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Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities

Official Book Companion Site

Marsha Kinder, Tara McPherson, Andrew Myers, Authors

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Interactive Frictions Conference Participants

Editors Note: This page archives biographies of participants in the Interactive Frictions Conference as of 1999. More recent biographies of authors contributed to the anthology volume are available here.

Mark Amerika is the author of many books including the novels Sexual Blood and The Kafka Chronicles. In 1993, he started The Alt-X Online Publishing Network (http://www.altx.com). In 1997 he launched the highly-acclaimed Grammatron hyper-media narrative project (http://www.grammatron.com). He has recently presented and exhibited his online art projects in many venues including the Ars Electronica Festival, the International Symposium of Electronic Art, SIGGRAPH 98, Virtual Worlds 98, and the Adelaide Arts Festival in Australia. His new web-project, PHON:E:ME, is a streaming audio installation for network-distributed environments.


Steve Anderson is a filmmaker and doctoral candidate in Film, Literature and Culture at USC. He is currently completing a dissertation titled History Written With Lightning: Film, Television and the Construction of the Past and a companion multimedia project, U.S. Out of North America. He has written for Film and History, Film Quarterly, Filmmaker and Res and is currently editing an issue of Spectator devoted to the representation of history in film, television and new media.


Julia Bernstein is a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked as the KCSB radio promotions director, a d.j., and a news reporter. She has also been a reporter for the Daily Nexus and the Santa Barbara News Press. Most recently, her experiences with digital media have consisted of an internship with Active Internet Marketing, a web design company in Goleta, and creating a web page for Professor Anna Everett's class at UCSB.


Michael Blitz is a Professor of English and Thematic Studies at John Jay College, CUNY. He has published several books of poetry, including Partitions and Five Days in the Electric Chair, as well as numerous essays on rhetoric and composition. His most recent book is Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age with C. Mark Hurlbert.


Ian Bogost is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His research includes instability and excess in literary and cultural spheres, hyper-textuality, and the fiction of Italo Calvino as a model for new media narrative. In addition to creating artwork and programming on Internet projects for large corporations, he has given several lectures and presentations to advertising agency art departments on new creative methods for approaching the web medium.


Michelle Citron is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose work includes Daughter Rite and What You Take for Granted. Her work is distributed in seven countries and is in the permanent collection of over two hundred universities and film schools. She is professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, where she is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. She is the author of Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions.


Rosemary Comella has, since 1994, worked as principal of HyperReal Media in all aspects of multimedia production, with an emphasis on art related CD-ROM projects. She has collaborated extensively with artist George Legrady on his CD-ROM and installation projects. She has also worked with Lynn Hershman Leeson on her companion CD-ROM to the book Clicking In, and Antonio Muntadas' anthology CD-ROM to be published by the Pompidou, Paris. Currently, she is working with a social researcher creating an interactive project sponsored by the National Institute for Cancer which attempts to teach women about issues of breast cancer.


Sharon Cumberland is an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Poetry at Seattle University. Her publications include North American Desire for the Spanish Other: Three film versions of Blasco Ibanez' Blood and Sand, Poetry on Display: Typography as Tone of Voice, and The Arithmetic of Mourning. She has published poetry in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Verse, and on the Internet at Poetry Daily and The Cortland Review. She has participated in the interactive narrative, Zorro Returns, and is developing a series of articles on Spanish stereotypes in American film.


Anne-Marie Duguet received her doctorate in the Sociology of Art from the University of Tours and has taught at the University of Paris 1, Sorbonne since 1970. Her teaching is focused mainly on electronic image (video and television) and computer works (computer graphics and interactive installations), and examines the incidence of new media on contemporary art. Duguet is director of Anarchive, a series of CD ROMs with artists, co-authored with Muntadas of the Interom Media Architecture Installations Anarchive n°1. Her books include: Vidéo, la mémoire au poing, Jean-Christophe Averty, Paysages virtuels, Jeffrey Shaw A user's manual-eine Gebrauchsanweisung, and From expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality.


