AvatarBodyCollision
+ http://get.to/vicki
 Vicki Smith is a
visual artist who has been producing commissioned work and exhibiting her art
for almost two decades. She has taught adult education in IT and the web and
is now involved in a cluster group of eight schools on the West Coast, delivering
Professional Development in ICT to teachers. She works in a design capacity
for both print and web, collaboratively on mural projects and in the digital
storytelling medium. Working with Avatar Body Collision has given her the opportunity
to explore the dramatic process and further her interests in theatre, film
and stage design. As well as producing graphics and avatars, Vicki performs
and has contributes to developing characters and devising stories.
Andrea Blundell
Select Parks
+ http://selectparks.net/
 Andrea Blundell's qualifications include a Bachelor of Fine Art (RMIT)
a Postgraduate Diploma of Fine Art (VCA), and an Advanced Certificate
IV 3D Modelling and Animation (AIE). She has been exhibiting since
1996, and was a member of Grey Area Art Space. Her work has focused
on the subliminal operation of sites, on the occupants and their bodies,
and now concentrates these ideas into the computer game environment
at the selectparks media lab in Melbourne. Blundell specialises in
the design and animation of 3D characters for mulitplayer game communities,
exploring ways players can immerse themselves further inside gaming
worlds. Her work focuses on facilitating people’s need to be
uniquely represented within virtual worlds, how in-game persona's
are constructed, and allowing deeper exploration of gaining's social
landscapes. Blundell is striving to enable rich populations of player
characters with diverse cultural traits and nuances.
Natalie Bookchin
CalArts
+ http://calarts.edu/~bookchin
 Natalie Bookchin
is a artist whose most recent project, Metapet (www.metapet.net) is online
game commissioned by Creative Time, a public arts presenter in New York City
in association with HAMACA, a net art platform in Barcelona made up of six
local art institutions and museum. The beta version of the project was launched
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Version 1 was launched on
May Day, 2003 and linked from the Whitney Museum's online gallery. Bookchin
is currently working with political theorist Jacqueline Stevens (jacquelinestevens.org)
on a large scale network project Agora. The first part of the project AgoraXChange
has been commissioned by the Tate Museum and is scheduled to launch on their
website on November 5, 2003. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>,
an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the Internet
at Cal Arts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana. From 1998 to
2000 she was a member of the collective ®TMark. She was a 2001-2002 Guggenheim
Fellow. Her work is exhibited at institutions including PS1, Mass MOCA, the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, KunstWerke, Berlin, the Generali Foundation,
Vienna, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the
Shedhale in Zurich. She is based in Los Angeles and is faculty member at CalArts.
Rebecca Cannon
Select Parks
+ http://selectparks.net
 Rebecca Cannon is
an Australian new media curator and producer. She currently curates an
online archive that contains an international selection of artworks made
using computer
games at Selectparks.net. She is also producing and curating a DVD compilation
entitled DVneopoetry which brings together young Australian writers with
media artists. Rebecca is dedicated to open access modes of distribution,
and where
possible applies copyleft ideologies to her productions - predominantly
to her video zine Some Underground Machine. The next Some Underground
Machine video
zine will be released on region-free DVD and embrace the GNUcopyleft[i] <#_edn1> code
of licensing developed by the open source software movement.
Chad Chatterton
Select Parks
+ http://selectparks.net/
 Chad Chatterton graduated with a B.A. in Japanese Studies and Art
History in 1991. He followed up these studies with a B.F.A. in painting
from the V.C.A. He has been exhibiting since 1996 and has also written
for Art and Text and Like Art Magazine. In 2000 his interests culminated
in a body of work comprising 6 exhibitions including a curatorial
project at 200 Gertrude Street. This body of work collectively explored
the way computer games impact on our experience of place. Since that
time he has developed these ideas from the computer game developers’ perspective at the selectparks media lab in Melbourne, where he co-directs
the on-line computer game based project acmi{park} for the ACMI. He
is also the recipient of the Australia Council Tokyo Studio 2002.
Chatterton hopes to further critically engage with online gaming and
virtual place-making, highlighting its important function in contemporary
culture.
