The first International meeting
September 23-24 at Eyebeam New York
540 w 21st, New York, NY


Speakers' bios

Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA). Born in Johannesburg, South Africa she graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 with a BFA Honours in Printmaking and a major in Art History. She emigrated to Boston in 1983 where she later obtained her MFA in Painting. In 1985, Green co-founded Cultural Resistance to educate the American public about apartheid through the art and culture of South Africa. Until 1991, the organization curated multiple exhibitions, organized video screenings and performances, and published a monthly newspaper.

Prior to joining NRPA in March 2002, Green was instrumental in starting the artist-in-residence program at the University of New Mexico’s (UNM) Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center; this initiative led to the creation of the Arts Technology Center (ATC). Green served as program coordinator for both the ATC and the Arts of the Americas Institute at UNM for two years before returning to Boston in 2001. Since then, she has earned a MS in Arts Administration from Lesley University, started atBoston, and initiated The Upgrade! Boston. Green has exhibited her paintings, one-of-a-kind artist’s books, and installations in South Africa, Boston, and New York.

* JoAnne Green

Catherine D’Ignazio AKA Kanarinka is a new media artist who creates collaborative experiments in public spaces both online and offline using old calculus texts, techniques from cartography, and the participation of the general public. Her current project, “The Institute for Infinitely Small Things,” is a research organization that supports various ways of going on expeditions in the world to find and create infinitely small things. By conducting microperformative interventions and supporting research into infinitely small things, “The Institute for Infinitely Small Things” creates experimental social and political spaces for members of the public to imagine new forms of resistance to the current condition of Empire.

Kanarinka is Co-Director of iKatun, a collaborative group of artists and technologists, and the Associate Director of Art Interactive, Boston’s premier new media arts space. She is a regular contributor to GlowLab, a collective of artists interested in psychogeographic practices. Kanarinka has been commissioned by Turbulence.org and the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival. Her work has been shown at MASSMoCA and the DCKT Contemporary Gallery in NYC among other locations. Kanarinka is a 2005 candidate for an MFA degree in Studio Art from the Maine College of Art.

* Kanarinka

Tiffany Holmes is a multimedia installation artist and writer. Early electronic projects assign interface control to animal agents—drawing attention to the limits of human control of our tools. In Follow the Mouse (2001), a live mouse creates drawings on the computer monitor instead of a plastic one. In Fishbowl (2003-04), a goldfish controls the video feed from four underwater surveillance cameras. Recent installations like Floating Point (2005) have at their core an interest in monitoring human impacts on the environment.

Holmes lectures and exhibits worldwide in these venues: J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Digital Salon, Viper in Switzerland, Next 1.0 in Sweden, Siggraph 2000, World@rt in Denmark, Interaction ’01 in Japan, and ISEA Nagoya ’02. Her writings have been published in Leonardo, Intelligent Agent, Computers and Graphics. A new essay on art that promotes sustainable water resource management will appear in summer 2006 in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture on “Water: Resources & Discourses.

Holmes received a MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, a MFA in digital arts from the University of Maryland, and a BA in art history from Williams College. Holmes was awarded a three-year research fellowship at the University of Michigan, an Illinois Arts Council individual grant and an Artists-In-Labs residency in Switzerland. Currently, Holmes is an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches courses in interactivity and the history and theory of electronic media and environmental art.

* www.tiffanyholmes.com

tobias c. van Veen is a renegade theorist & pirate, techno-turntablist & writer (Montréal). He is Concept Engineer at SAT [sat.qc.ca] and Network Investigator of Sonic Scene in the Mobile Digital Commons Network [MDCN.ca]. Since 1993 he has internationally directed over fifty independent conceptual and sound-art events, online interventions and radio broadcasts, working with STEIM, Mutek, the New Forms Festival, the Banff Centre, the Video-In, Upgrade!, the Vancouver New Music Society, and Hexagram. His work has appeared in CTheory, EBR, Bad Subjects, Leonardo, FUSE (contributing editor), e/i (columnist), the Wire, HorizonZero and through Autonomedia, among others. His writing has been translated into Spanish, Lithuanian and French and his art disseminated through Rhizome.org, Javamuseum.org, Kunstradio, Burn.fm, CiTR, a handful of contemporary art museums (Denver, Barcelona, etc.), No Type’s BricoLodge and the and/OAR labels. From 1993-2000 he was Direktor of the sonic performance Collective (shrumtribe.com) on the West Coast and co-founder of technoWest.org and thisistheonlyart.com.