Anna Everett is an Assistant Professor of film and television history and theory at UCSB. Her book, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of African American Film Criticism, 1909-1949, is forthcoming from Duke University Press this year. She is the founding editor of Screening Noir, an on-line and print newsletter of African Diasporic visual culture. She is currently completing a manuscript, Digital Diasporas: A Race for Cyberspace, under contract with SUNY University Press.


Mary Flanagan is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Arts in the Department of Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo. She teaches courses in animation, cyberculture, interactive media, gender and technology, digital storytelling/interactive narrative, and sound design. Her published work appears as article text, virtual performance, web sites, and CD-ROMs.


Eric Freedman is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at Florida Atlantic University. He is currently at work on a manuscript on the aesthetics and politics of public access cable television, an excerpt of which is included in The Television Studies Book. He has also published articles on television and popular culture in a number of anthologies, contributed columns to Filmmaker and Daily Variety, and edited a special issue of Spectator on queer theory. Dr. Freedman is also an independent video maker and former public access producer.


Mark Hansen is a theorist who is working on the "new media ecology." He is especially interested in using non-print based forms of media (including hypertext fiction, video art, cybernetic body art, etc.) to challenge traditional assumptions of literary study. In his forthcoming book, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, he develops a critique of what he calls the "machine reduction of technology" or "technesis" in literary and cultural theory from Freud and Heidegger to Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze-Guattari. He teaches courses on postmodernism, contemporary fiction and nonliterary culture, and new media.


N. Katherine Hayles teaches and writes on relations between literature and science in the twentieth century. Her books include The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contempoary Literature and Science, Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics between Literature and Science, and How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. She is currently at work on a book project entitled Linking Bodies: Hypertext in Print and New Media.


Vilsoni Hereniko is Associate Professor at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawaii where he teaches Pacific literature, film, and theater. Hereniko's two most recent books are Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma and Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Power in the New Pacific. In addition to being a scholar, he is the editor of a prominent series on Pacific Island literature as well as a playright and writer of fiction.


Fran Ilich is the general director of Cinematik, the first cyberculture festival in Latin America. He is the author of the best-selling novel Metro-Pop and writer of the series InterAccisn. In 1997, he won second place in the first Latin American screenplay contest. His film Una Ciudad sin Estilo was shown in the Next 5 Minutes Film Festival in Amsterdam and is part of the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis collection. He currently writes about cyber-culture and global issues and produces Modem Drama, which initially started as a pilot for HIP TV and Digital Entertainent Network.


Adriene Jenik is a media artist who has been working for over a dozen years as an artist, teacher, curator, administrator and activist. She is currently an artist/educator employed in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. The artistic projects which have emerged from her ideas, interests and involvements exist outside of the purely aesthetic or entertainment realms. Her greatest hope is that they would serve as catalysts of community and interpersonal understanding during their creation and reception. She enjoys creating with others, making music, TV or Internet theater, and is proud to have been involved in many successful collaborations.


Henry Jenkins is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and is the Friedlaender Professor of the Humanities at MIT. He is currently completing The Virtual Screening Room, an interactive textbook for teaching film analysis. He is the author or editor of seven books on various aspects of film, television, digital media, and other forms of popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, The Children's Culture Reader, and Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Among his current book projects are an intellectual biography of Doctor Seuss and an overview of popular culture in the digital age.


Isaac Julien is an internationally known artist, filmmaker, writer and scholar. His films include the recent Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, the Cannes prizewinning Young Soul Rebels and the acclaimed poetic documentary Looking for Langston. His recent video installations have been shown internationally in contemporary art galleries and museums. He has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard's Schools of Afro-American and Visual and Environmental Studies and a research fellow of Fine Arts at Oxford Brooks University. Julien's research and work on Frantz Fanon led to New York University and the Ford Foundation funding a large international conference in 1997 in which an interdisciplinary approach to post colonial history, theory and contemporary arts practice was established and a proto-type CD-ROM made.


Yasmin Kafai is on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, where she also heads KIDS (Kids Interactive Design Studios), a research group dedicated to exploring interactive multimedia design environments for young children. She recently published and edited two books, Minds in Play: Computer Game Design as a Context for Children's Learning and Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking and Learning in a Digital World (with Mitchel Resnick), and various articles in the fields of education, developmental psychology, computer and information science.


