global Tourette, a digital documentary and media exchange project that engages cultural and professional responses to Tourette Syndrome in the US, Argentina, Mexico, Germany and other contexts internationally. He is also working on Sense Ability: Fragments on Media Pedagogy, Digital Prosthetics and Assistive Technology explores the roles of visual culture and technology in shaping the concept of [dis]ability and in the development of techniques for assessing and supporting disabilities relating to the senses and communication. Sense Ability considers the role of visual culture, and these technologies in particular, in the emergence of sensory disability as a concept, and in the development of techniques for aiding and augmenting physical and sensory abilities since the late 19th century.

 Links:      Home page | Global Tourette

Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of robotics at UC Berkeley. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Pompidou Center (Paris), Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica (Linz Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe), ICC Biennale (Tokyo), Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, and The Kitchen (New York). He has held visiting positions at San Francisco ArtInstitute, MIT Media Lab, and Pasadena Art Center. Goldberg was awarded the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995, and named IEEE Fellow in 2005. The Tribe, a short film he co-wrote, was selected for the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals. Ballet Mori, a multi-media project he developed to commemorate the 1906 Earthquake, was performed by the SF Ballet at the San Francisco Opera House.

 Links:      Home page | Artwork

 Quote:   

Technology aids suspension of disbelief but let’s not forget the resumption of disbelief.

Marcia Linn directs one of the 13 Centers for Learning and Teaching funded by the National Science Foundation: the Technology-Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) center. Established by the National Science Foundation as a national Center for Learning and Teaching, TELS develops instructional programs that use educational technology to help middle school and high school students master complex scientific concepts. TELS includes seven universities, a nonprofit educational research and development organization, and seven school districts. All TELS instructional programs fulfill local and national standards for science education. As an integral part of our mission, we educate graduate students and offer professional development for participating teachers. The school districts provide the setting for our research, assessments, and professional development programs. The TELS teachers collaborate on research projects in their district, providing a practitioner’s perspective, participate in our annual summer retreat, and organize workshops for other science teachers in their district.

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Marcia Linn investigates science teaching and learning, gender equity, and design of technology-enhanced learning environments. In 1998, the Council of Scientific Society Presidents selected her for its first award in educational research. In 1994, the National Association for Research in Science Teaching presented her with its Award for Lifelong Distinguished Contributions to Science Education. She has accepted invitations to contribute as a Fulbright Professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel; as a Visiting Fellow at University College, London; and as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute J. J. Rousseau in Geneva, Switzerland, where she worked with Jean Piaget. Her board service includes the American Association for the Advancement of Science board, the Graduate Record Examination board of the Educational Testing Service, the McDonnell Foundation Cognitive Studies in Education Practice board, and the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

 Links:      home page | Center for Technology Enhanced Learning in Science | WISE

Frances Dyson (Ph.D), is an Associate Professor in Technocultural Studies, with a research and artistic focus on sound, new media and cyberculture in contemporary theory and practice. For the past two years Dyson has been a researcher in residence at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Montreal where her web based project “And then it was Now” has recently been published.

Recent essays have appeared in Frakcija, special issue on Rhetoric, (Zagreb, 2006); Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, special issue on “Hybrid identities in Digital Media,” Winter, 2005 (London: Sage), and the Biennale of Sydney Catalogue, Art Gallery of NSW, Australia, 2004 (also published on
www.catherinerichards.ca/html/essays.htm). Book chapters have appeared in Catherine Richard’s Excitable Tissues (Ottawa Art Gallery) 2004; Uncertain Ground, (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales) 2000, The Virtual Dimension: Architecture,
Representation, and Crash Culture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press) 1998,
Immersed in Technology (Massachusetts: MIT Press) 1996; and Wireless
Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde, (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1992/94/2002).

For over a decade Dyson has also been a regular contributor to Australia’s premier audio arts program, The Listening Room (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and her audio artwork can be heard on Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Air America Radio archives.

Currently, Dyson is a member of the Technoscience, Culture and the Arts, and the Technovisual Cultures Research Interest Groups at UC Davis, and is completing a book on sound and new media.

 Links:      Technocultural Studies | Daniel Langlois Foundation

Composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, kayak instructor ­ Bob Ostertag’s work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. Electronic instruments of his own design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, dyke punk rocker Lynn Breedlove, drag diva Justin Bond, Quebecois film maker Pierre Hébert, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings to which he owns the rights available as free digital downloads under a Creative Commons license. He is currently Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.

 Links:      Home Page | All Music Guide| Wikipedia Article