He currently hosts The Upgrade! Montreal [theupgrade.sat.qc.ca] and is director of the [3p] project [3p.sat.qc.ca]. Djing for over 10 years, tobias’ style is marked by the cut-up and non-linear mixing styles of future techno and house: Detroit, minimal, dub, glitch, and acid. Run that through the regional markers of context (Montreal, Vancouver, Berlin) and the application of concept (masochism, atmosphere, shock). His Dj sets have appeared on BetaLounge.com, Burn.fm, NoType.com and Techno.ca, and his skills have graced events worldwide, from Amsterdam to Barcelona, Montreal to NYC. An article discussing his experimental work with turntable scripts appeared in Leonardo Music Journal 13. Tobias is Ph.D candidate in Philosophy & Communication at McGill and New School, NYC. He also mixes a mean absynthe martini.

* Quadrant Crossing

Yael Kanarek is a new media artist. She has been developing her integrated media project World of Awe since 1995. At the core of World of Awe is The Journal—an original narrative that uses the ancient genre of the traveler’s tale to explore the connections between storytelling, travel, memory and technology.

Selected for the Whitney biennial 2002, Yael Kanarek is a recipient of the Rockefeller Media award 2005, the Jerome Foundation Media Arts grant 2003, the New York Foundation for the Arts 2001 fellowship award and the Alternative Museum Digital Commission 2000. She has been an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks collaborating on Music for World of Awe with composer Yoav Gal scheduled for release fron Innova label with support from CoCo Institute. In 2002 she completed Chapter 2 of the Traveler’s Journal commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. in 2003 Kanarek launched an interactive net.dance in collaboration with dance filmmaker Evann Siebens, commissioned by Turbulence.org and was R&D resident at Eyebeam, collaborating with bnode architecture studio on the mRB project.

Yael is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City. World of Awe has been written about in the New York Times, Le Monde Interactif, Tema Celeste, Art News, Time Out, Flash Art Italy, Firma, Paper Magazine, The Industry Standard, Wired, The Journal News and ArtByte, and participated in festivals and exhibitions in Brazil, Italy, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Israel, Korea and the USA.

In October 2002 World of Awe was awarded the CNRS/UNESCO Lewis Carroll Argos prize in France and in June 2003 Ms. Kanarek won the 1st prize in the Netizens International Net Art competition in Rome, Italy. Kanarek who founded The Upgrade! is involved in art & technology education programs and lectures around the world.

* World of Awe
* treasurecrumbs

Since 1999, Liz Slagus has developed and managed various Eyebeam Education programs, from school, youth, & family-related courses and workshops to broader issues of new and digital literacies and learning and teaching practices. Liz has organized and spoken on several panels regarding art and technology education programming, including AAM and NYCMER. She has taught new media art courses for the University of Connecticut and the University of Rochester via Eyebeam and has consulted for many organizations and schools within New York City regarding art and technology education and programming. Liz holds a Bachelors Degree in Art History and Anthropology from Bucknell University and a Masters Degree in Visual Arts Administration from New York University.

Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg is a sound artist whose work explores the intersections of personal narrative, communication networks, and history as embedded in place. His work encompasses installation, music for live performance, tunebooks, web design, audio tours, and works for radio. His areas of interest include American shape note music in the northeastern United States and northeastern Alabama, social and religious movements in nineteenth-century upstate New York, and finding sand dollars.