Chris Chesher
University of New
South Wales
+ http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/Staff/Chesher/>http://mdcm.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/Staff/Chesher/
 Chris Chesher is
a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales with an unhealthy obsession
with new media. He wrote his PhD at Macquarie University on what makes computer-based
media distinctive, arguing that they are characterised by their capacity to
call up things, and should be reconceptualised as ‘invocational media’.
He established, and now coordinates the MA (New Media) program at UNSW, which
is aimed at new media practitioners. But he has been at UNSW since 1997, the
first year of the BA (Media and Communications), a program with a strong emphasis
on new media theory and practice. Before this he taught at Macquarie, UTS and
Newcastle. As one of the facilitators of the critical Internet studies mailing
list Fibreculture, he organised the ‘Networks of Excellence’ conference
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in November 2002. He is currently
co-editing a special edition of Media International Australia on computer games
and media studies methodologies. His writing can be found online in Cultronix,
Ctheory and CultureMachine, in hard copy in several books, and in journals
including Convergence and Media International Australia.
Kathy Cleland
School of English,
Art History, Film and Media at The University of Sydney
+ http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/informatics/
 Kathy Cleland is
a lecturer, curator and writer specialising in the field of new media. She
has been curating new media art exhibitions since 1996 including ARTifical
LIFE, a touring new media exhibition hosted by Artspace, Auckland (1999) and
the Cyber Cultures (http://www.casulapowerhouse.com/cybercultures) exhibition
series (The Performance Space, Sydney, 1996, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre,
Western Sydney, 1997 and 2000). The 2000 Cyber Cultures program toured to over
20 venues in Australia and New Zealand from 2000 - 2003. Kathy was also a consultant
for the Australian online component of the BAM Festival in New York (2001)
and curated the Australian component of St@rt Up a program of new media works
for Te Papa Museum, Wellington, NZ (2002-3). She was president of dLux media
arts from 1997 to 2002 and writes for a number of arts and cultural publications.
She was guest editor of a special new media issue of Artlink magazine, e-volution
of new media [Vol 21, No.3, 2001]. Kathy lectures in the Arts Informatics Program
in The School of English, Art History, Film and Media at The University of
Sydney.
Leon Cmielewski
School of Communications,
Media and Design, University of Western Sydney
+ http://www.sysx.org/leon/mirror/
 Leon is an animator,
artist and designer and has worked in print and broadcast television design,
he currently lectures in the School of Communications Design and Media at the
University of Western Sydney. Together with Josephine Starrs he has produced
a range projects which have been widely exhibited, including; The User Unfriendly
Interface, The Paranoid Interface, The Fuzzy Love Dating Database, Bio-Tek
Kitchen, Dream Kitchen and a.k.a.
David Cranswick
dLux Media Arts
+ http://www.dlux.org.au
 David Cranswick was
appointed Director of dLux media arts in March 2003. Prior to this appointment
worked both as a Curator and artist in Western Sydney for over ten years. He
was Curator of the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Liverpool [NSW] from 1998
- 2003. In this time he was responsible for the curation and production of
an innovative exhibition program which was built on a strong commitment to
community cultural development and engagement with diverse audiences and communities.
While Director of Streetlevel, an artist run Space in Blacktown NSW, he initiated
the Cybercultures Project with Kathy Cleland. David has also served on the
National Executive of NAVA and on the Board of Artspace.
Captain Simon Geddes
Australian Army
+ http://www.army.gov.au/
 After eight years
as a general service Military Police Officer in the Australian Army, Simon
Geddes left to pursue full time study in education and multimedia. Upon completion,
he returned to the Army and is now employed as a Technology Based Training
Developer and Instructional Designer within the Army’s Education Corps.
Geddes has a Certificate IV in Interactive Multimedia, Diploma of Instructional
Multimedia, Bachelor of Management (HRD) and is currently completing a Master
of Education (Multimedia) through Southern Cross University. Geddes was an
Instructional Designer on the Australian Army’s award winning Sergeant
Offensive Operations Package.
Michael Goldberg
Sydney College of
the Arts , University of Sydney
+ http://www.catchafallingknife.com
 Michael Goldberg
is an artist and lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts who explores the gameplay
involved in the world of trading stocks (catchingafallingknife.com). His work
examines stockmarkets as highly complex organisms although their financial
cycles are generally simplified as being either 'boom or bust'. In fact these
cycles arise out of a multitude of personal psychologies and are the evidence
of an almost inconceivable number of transactions, or 'face-offs', between
buyers and sellers. In reality, markets perform to an elaborate choreography.
