Seth Forrest is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis where he teaches courses in literature and composition. His research interests cover: poetry and poetics from the British Romantics to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers; sound studies; modern and contemporary music; and media-assisted pedagogy. Seth’s dissertation engages new theories and methodologies of prosody by analyzing the poetry of Black Mountain writers Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn and Larry Eigner. To that end, his dissertation considers tape recordings, especially the collections of UCSD’s Archive for New Poetry and the PennSound archives, as primary audiotexts. The project locates the Black Mountain School in a crucial moment in the history of sound and in the history of sound technology. It explores the distinction between orality and aurality and theorizes new approaches to “old media” such as typewriters, portable tape recorders and mimeography and the role of technologies on poetic style. He is also working on a series of essays on recorded poetry, acousmatics and the notion of “secondary orality”.

Seth has taught numerous courses for the Department of English, from lower-division and advanced composition to a seminar on sound in American poetry. His courses frequently experiment with new media tools such as hypertext, collaborative wiki assignments and podcasts along with good old fashioned close reading.

Seth also writes poetry and makes sound collages from samples and field recordings. He is an active volunteer at KDVS, the freeform community radio station located on the UC Davis campus. When he is not working, he is playing outside with his two boys, Leo and Miles.

 Links:      Home page

A former web designer and programmer, David Shepard’s interests center around code as art form and gaming, but he has also done work on early radio. With Alison Walker and Jessica Pressman, he has published Media-Specific Analysis: Analyzing the Specificities of Digital Texts, a web project that explores the specificity of presenting information in various digital platforms. He is currently writing on games and authorship.

 Links:      Media-Specific Analysis: Analyzing the Specificities of Digital Texts

Andrew Hageman is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of California, Davis, pursuing his degree with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory, and he is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). His current research focuses on re-envisioning ecocriticism in a posthumanities context by analyzing the intersections of ecology, technology, and ideology in literature and cinema. Of particular interest are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, cyberpunk and cybernetic fiction, Bruce Sterling and his “dot-green future,” and the films of David Lynch; and ever on the periphery, Chinese film & culture with an affinity for contemporary Shanghai. Recent conference presentations include “Floating Consciousness: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River as Posthumanist Tributary of Mainland Chinese Cinema” at the ACSS Conference in Shanghai 2005 (forthcoming in a volume on Chinese Eco-Cinema) and “Herzog and Treadwell Lost in the Grizzly Gaze: Grizzly Man and Eco-Cinema” at the 2006 Film & History Conference in Dallas.

 Links:      Under Construction

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

Sue Lewak is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at UCLA. She specializes in 20th century American literature, little magazines (hard-copy/online self-publication), and literature and the environment. She is currently completing a dissertation entitled: “Soft Poems: Access to Raw Tools.”

 Links: Website

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

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His most recent projects involve close examinations of state secrecy, the California prison system, and the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.”

Paglen’s visual work has been shown at MASSMOCA (2006), the Warhol Museum (2007), Diverse Works (2005), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He has had one-person shows at Deadtech (2001), the LAB (2005), and Bellwether Gallery (2006).

Paglen has published articles in Art Journal, Cultural Geographies, Clamor Magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Leonardo Music Journal, Cabinet Magazine, and the Village Voice. His first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson) was published by Melville House in September 2006. A book about the symbology of “black” military projects will be published in the fall of 2007.

Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, the LEF Foundation, Eyebeam, and the University of the Pacific. In 2005, he was awarded a Vectors Journal Fellowship at the University of Southern California.

Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley.

 Links:      Home Page | Curriculum Vitae | “Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies”

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.

Home Page

Richard Rinehart has taught studio and theory of digital art at UC Berkeley since 2000 and has also been visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and JFK University. Richard sits on the Executive Committee of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media and previously on the Board of Directors for New Langton Arts in San Francisco. Richard curates digital art exhibitions and programs for theBerkeley Art Museum, curated digital art for New Langton Arts for six years, and has also curated or juried for ISEA2006/ZeroOne, Creative Capital Foundation, Djerassi Foundation, Marin Arts Council, and San Jose City/Airport Project. Richard manages research projects in the area of digital culture, including the NEA-funded project, “Archiving the Avant Garde,” a national consortium of museums and artists distilling the essence of digital art in order to document and preserve it. Richard is also a working digital media artist whose work has been exhibited at Exit Art, New York; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; GenArtSF; New Langton Arts; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

 Links:      Home Page

Brian A. Barsky’s research interests include computer aided geometric design and modeling, interactive three-dimensional computer graphics, visualization in scientific computing, computer aided cornea modeling and visualization, medical imaging, and virtual environments for surgical simulation.

He is a co-author of the book An Introduction to Splines for Use in Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling, co-editor of the book Making Them Move: Mechanics, Control, and Animation of Articulated Figures, and author of the book Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling Using Beta-splines. He has published 120 technical articles in this field and has been a speaker at many international meetings.

He has been working in spline curve/surface representation and their applications in computer graphics and geometric modeling for many years. He is applying his knowledge of curve/surface representations as well as his computer graphics experience to improving videokeratography and corneal topographic mapping, forming a mathematical model of the cornea, and providing computer visualization of patients’ corneas to clinicians. This has applications in the design and fabrication of contact lenses, and in laser vision correction surgery. His current research, called Vision-Realistic Rendering is developing new three-dimensional rendering techniques for the computer generation of synthetic images that will simulate the vision of specific individuals based on their actual patient data using measurements from a instrument a Shack-Hartmann wavefront aberrometery device.