Jesse’s installation Rapture/Rupture is currently on display at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY. His music has been performed by Pauline Oliveros, Anne Rhodes, Micah Silver, Angela Opell, and Tim Eastman. He has recently presented work at the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Jessica Murray Projects, Psy-Geo Provflux Festival, Wesleyan University, and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

* Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg / Electronic Artworks

Adam Brown is a digital artist and inventor. His creative activity is informed by an Intermedia tradition that supports collaboration among various disciplines resulting in a practice that blends digital media with physical materials. Brown has exhibited nationally and internationally and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Oklahoma Research Council’s Junior Faculty grant as well as several other state and private grants.

Brown directs the Oklahoma component of “The Upgrade” which is a monthly international gathering of artists, engineers, programmers and curators hosted by the Untitled ArtSpace and The University of Oklahoma’s School of Art. He is also a member of the New York Sculptors guild.

He is currently working on three large projects. The first, entitled Bion is an emergent robotic installation and web virus. The second is a web documentary and installation called The Archivist. It investigates the relationships between objects, memory, collecting and simulation. Coyote, the third project, is a web piece documenting the illegal movement of people across the US/Mexican border.

During the mid 90’s, Brown’s launched a graphic and web design studio. At the same time he spent two years developing a non-profit art space in West Branch, Iowa, where he collaborated with internationally recognized artists in creating work that was dedicated to unveiling the myth of Isis. The Isis Conceptual Laboratory was a space dedicated to exploring the mystery of Isis, an Egyptian goddess whose spirit was captured in the form of a bronze statue located on the grounds of Herbert Hoover National Park. The first show entitled “Looking for the Pieces” was broadcast live on Pseudo Radio as well as being one of the first art openings to stage an internet video teleconference.

Brown has a diverse undergraduate educational background in Biomedical Engineering and Intermedia. He completed all of his graduate work at the University of Iowa, and obtained his M.F.A. in May 2000. While at Iowa, Brown was instrumental in creating a new digital media art program called Digital Worlds. Since 2000, Adam Brown has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma where he teaches courses in electronic media, interactivity, video and theory. He currently resides in Oklahoma City.

* Isis Conceptual Laboratory

Cézanne Charles is an artist, arts administrator and curator. She is currently the Executive Director of New Media Scotland. Originally from the US, she moved to Britain in 2003 to co-curate and manage the exhibition Intersculpt:uk 03 for Manchester based fast-uk (www.fast-uk.mmu.ac.uk). Prior to moving to the United Kingdom she was the Acting VP, for Community Arts Services (promoted from CAS Associate - 2002) of Culture Works, Greater Dayton’s Arts Council and United Arts Fund where she developed and managed funds ($350,000 annually) to small and mid-sized arts organisations and individual artists (Artist Fellowships, Artists Professional Development, and Special Projects grants). She also worked to develop special initiatives for the agency including planning and implementing workshops, special projects/events (Cultural Facilities Plan; Cultural Assets Program - OAC and NEA funded), conferences and forums (Youth Arts Forum; Networks: Community, Connectivity and the Arts; Arts Dialogue Breakfast Series) and the annual Cultural District news conference. Cézanne works as an artist as one half of rootoftwo, which is an interdisciplinary arts practice dedicated to the production of contemporary artworks focused on the urban environment and electronic culture. Their latest project is identityware.

* Birthday
* Art Core

Since 2002, Robb Mitchell has had a pivotal role in the establishment of Scotland’s glazed and confused cultural citadel The Chateau. Steering the reclamation of a derelict city centre department store into independent exhibition/event space and working studios for over thirty creatives. He is producer of The Chateau’s acclaimed interdisciplinary events both within own spectacular warehouse style premises and in other unlikely locations ranging from disused jails & paintball arenas to penthouse hotel suites and The ICA, London. Best known as the launch pad for Grammy nominees Franz Ferdinand, The Chateau has also seeded a myriad of other spin off projects and collaborations, most notably Radius Glasgow (a creative environmental education initiative) and Maths Club (a remedial practical applied mathematics self help group for creatives who spent too much time at school staring out the window) and Machinista 2004.