Glenn Kaino has exhibited work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Track 16 Gallery, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, among others. He collaboratively runs an art space called Deep River in downtown Los Angeles, and is the Co-President of the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. He is the Internet consultant for Fox Broadcasting Company and has produced and directed numerous commercial projects. His interactive project, Thaw, recently appeared in the Rotterdam International Film Festival. He is working on an upcoming solo exhibition, developing a screenplay, and is involved in his first recording project. He has served as an instructor at both UCLA and USC. He is represented by Rosamund Felsen Gallery.


Marsha Kinder is Professor of Critical Studies in USC's School of Cinema-Television and Director of the Labyrinth Project, the three-year research initiative at the Annenberg Center for Communication that is sponsoring this Conference and Exhibit. In conjunction with this project, she is also producing three electronic fictions in collaboration with independent filmmakers Nina Menkes and Pat O'Neill and novelist John Rechy. She recently co-authored and codirected (with Mark Jonathan Harris) an alternative CD-ROM game for teens called Runaways, which explores issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity. Her most recent publications include Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Kids' Media Culture. She is general editor of the Cine-Discs series of bilingual CD-ROMs on national media cultures, whose first title was her own Blood Cinema: Exploring Spanish Film and Culture.


Norman Klein is a professor at California Institute of the Arts, author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and Erasure of Memory, and Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. He is completing his next book, The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects, along with other projects: The Freud-Lissitzky Navigator (with Lev Manovich); a DVD on Los Angeles (with Stephen Mamber); and an art guidebook, Missing Los Angeles: A Guide to Ruins, Fragments and Obliterated Structures.


The Koenig Brothers The Koenig Brothers are the founders of Gigawatt Studios - a digital production studio which has released several titles, including Men in Black: The Game, Pinky and the Brain: World Conquest, Fox Arcade Sci-Fi Pinball and a location-based ride for DisneyQuest, Disney's newest theme park. David Koenig, Gigawatt's CEO and Executive Producer, was honored in 1995 as one of the "Top 100 Producers" by Multimedia Producer magazine. His educational background includes a BA from UC Santa Cruz, as well as Masters degrees in International Affairs and History from Columbia University. Yoni Koenig, Gigawatt's President and Art Director, received top honors at Autodesk's International Caddy Competition for Theatrical Animation in 1993 and was named to the Alias A-List at SIGGRAPH in 1995. He holds an associate degree in fine arts from Munson, Williams and Proctor Institute, a BFA degree from the New York School of Visual Arts, and an MFA from Hunter College.


Louise Krasniewicz is an anthropologist and award winning artist and digital media producer. She is currently the Director of the Digital Archaeology Lab in UCLA's Institute of Archaeology. Her anthropological research focuses on issues of narrative, symbolism, and crisis in contemporary American communities, as well as issues of digital media representation and virtual reality. She is interested in alternative forms of academic publishing and presentation, and has created and presented numerous digital media alternatives to the academic paper, including Pregnant Men: The Social Alchemy of Male Birthing, and The (Unauthorized) Autobiography of Consciousness for the American Anthropological Association.


George P. Landow is Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. A Faculty Fellow at Brown University's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship from 1985 to 1992, he worked as a member of the team that developed Intermedia. He supervised, edited, and partially wrote various hypermedia documents on this system. His books on interactive media include: Hypermedia and Literary Studies (edited with Paul Delany), Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities, Hyper/Text/Theory, and Hypertext in Hypertext.


Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher, writer and co-founder/VP of Purple Moon. Her work focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction, and cultural aspects of technology. As one of the founding members of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation, she coordinated research exploring gender and technology, and co-produced and directed the Placeholder Virtual Reality Project. In 1990 she co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc. to develop virtual reality and remote presence technology and applications.She has worked as a software designer, producer, and researcher for companies including Atari, Activision, and Apple. She is editor of The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design and author of Computers as Theatre and a collection of essays titled, Severed Heads.