They unfold daily, minute by minute, second by second into a sequence of arabesques
and set moves responding to constantly shifting global algorithms.
Troy Innocent
Monash University
+ http://www.iconica.org
 Troy Innocent has
been exploring new aesthetics enabled by computers since 1989. Deconstructing
and understanding the endemic properties, language and nature of the digital
realm has been the underlying theme of his work. Trained as a designer and
practising as an artist, he has moved across media in works involving computer
animation, installation art, interactive media, synthetic images and sound.
His work has been exhibited widely at national and international galleries,
conferences, and symposia.
Typically, these works involve the construction of artificial worlds
that explore the ‘language of computers’. In his work, Innocent
explores the dynamic between the iconic ideal and the personal specific, the
real and the simulated, and the way in which our identity is shaped by our
language and communication.
Innocent is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Multimedia & Digital Arts
at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently producing lifeSigns,
an interactive installation that generates iconic languages that live and die
in an eco-system of signs and symbols. Innocent recently showed offline artefacts,
computer generated prints, and dual-screen moving image work in a solo exhibition
at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne. He is also completing a Master of Arts investigating
a model for digital media language.
Kipper
+ http://www.escapefromwoomera.org
 Kipper is a game
developer based in Melbourne. After working in the commercial industry for
several years as a games programmer he became creative director of the community-based
game project Escape From Woomera (www.escapefromwoomera.org). The politics
of the videogame as an art form and games as a medium for cultural resistance
are Kipper's main areas of interest. He is also focused on issues facing game
developers as creative labourers and is a founding member of the Game Developers'
Liberation Organisation.
Feng Mengbo
+ http://www.mengbo.com
 Feng Mengbo is an
artist with an international reputation who arose out of a Political Pop movement
in China, during the late 80's and early 90's, when many artists were using
deconstructive techniques and Western iconography to comment on contemporary
China. Although he considers himself more game artist his work has never been
exhibited in China because of his connection with Political Pop. Nevertheless
he continues to live and work in Beijing. Since 1996 Mengbo has worked with
computers, not as a passive player, but making CD-Roms and games. The first
CD-Rom piece by Mengbo was My Private Album in 1996, which is an interactive
family photo album. Following that he has made a series of interactive multimedia
works using the structures of commercial software with Chinese themes. As a
young Chinese artist whose work uses the the styles and structures of contemporary
electronic games. He combines this with cultural influences of China, from
traditional opera legends to more recent stories from the Cultural Revolution
and Hong Kong action cinema. The icons from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution
and those of Hong Kong cinema both use a romantic, heroic style to tell moral
or political tales.
Mark Pesce
+
 Internationally renowned
as an inventor, engineer, writer, and educator, Pesce is the man who brought
virtual reality into the World Wide Web as co-author of VRML. For nearly two
decades Pesce has used his extensive knowledge of computer networking and interface
design to produce novel and useful innovations for computer users worldwide.
At least fifty million computers around the world are VRML software enabled,
and it has become a core component of the MPEG-4 standard, which will bring
interactive capabilities to a broad array of consumer electronics. Pesce has
written five books, including The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming
Our Imagination (Ballantine Books, 2000), and spent two years establishing
and running the Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern California's
School of Cinema-Television.
Melinda Rackham
+ http://www.subtle.net
 Melinda Rackham is
an artist and theorist based in Sydney Australia, who has been working online
since the mid 1990's in her domain www.subtle.net. Her web practice has investigated
the technological and psychological aspects of online identity, locality, sexuality
and community, as well as viral symbiosis and trans species relations. She
has just completed her PhD on the nature and construction of spaces and avatars
within Virtual Reality Networked Environments at the College of Fine Arts,
University of New South Wales, Australia.