Robb was co-director of Machinista Glasgow 2004, an open submission art & technology online show featuring over 250 projects followed by a face-to-face international festival. Previously co-founder and two times director of Free Gallery where his open recruitment campaign “Curator Wanted : No Experience Necessary “ brought world wide attention to a hairdresser’s disused basement.

His own art practice aims at amplifying feelings of social awkwardness until they disintegrate or in other words: bringing people together. He is touring Illinois and North East USA and Canada from early September 2005 and is thus available for guest lectures, after dinner speaking, weddings, children’s parties etc.

* www.egomassage.tk
* www.chateaugateau.co.uk
* www.machinista.org

Michelle Kasprzak is an artist, writer and curator. Her practice in these three areas is primarily focused on artistic activities that incorporate technology, with sub-interests in performativity and site-specificity. She is currently based in Edinburgh, UK, and is the Programmes Director of New Media Scotland.

Since winning the InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre Emerging Electronic Artist award in her early career, Michelle has proceeded to exhibit her work and present performances across North America and Europe. She has been featured in numerous publications and on radio and television broadcasts syndicated worldwide.

As a writer, Michelle has been published in magazines such as Mute, Spacing, Broken Pencil, and Public. She has been an invited contributor to several online publications, most recently, Spacing Magazine's Spacing Wire, and turbulence.org's networked_performance weblog. She has also contributed an essay to an upcoming book by University of Central England/Article Press.

Her current curatorial projects include an online exhibition being developed with Virtual Museums of Canada/Gallery TPW, and co-curation of video art on a public video billboard in downtown Toronto, Canada, with Year Zero One. Her academic affiliations include: Ryerson University (BFA, 2000), Université du Québec à Montréal (MA, expected 2006) Canadian Film Centre/Habitat New Media Lab (Adjunct Faculty, 2002-2005), and member of the Mobile Digital Commons Network (Concordia-UQAM-McGill-Banff Centre for the Arts, 2005).

michelle.kasprzak.ca

Michelle is a featured artist on the following websites: Popstart Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art

Suhjung Hur is a curator and writer based in Seoul, Korea. As a curator at Art Center Nabi, non-profit media art center in Seoul, Hur has been curating and organizing exhibitions, workshops and live events since 2002. Her curatorial projects include Liquid Space, Art & Science Station, Unzipping Codes and forthcoming Urban Sensorium, which explores the multi-sensory experience in urban environment enhanced and intervened via new media technologies. She is also organizing experimental sound-visual performance series, ‘alt_sound’ and a monthly gathering of media art practitioners, The Upgrade! Seoul. Currently, she is co-organizing International Workshop ‘Urban Play and Locative Media’ and Unesco Digital Arts Award on the theme of ‘City and Creative Media’, both to be held at Art Center Nabi in October.

She was a co-founder and editor for art quarterly Stray Dog in Los Angeles, and has written for leading art and architecture magazines in Korea including Wolgan Misool, Art in Culture, Bob, Design Net, as well as for catalogue publications. Suhjung holds a Bachelors Degree in Communication/Journalism from Yonsei University and a Masters Degree in Art History from University of Southern California.

* blog mostly in Korean

Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer and a net artist interested in exploring the web as a cultural space, and as such exploring the redefinition of the cultural-borders inside this symbol of globalization. In the past 15 years Mushon have created projects involving design, animation, net art and comics. He is active in the Israeli digital culture scene, as a desk member for Concept magazine (exego.net), and the international scene, as an official contributer for Pixelsurgeon.com magazine. Mushon currated the BD4D Tel-Aviv new media events through 2003-2004, and is involved in several initiatives concerning issues of design, art, media and culture. His work has appeared in several publications among which, The Venice Biennial’s Gluebalize Magazine, and in exhibitions in Israel and abroad, such as Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, 2001, OFFF Festival, Barcelona 2003 and 2004, and Europrix Top-Talent Award Festival 2004, Vienna. Since 2002 Mushon runs Shual - the in-house design studio for the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Lives and works in Tel-Aviv.

