Contributors
Editor Bios
Amanda Starling Gould is a James B. Duke Scholar and PhD candidate in Duke University’s Program in Literature. She is a member and lead project designer in the Duke S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, a HASTAC Scholar, a member of the Franklin Humanities Institute Digital Humanities Initiative Advisory Board, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Writ Large Environmental Humanities Emerging Networks Fellow. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and the forthcoming journal Media Theory. She is currently finishing her dissertation, Digital Metabolisms: Mapping a Digital Environmental Humanities through Digital Materiality, which traces the complex intersections of digital media and the environment, and questions the absence of environmental thinking from digital theory. More about her publications, teaching, and digital projects can be found on amandastarlinggould.com, on HASTAC, and at @stargould. Her work can be found in bot form at @stargouldbot.Florian Wiencek (B.Sc. in Digital Media, 2006; M.A. in Art and Cultural Mediation, 2009; University of Bremen) is currently Media Officer at Global Young Academy (at Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), PhD fellow at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany and freelance lecturer. He is finishing his thesis on the topic of “Digital Mediation of Art and Culture”, analyzing how digital media and digital data with their characteristics and affordances are currently employed in practices of mediation of art and culture and for cultural learning. Moreover he is interested in the creative (re-)use of digital heritage data for co-creative knowledge generation about and with art and culture together with the audience inside and outside of an exhibition or institution. Before he was teaching as visiting lecturer in the department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University (Durham NC, USA), served as Steering Committee Member of the Research Center “Visual Communication and Expertise” (Jacobs University Bremen) and was working as research associate in the BMBF-funded project "Visual–Film–Discourse" (Jacobs University Bremen) on the categorization and image typologies of news images and the use of image archives and databases in news production. Moreover he has worked as freelance graphic- and webdesigner and as curator / project manager / designer in several exhibition projects. His main research interests are digital mediation of art and culture, digital archives, media- and hybrid art, digital culture and communication as well as co-creative and participatory methods of knowledge generation and education. Website: http://www.florianwiencek.com.
Contributor Bios
Stephanie Boluk is an assistant professor in the English Department and Cinema and Digital Media Program at University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching incorporate game studies, media studies, utopian studies, and critical theory to explore videogames, electronic literature, alternative currencies, finance capitalism, and the convergence of leisure and labor in contemporary information economies.Drew Burk is a Cultural Theorist, Translator, Editor, and Director of Univocal Publishing (www.univocalpublishing.com), an independent philosophy and theory publisher working with his colleague and co-founder, artist and designer, Jason Wagner to conjugate digital design evolutions with various analog methods of book-making striving to create new models for thinking the art of the book form along with our arrival into the digital universe. He has studied philosophy and religious and political anthropology as an Ambassadorial Scholar at L’Institut D’Etudes Politiques in Aix-en-Provence, France and completed his graduate work at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where he is currently a Visiting Scholar. As a cultural theorist, Burk works at the intersection between poetry/cybernetics/theory/translation and media ecology tracing in various experimental and poetic ways the paradigmatic shift from linear written culture to that of algorithmic, non-linear telematic society (Flusser). He has translated essential texts by a variety of thinkers such as Grey Ecology by Paul Virilio, Telemorphosis and Pataphysics by Jean Baudrillard, Two Lessons on Animal and Man by Gilbert Simondon, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics by François Laruelle, and Fernand Deligny’s The Arachnean and Other Texts. Burk’s most recent work can be found in journals such as C-Theory and Poeisis as well as forthcoming essays in the following books: Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam), The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2013). He is currently working on a theoretical poetic flash-text called, The Cybernetic Theatre of Cruelty (pharamkon series, forthcoming from Univocal).
Peter Cornwell is Director of the Data Futures Laboratory and professor in the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, and also a member of the Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies. He has been the recipient of numerous awards in roles such as Manager of European Research and Development for Texas Instruments, and for large-scale digital media infrastructure projects for clients such as Coca-Cola, Samsung and Sony. Cornwell started the California technology company Division, Inc., and was CEO at the time of its successful IPO. An expert for the EU’s development of its first Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) work-program, he also served on numerous U.K. funding council committees and, together with the U.K. Department of Trade, developed the London Center for Parallel Computer Applications. As director of the Institute of Visual Media at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology (effectively a German version of the Media Lab) Cornwell founded its Center for Digital Heritage. His sustainable computing research has been funded by the U.K. Technology Strategies Board and the Austrian Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft.
Shane Denson is a DAAD postdoctoral fellow in Duke University’s Program in Literature, an associate of the Duke S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, and a member of the interdisciplinary research unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice” (based at the Freie Universität Berlin). He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag / Columbia UP, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016). His blog can be found at: medieninitiative.wordpress.com.
Karin Denson is an artist and former teacher. She studied art and earned her master’s of education in Germany, where she worked for several years as a teacher for children with special needs in emotional and social contexts. She has also worked as a systemic counselor and she holds a Montessori degree. In her art practice, she experiments with a variety of materials, media, and technologies. She has collaborated with the Duke S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab and taught art workshops at the Duke University International House. Her collaborative work with Shane Denson has been exhibited at Duke University and at Rutgers University Camden, and it is featured in a variety of publications. She can be found online at http://thenewkrass.wordpress.com.