Rackham's writing appears online and in print in arenas like Ctheory, Culture
Machine, Leonardo, and Realtime. Conference presentations include Contagion
in Australia, Invencao in Brazil, and Consciousness Reframed in Wales. She
has participated in residencies at Polar Circuit in Finland and Discovery
at Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Her award winning web works have been
shown in Beyond Interface, Arco Electronico, Transmediale, File, Art Entertainment
Network, The Montreal Biennale, European Media Art Festival, Hybrid Life
Forms, Biennial of Buenos Aires, lab3D and ISEA. Rackham received the SoundSpace Award for Virtual Worlds at the 2001. Stuttgart
Filmwinter, and the Faulding Award for Multimedia at the 2000 Adelaide Festival,
and is the producer of -empyre- online media forum.
Camille Scaysbrook
+ http://www.geocities.com/c_scaysbrook
 Camille Scaysbrook
has worked as a writer in a diversity of mediums, including prose, theatre,
radio drama, hypertext fiction, and computer game design. She was a student,
and later a teacher, at Sydney's Roundabout Theatre, where she gained a diploma
of Advanced Acting in 1997. In 1995 her play Am I Your Dream? won the Sydney
Theatre Company Young Playwright of the Year Award. It has since enjoyed numerous
national and international productions, including the 1996 Adelaide Fringe
Festival and a tour of London in 2000.
She has given many talks and participated in numerous, panel discussions
and interviews on topics ranging from literature, womens' modernist art,
and film theory, most recently addressing the 2002 Biennale of Sydney on
the topic of massively multiplayer online games. After graduating from Sydney
University in 1999 (majoring in English and Art History and Theory), she
spent several years working for computer games company MicroForte on their
Massively Multiplayer Online Game project, BigWorld: Citizen Zero and gained
media attention for being Australia's only female game designer. She lived in New York for most of 2001 before touring Europe in 2002. She
now works as a media analyst and, when there's time, on a third novel, as
well as several film projects and occasional freelance writing. Her work
appeared as part of the anthology Letters to J.D. Salinger, published by
the University of Wisconsin Press, in 2001.
Select Parks
Select Parks
+ http://www.selectparks.net
 Selectparks is a media laboratory currently based in Melbourne Australia.
Selectparks was established in 1998 by Julian Oliver and now includes key
members: Chad Chatterton, Andrea Blundell and Rebecca Cannon. Work and writing
by Selectparks has featured at many symposiums and electronic art exhibitions
throughout Europe and America including Siggraph2003, American Museum of
the Moving Image, the Tate Modern, and the Computer Games and Digital Cultures
conference in Tampere, Finland. Selectparks puts particular focus on the
use of games as a platform for both producing Place, and researching how
sense, memory and action collaborate toward this unique effect. Out of a
belief that games produce not only places, but new Public Places, the worlds
of Selectparks develop upon traditional concepts of public by offering both
new mediums and sites for exchange. This aspect of Selectparks' enquiry currently
forms the basis for a research collaboration with the Interactive Institute
of Sweden.
Eugenie Shinkle
School of Media,
Arts and Design, Westminster University
+
 Eugenie Shinkle is
a lecturer in photographic theory and criticism in the School of Media,
Arts and Design at Westminster University, London, UK. Eugenie’s research
focuses
on the areas of digital culture, phenomenology, aesthetics (C18th and
contemporary), linear perspective, landscape, and fashion photography.
She is a former civil engineer (BSc) and worked as a waterflow control systems
designer before studying photography. Eugenie holds a BFA (Concordia
University,
Montreal, major photography, minor art history) an MA (Concordia University;
photography, art history, landscape anthropology) and a PhD (Slade School of Fine Art, London; art history/critical theory, fine art media practice).
Eugenie has been a practicing photographer and video artist since 1991,
have exhibited internationally and with work in museum and private collections.
She lives and works in London, UK.
Vanessa Sowerwine
+ http://www.netspace.net.au/~van
 Van Sowerwine is
a new media artist who works with stop-motion animation, interactives, installation,
miniatures and comics. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent
projects include Expecting, an Experimenta New Visions commission with Isobel
Knowles for the Experimenta House of Tomorrow (Black Box, Melbourne, 2003),
and Play With Me, an interactive stop-motion installation in a cubby house
as part of the 2002 Next Wave festival (Centre for Contemporary Photography,
Melbourne, 2002).