* Shual

The Sala-manca Group is Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman, artists born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who live and work in Jerusalem since 2000. The group works on performance, installation and new media. Sala-manca’s works deal with poetics of translation (cultural, mediatic and social), with textual, urban and net contexts and with the tensions between low tech and high tech aesthetics, as well as social and political issues.

The group also publishes (H)Earat Shulaym - (Note in the Margin): Independent Art Journal, produces and curates Heara art events, independent events organized with no commercial or official sponsors, sound & art events and new media workshops. Since december 2003 edits together with Matvey Shapiro no-org.net, a Jerusalem art network envisioned as a platform for projects in the area of netbased and digital art and for the exchange of independent information on art and media, and integrates the acute.cc network.

Sala-Manca participate as artists or curators in different frames in Israel and abroad: Jerusalem Film Festival (2003-5), Transmediale.05, Festival Macadamia, Buenos Aires (2005), Digital art Lab, Holon (2004), Blurrr-Biennale for performance Art, Jaffa (2003), VideoZone, Tel-Aviv (2002), VideoBardo Buenos Aires Festival (2004), Kunstradio (2003), II Festival Dialogu Czterech Kultur, Lodz (2003).

* sala-manca.net
* no-org.net

Kate Armstrong is a new media artist and writer who has lived and worked in Canada, France, Japan, Scotland, and the United States. Her work focuses on the creation of experimental narrative forms, particularly works in which poetics are inserted within the functional framework of computer programs, and performative pieces in which computer functionality is merged with physical space. She has worked with a variety of forms including short films, theatre, essays, net art, psychogeography and installation. Her art has been exhibited at the Javamuseum (Frankfurt), Access (Vancouver), Neutral Ground (Regina), Art Media (Buenes Aires), Segundo Encuentro Internacional De Arte Experimental De Madrid (Madrid), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), Psy.Geo.Conflux (New York), Images Festival (Toronto), Arte Digital Rosario (Argentina), Mediatopia (Los Angeles), Western Front (Vancouver), Contemporary Art Centre (Lithuania), the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Istanbul Museum, among others.

Armstrong was artist in residence at the Techlab at the Surrey Art Gallery and received a New Media Production Grant from the Canada Council in 2003. She is a recipient of a 2004-2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts for Turbulence, which was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and is affiliated with the Locative Media Lab. Her work has also been commissioned by the Mobile Digital Commons Network with funding from Heritage Canada, and I-Projects for the Charles H. Scott Gallery. Armstrong curates the new media art speaker series Upgrade 2.0 at the Western Front in conjunction with Upgrade at Eyebeam Atelier in New York, and runs Special Airplane, a Canadian organization for media arts initiatives. She has a primary degree in French Language and Literature, a BA (Honours) in Film Studies and Philosophy, and a Masters in Philosophy. She has written for P.S 1/MoMA, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, TrAce, Year Zero One, and The Thing, as well as for catalogue publications. Her first book, Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, was published in 2002.

* Kate Armstrong

Michael Century, Guest Speaker

Long associated with The Banff Centre for the Arts, Michael Century founded the Centre's Media Arts Division in 1988. In this position, he was the instigator of The Art and Virtual Environments project (1991-94). This project was the first large-scale and sustained investigation of virtual reality technologies as a new medium for artists; the completed installations have been been displayed in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, and the entire project documented in a book-length collection Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (MIT Press, 1996).From 1993-1996, Century was a program manager at the Canadian Centre for Information Technology Innovation (CITI), a federal research laboratory located in Montreal, with responsibility for new media arts funding. From 1996—98, he served as policy advisor to the federal department of Canadian Heritage. Since September 1997, he has been the principal of Next Century Consultants, focusing on new media and cultural policy for various public and university sector clients. For the Rockefeller Foundation, he researched and wrote a report in 1999 entitled Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. He was panelist and co-author for the U.S. National Academy of Science 2003 report on information technologies and creative practices, Beyond Productivity. He was educated in humanities, piano performance, and musicology at the University of Toronto, and the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Iowa.

Michael Century