Erik Loyer is an award-winning digital media artist and Creative Director for the Los Angeles office of Razorfish, Inc., a leading international digital developer. Erik has a strong body of experimental, non-commercial new media work that explores the creative potential unleashed by the advent of digital communications. His most recent Web site, The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (http://www.thegrid.net/orion17), won a 1998 New Media Invision Silver Award, has been shown in several film and new media festivals, and was selected for addition to the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Erik's prior independently-produced CD-ROM, aug 6 1991, was also shown in the 1996 L.A. Freewaves Festival.


Peter Lunenfeld is one of the coordinators of the Graduate Program in Communication & New Media Design at Art Center College of Design. He is the founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group, director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (ITA), and last year co-chaired Scripted Spaces: An ITA Conference on Entertainment Design, Narrative Architecture, and Virtual Environments. Editor of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, he writes User, a regular column for art/text. His book, Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures is forthcoming from the MIT Press.


Laird Malamed is a graduate of MIT and first became interested in interactive products while playing mainframe games at a relative's bank in the late 1970s. He wrote his first game in 1981. At USC's School of Cinema-Television, he became the lead programmer on Reframing Roger Rabbit, a HyperCard-based Critical Studies project. Laird left USC to work as a television sound editor on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and later landed a job at video game maker Activision, where he was Technical Director of Zork Nemesis and Director of Zork Grand Inquisitor. He is currently the Brand Manager for the Star Trek franchise at Activision.


Stephen Mamber is a Professor in the Critical Studies Program of the Department of Film and Television at UCLA. He is the author of Cinema Verite in America and numerous articles of film and television criticism. He has been active for a long time in the area of multimedia, and has written a variety of tools and applications for the study of films in a digital environment. He has recently completed two web projects, Instrument of War: The True Story of the Yuba City Draft Board Murders and Center for Hidden Camera Research, and also worked on projects under a grant from the Intel Research Council.


Lev Manovich is an artist, theorist and critic of new media. He has published more than thirty articles which have been translated into many languages and reprinted in sixteen countries. In his writings, Manovich places new media within the larger context of modern visual culture, relating it to the histories of art and cinema. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego where he teaches studio and theory classes in new media. Currently he is working on a book titled The Language of New Media.


José Marquez is a founding member of the arts and writing collaboration, South to the Future. He has written essays for the Guggenheim Museum and created an artist book CD-ROM about Las Vegas. He has also designed multimedia teaching curricula for the San Francisco Mayor's Office of Community Development, and the Williams College Center for Technology in the Arts and Humanities. His curriculum design work for Williams was the subject of a New York Times Magazine article and his work on The Real was showcased on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation.


Alison McMahan is an Associate Professor and the M.A. Program Director for the Film and Television Department at the University of Amsterdam, where she participated in the design of the New Media Major. Her interactive media production experience includes writer/producer of Hands-On, a series of educational CD-ROMs on art and science topics, and production administrator for Interactive Medical Communication's analog interactive production for the New York City Transit Authority. She is currently writing a book, A Narratology of Interactive Media, to be published in the Fall of 1999 by Amsterdam University Press.


Tara McPherson is an Assistant Professor in the Critical Studies Division of USC's School of Cinema-TV. She teaches courses in gender and cultural studies, television and new media. Her book, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Place and Femininity in the Deep South, will be published by Duke University Press. She is also a co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, forthcoming from Duke, and is writing a book exploring the role of place, race, and gender in new technologies. She is Co-organizer of this conference and an associate producer on The TV Dinner Party, a multimedia art project.


Patricia Mellencamp is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her books include: Fine Romance, about women and contemporary cinema, and High Anxiety, an analysis of electronic culture via an economics of obsession that draws on Freud and Simmel. She is currently writing about death, money, and the stockmarket, along with digital art sites.


Pedro Meyer is probably the first photographer to swim from the shores of analog photography to those of the digital world. He was responsible for creating the Latin American Colloquia of Photography and founded the Mexican Council of Photography. He has been a teacher over the past three decades in various parts of the world and is creator of the first CD-ROMs with photographs and sound, I Photograph to Remember and Truths and Fictions. He has created a web site dedicated to photography known as ZoneZero, which presents the work of photographers, artists and writers from all over the world.