Josephine Starrs
Sydney College, University
of Sydney
+ http://www.sysx.org/starrs/
 Josephine Starrs
is an artist whose video and new media works have been shown extensively in
Australia and overseas. She was a member of the Australian cyberfeminist collective
VNS Matrix, who used irony and humour to reveal the gendered biases hardwired
into computer culture and products. In 1997 she was artist in residence at
the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and in 1998 received a New Media Arts
Board Fellowship from Australia Council for the Arts. For the past six years
she has collaborated with Leon Cmielewski on a variety of new media projects
including The User Unfriendly Interface, Dream Kitchen and the game patch,
Bio-tek Kitchen.
Melanie Swalwell
University of Technology,
Sydney
+
 Melanie Swalwell
is a Sydney based cultural and media theorist, currently teaching at the University
of Technology, Sydney. Her research is broadly concerned with intersections
between the senses, technology and affect, concerns which shape her work on
computer gaming. Her doctoral research included a study of a large multiplayer
gaming group, the members of which get together to play over a purpose built
Local Area Network. An essay on lanning which theorises gamers’ entry
into virtual environments is forthcoming in The Games Reader, edited by Matthew
Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman. Currently, Melanie is editing (together with
Jason Wilson) a collection of essays which attend to the significance of the
particular aesthetic pleasures and engagements of gameplay. Other work includes
a focus on experimentation with the games form, including the work of independent
game developers and artists working with games, and a concern with the current
regime of classification/censorship of games, particularly the way in which
gaming is conceived in terms of impactful aesthetics, as in the Office of Film
and Literature Classifications recent (2001) Review of the Classification Guidelines
for Films and Computer Games
Laurens Tan
University of Western
Sydney
+ http://www.octomat.com
 Laurens Tan returned
this year from his 11th pilgrimage to the Silver City [since 1995] to chair
the session: Disneyland for Adults: Fun Cities Around the World at the University
of Nevada Las Vegas' 13th Far West and American Popular Culture Association
[FWAPCA] Conference. He was keynote speaker at UNLV's FWAPCA 10th Anniversary
event in 1997. His current project/thesis, The Trinkets of Clubland: Vegascana:
is an analysis of the lure of the gaming parlour and the cultural architecture
of identity referenced primarily where entertainment design originated - Las
Vegas.
In 1998, he was Keynote Speaker at the 10th Anniversary Conference of the
FWAPCA at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and has written on the design
of casinos in The Business of Gaming: Economic & Management Issues. Since
1993, Laurens’ works have been based on games, entertainment technology
and on exteriors and interiors of gaming resorts/ casinos. Installations,
interactive kiosks and sculptures inextricably link the digital [especially
3D modelling/ animation] with prototypes resulting from industrial research
experience. His 3D animation works include Jack High [1997] which has been screened
at Pan Pacifica Multimedia Festival, [Groningen Holland], Altered States,
New Media Screenings: Interact Asia Pacific [Melbourne], Code Red [Multimedia
Installations in Sydney] and in the touring MAAP/Multimedia Art Asia Pacific
Festival's, ArtRage. The Octomat ESM Prototype was produced in 1997 and first
exhibited in 'Lawyers Guns and Money' at the Experimental Art Foundation
Adelaide.
Anne Mette Thorhauge
+ http://www.thorhauge.dk
 Anne Mette Thorhauge
holds a master degree in film and media studies. At the moment she is a PhD
fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, working within the field of
computer games and new media studies. Her main field of interest has to do
with the game experience from the point of view of the computer game player.
The main objective of her project is to study how the activities of playing
the game and experiencing the fiction are combined from the point of view of
the player. Apart from this subject area she has been working with a range
of topics including digital arts and music, computer history and technological
development, information technology as a research tool and e-learning, CSCW & social
processes.
Jason Wilson
Griffith University
+
 Jason is a researcher,
critic and writer, currently completing a PhD on the aesthetics of video gaming
at Griffith University. He has published and presented research on gaming,
new media and other areas of contemporary cultural research in various local
and international publications and conferences, and he recently co-edited (with
jOhn pAce) the logo edition of the online journal of media and culture, M/C.
He teaches in Griffith University School of Arts, Media and Culture, and in
Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Creative Industries, mainly
in new media and film studies. When he's not thinking about how others have
made the digital beautiful, he's trying to do it himself with music, though
he's still hopelessly mired in the FastTracker era.
|
|
dLux
media arts is a screen, sound and new media arts
organization, which develops, exhibits, promotes and advocates
for screen, sound and new media arts.