Turan Duda, FAIA has honed his skills as a design architect in his over 30 years of practice. As Design Principal, his personal approach to design informs the creative process of the firm. Clients rely on his skill as a translator: to interpret their wishes architecturally; to clearly communicate abstract design concepts both visually and verbally; and to inspire common vision among different groups. He engages the design process at every level, from planning to detail, believing that a project’s success is measured by the quality of its execution. Turan shares his passion for design by encouraging a laboratory culture in the firm’s design studio–a place for nurturing creativity and exploring new architectural ideas. As an educator, he inspires the graduate students he has taught at Yale, MIT, Cooper Union, and NC State. He frequently lectures students, professional organizations, and civic groups on topics such as urban place-making, the role of public space within private development, and design methodology.
Mark B. N. Hansen is Professor of Literature and Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Duke University. In work that ranges across a host of disciplines, including literary studies, film and media, philosophy (particularly phenomenology), science studies, and cognitive neuroscience, Hansen has explored the meaning of the relentless technological exteriorization that characterizes the human as a form of life and has paid particular attention to the key role played by visual art and literature in brokering cultural adaptation to technology from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution. His recent work has focused on the experiential significance of the revolution in computation that has transformed the architecture of knowledge in academe and in culture more broadly. His monographs include Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT Press, 2003), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (Routledge, 2006), and Feed Forward: On the Future of 21st Century Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Jonathan Kroll is a leadership and mentoring educator, entrepreneur, scholar, and coach. He believes that when we engage in intentional leadership development and mentoring experiences, our opportunity for learning, mastery, and transformation increase exponentially. Jonathan earned a PhD in human and organizational systems from Fielding Graduate University. He can be reached at JonathanRyanKroll.com.
Patrick LeMieux, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, is a game designer and media theorist. Recent projects include Speculation (http://speculat1on.net), an alternate reality game that explores the culture of Wall Street investment banks in the context of the 2008 global economic crisis, and Open House (http://no-place.org), a telematic installation which allows visitors to virtually squat in a Florida home undergoing foreclosure after the U.S. housing collapse. He has published extensively on game studies, critical code studies, and media technologies in journals such as Critical Inquiry and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His book Metagaming: Video Games and the Practice of Play is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2016. For more information visit http://patrick-lemieux.com.
Anne Luther is a researcher, curator and software developer whose work examines contemporary art, network theory and data visualization in qualitative research. She received her PhD from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, is currently a research fellow at Parsons Institute for Information Mapping and teaching assistant for Professor Boris Groys at NYU. Her research is grounded in cultural studies and art theory. Anne worked in several arts institutions internationally including MoMA PS1 KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin Biennale and independent project spaces such as Front Desk Apparatus, Salon Populaire, and The Office, Berlin. Found at anneluther.info, @AnneLuthera, and https://github.com/lutheranne.
Reagan W. Moore is RENCI’s chief scientist for Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE), coordinating collaborative research efforts between RENCI and the DICE group in the UNC Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS) in areas such as the development of data grids, digital libraries, and preservation environments. Moore is also a professor with SILS. Prior to his RENCI and UNC appointments, he was the director of data and knowledge systems at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. Moore came to UNC Chapel Hill in August 2008 along with other members of the DICE research team. The team is known worldwide for its expertise in the development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations. Moore holds a Ph.D. in plasma physics from the University of California, San Diego.
Rebecca Norton received her BFA from the University of Louisville in 2004 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2010. Norton's studio practice encompasses 2D and 3D design, collaboration, digital modeling and animation. Her work explores theories of synthesis and connectivity as they relate to the activity of reconstructing reality in vision and thought. She takes a special interest in the formal mapping of mathematical and generative forms, color theory, the study of perspective (in art and architecture) and attraction. Norton has exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at California State University, Long Beach, CA, The Carnegie Center for Art and History, New Albany, IN, and Schneiderel.Home.Studio.Gallery, Vienna, Austria. She has been a contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail, Arts in Bushwick and Abstract Critical. Rebecca Norton currently lives and works in Louisville, KY. Found at website: www.rebeccajnorton.com, blog: http://rebeccajnorton.tumblr.com/, twitter: @RamblinJean.
Jussi Parikka is a media theorist, writer and Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and in addition, he is Docent of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland. Parikka has published widely on digital culture, media theory and visual culture. His work on media archaeology has gathered a lot of positive international attention and awards. Parikka’s books include (Koneoppi, in Finnish, on “cultural theory in the age of digital machines”) and his Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses was published by Peter Lang (2007, 2nd. edition forthcoming 2016). Parikka’s Insect Media (2010) won the 2012 Anne Friedberg award for Innovative Scholarship (Society for Cinema and Media Studies). The third part of the media ecology trilogy, A Geology of Media, came out in 2015 with University of Minnesota Press as well. The co-edited collection The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture was published by Hampton Press (2009), and Media Archaeology came out with University of California Press ( 2011). The work on media archaeology was continued in Parikka’s 2012 monograph What is Media Archaeology?. In 2013 he edited a collection of Wolfgang Ernst-writings, Digital Memory and the Archive. Recently Parikka also wrote the short booklet, The Anthrobscene (2014).