Jan Millsapps is an award winning television producer/director, an independent filmmaker, a writer and a graphic designer. She has taught filmmaking and animation at the University of South Carolina and San Francisco State University, and is currently Director of Creative Arts Computing. In 1999 she co-produced "Pleasure Island," a virtual community and on-line performance piece (with Randall Packer). Her films and videos have been screened internationally and have won major awards.


Margaret Morse is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture and the editor and principle author of Hardware, Software, Artware, as well as numerous articles on subjects ranging from aerobics and interactive art to posthuman pain and electronic empathy.


Erika Dalya Muhammad is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and an instructor in the Graduate Communications Department at The New School for Social Research. Her work examines strategies of race, nation and representation in visual media and investigates issues of access and public policy around new media technologies. Her work on new media by artists of color will be published in the forthcoming volume, Strategies of Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video.


Janet H. Murray is Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative Technology (PAINT) in MIT's Center for Educational Computing Initiatives. She is a pioneer of multimedia computing in the humanities and has won several awards for her work in interactive design. Her recently published, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, is based in part on her course in Interactive Narrative, which has been offered at MIT since 1992. She lectures and consults widely on interactive design and applications of new media. In the Fall she will be joining the Information Design and Technology program at Georgia Tech University.


Alok b. Nandi is a multi-media writer/director. His work, <www.urbicande.be>, an interactive fiction based on Obscure Cities, has received much acclaim and several awards. He has directed websites based on comic strips/graphic novels exploring science-fiction, thriller, humor, eroticism, and children's stories. His current projects include the conception of Tokyo Vignettes, interactive narratives, and the writing/ direction of a documentary, solvyns@calcutta. He is also a media writer and columnist for Inside Internet and Publish.


Michael Nash has an extensive background in new media through his work as executive, entrepreneur and producer. From 1994 to 1997, Nash was President and CEO of Inscape, an acclaimed new media entertainment partnership he formed with the Warner Music Group and HBO. He has authored numerous publications on the digital revolution, media arts and contemporary culture and served as Creative Director of the AFI's inaugural California Digital Arts Workshop. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Madison Project, an alliance of major music labels and IBM, to conduct trials of secure electronic music distribution technology.


Marcos Novak is a transarchitect, artist, and theorist investigating the emerging tectonics of technologically augmented space. Widely regarded as a pioneer of the architecture of virtuality, he is the leading proponent of virtual environments as autonomous architectural spaces and of the Internet as an unprecedented, non-local, transurban, public domain. Combining elements of architecture, music, and computation, his work investigates non-Euclidean conceptions of space and algorithmic emergence and morphogenesis. He is honorary co-president of the Transarchitectures Association in Paris and a visiting professor in the school of architecture at UCLA. He lectures and exhibits worldwide.


Christina Olsen is the Content Editor of Art Access, the J. Paul Getty Museum's educational interactive resource for museum visitors. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, and taught at the University in 1995. After deciding that an academic position was not what she wanted, she began working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in their multimedia lab, where she was the Associate Producer on the Museum's CD-ROM Voices and Images of California Art.


Jan Olsson is a Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. He has published a handful of books, primarily on silent cinema. He is currently editing Allegories of Communications: Intermedial Concerns from Pre-Cinema to the Digital (University of California Press) and Nordic Refractions with John Fullerton for John Libbey, London.


Randall Packer has worked as a media artist and curator/producer, focusing on the integration of live performance, technology and the interdisciplinary arts. He has co-produced and composed music for CD-ROM under the Chronic Art series, and, in 1997, completed the collaborative sound-text work, Through Invisible Cities. This fall his collaborative work Mori will be included in the 1999 Biennial Exhibition at the Inter-Communication Center in Tokyo, Japan. He is currently Lecturer in Digital Media at the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, where he teaches the history, theory and practice of interactive media.


Lisa Parks is an Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book manuscript, Cultures in Orbit: Satellite Technologies and Visual Media, is currently in review by Duke University Press. In addition to her work on satellite media, she has written about the interactive CD-ROMs, For All Mankind and Inside the Hubble Telescope, both of which involve narratives of space travel. At UCSB, she is developing a course called Video Art and Activism, in which students will produce multi-media projects.