David Rambo is a PhD Candidate in Literature at Duke University. His writing and teaching consider the intersection of materialist philosophy, media theory, and contemporary cultural forms including fiction, film, and video games. “Of Fear and Exaltation: The Sublime Autonomy of Finance,” an article that criticizes the role of the Kantian sublime and contemporary finance in the film Limitless, will be published in Angelaki late 2016. Another essay, “The Error-Image: On the Technics of Memory,” is included in the recent collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Reframe Books). Currently he is writing a dissertation elaborating a category of transcendental technicity that mediates 20th-century French rationalism, Bernard Stiegler’s technological phenomenology, and the speculative cosmologies of both Eugen Fink and Alfred North Whitehead.
S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab: Our collaborative work uses biometric and environmental sensing technologies to expand our access to sensory experience beyond the five senses. Our work is informed by the premise that digital technologies have opened new vistas for accessing and conceptualizing our robust embodied contact with the sensory environments in which we live. Our projects aim to explore this enhanced contact and to make the sensory experience it involves more intense. As we see it, digital technologies allow us to access our complex and robust embodiment and our coupling to the environment in ways that evade introspection, perception through the five senses, and other subject-centered modes of experience; assisted by the array of biometric sensing devices that can report on the states of such bodily functions as heartrate, galvanic skin response, eye movement, and brain wave activity, we can gain indirect, technically-mediated insight into the bodily states that – following arguments from philosophers like Spinoza, Whitehead, and Deleuze as well as neuroscientists like Damasio and Edelman inform our bodily activity within larger sensory environments as well as the higher-order conscious representations that emerge on the basis of that activity. See more at S-1Lab.org.
Pauline van Mourik Broekman (NL/GB) is, together with Simon Worthington, co-editor and publisher of Mute Magazine, which she co-founded in 1994 soon after leaving art college and has helped develop into an internationally recognized voice on technoculture and independent media production. Aside from editing Mute, she also writes and lectures extensively on culture, media and publishing in the UK and abroad. Recent essays include The Vanishing—on artistic responses to nuclear technology (Locus Solus, Black Dog Publishing) and Art, interrupted on the work of English artist Josephine Pryde. Pauline is currently involved in the metamorphosis of MetaMute from a traditional magazine archive site into something completely different! See more at http://www.metamute.com/.
Simon Worthington, http://hpg.io @mrchristian99 simon@hpg.io, is director of the Hybrid Publishing Group and independent research organisation, specialising in next generation free and open source publishing software product development. He led the free and open source technology section of the Hybrid Publishing Lab as part of the Innovations Inkubator, Leuphana University, Lüneburg (2012-2015). Co-founder of Mute Magazine and Director of Digital at Mute Publishing. Skilled as an artist at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London and at CalArts, Valencia, California. Simon has twenty four years experience in cultural journal publishing, starting at UCL and CalArts. Simon began with experimental digital publishing, online with Mute (1994) and as multi-media CD with Artifice magazine Bartlett Sch. Architecture, UCL (1995). Simon has been an open publishing advocate with cultural journal networks such as Eurozine and as a founding member of MagNet ECP European Cultural Publishing. As a technologist Simon has initiated numerous publishing software projects with Mute. Most recently Progressive Publishing System an ePublishing conversion service—Technology Strategy Board, UK, supported (2012), MoreIsMore an international journal distribution web service—funded by Kennisland NL (2007) and Web2POD a web to Print on Demand publishing service (2005).
Clare Woods teaches courses on classical and medieval Latin literature, manuscript studies, and—new in Spring 2016—the History of the Book. Her research interests center on early medieval literature and culture, and range from establishing texts (Latin sermons in particular) to investigation of the physical contexts and intellectual communities in and through which early medieval texts were disseminated. Clare is currently exploring digital technologies to map early medieval intellectual networks. She is enthusiastic about the digital future of scholarship, and what that means for the way we write, present and publish our research. Clare also brings her interest in the production, reworking/reception and dissemination of ancient and medieval stories and narratives to the Franklin Humanities Institute’s new Story Lab as one of its co-directors.
Soenke Zehle, who draws on perspectives from comparative literature, philosophy, and translation, has current media-theoretical research interests that include the role played by media architectures in framing our communicative modes of relation and the dynamics of commoning. Lecturer in Media Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Saar, he also co-initiated and currently works as Managing Director of the academy's xm:lab–Experimental Media Lab as well as K8, a non-profit company with a focus on educational research and critical design. He frequently co-develop projects with his academy colleagues from Communication Design, Fine Arts, Media Art and Design, Media Informatics and Product Design with a particular interest in practice-based and transcultural approaches.