Jon Pengelly is currently a Research Fellow in Fine Art at The Center for Research in Art and Design at Gray School of Art. He is principally concerned with the continued development of practice-based research within Fine Art and the integration of digital media into his creative practice. These concerns range from developing print related work using CAD/CAM technologies to the development of interactive installation art works and setting up collaborative science-art projects, such as Lateral Transfer, Seeing the Unseen and Touching the Untouchable, and My Only Skin.


Mark Pesce is an Internet visionary and co-creator of VRML. He was the co-recipient of Meckler's Market Impact Award for Virtual Reality, and was recently named one of Network Computing's Most Influential People in Networking. For his work on WebEarth, which creates a real-time VRML model of the planet, Pesce received an Honorable Mention from the Ars Electronica Foundation. Author of three books, most recently he was selected as one of the ID 40 for 1997 by International Design magazine. He was recently appointed to chair the Interactive Media Program at the USC School of Cinema-Television. 


Dana Polan is the chairperson of the Division of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. He has a Doctorat d'Etat in cinema studies from the Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is at work on a BFI Modern Classics volume on Pulp Fiction. 


Michael Renov is a Professor of Critical Studies in USC's School of Cinema-Television. He is the editor of Theorizing Documentary, co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices and Collecting Visible Evidence and author of the forthcoming Documenting Subjectivity. In 1998, Renov organized Eye & Thou: Jewish Autobiography in Film an Video, the USC Institute for the Study of Jews in American Life's inaugural event, and is coediting a book from that conference. Since 1995, Renov has collaborated with artist Wendy Clarke to create L.A. Link, a project connecting L.A.-area youth from diverse backgrounds via computer-based, interactive video technology. 


Sheldon Schiffer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the Digital Arts and Entertainment Laboratory at Georgia State University. While living in New York City in 1994-96, he co-founded a company that developed commercial web sites which in turn sustained his creation of more experimental projects. From 1996-98, he was the New Media Manager of the Department of Film and Television at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. His recent completed projects include The Old Road, The Black Velvet Flag Game, and dos, tres, many Guevaras.


Thecla Schiphorst is a computer media artist whose work includes interactive installation, performance, and software design. She is Assistant Professor in Interactive Arts at the Technical University of British Columbia. She is the co-founder of Digital Earth, a new non-profit cultural society, as well as co-curator of the web-based project, The Ecology of Communications. She is a member of the original design team that developed Life Fors, the computer compositional tool for animation and choreography. Her other recent interactive works include Felt Histories, immerce, and Bodymaps: Artifacts of Touch. 


Jeffrey Sconce teaches film and television studies at the University of Southern California. His forthcoming book, Television Ghosts: Electronic Media and the Mythology of Presence, discusses the cultural history of electronic presence in telecommunications technologies. 


Ellen E. Seiter is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches media studies and women's studies. She specializes in the study of children and the media, and is the author of Television and New Media Audiences and Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Studies, Feminist Review, Screen, and Frauen und Film. Seiter has consulted for Sega of America, Microsoft, and Interval Research Corporation.


Lynn Spigel is a Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema-Television at the USC. She is author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. She just completed a book of essays, Sitting Room Only: Television, Consumer Culture, and the Suburban Home, for Duke University Press, and is currently writing High and Low TV: Modern Art and Commercial Television, 1950-1970, and a monograph on I Love Lucy for the British Film Institute.


Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone is Associate Professor and Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) at UT Austin, Resident Senior Artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Resident Fellow during Fall 1998 at the Humanities Research Institute, UC Irvine. In various incarnations she has been a filmmaker, rock 'n roll music engineer, neurologist, social scientist, cultural theorist, and performer. She is the author of numerous publications including The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto and The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.


Ellen Strain is an Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech's Information Design and Technology program, a graduate course of study that marries media theory and practice in the areas of multimedia, digital video, and web design. While at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center, she was co-project director of a web-based exhibit of Japanese prints mirroring the Fisher Gallery's Light in Darkness: Japanese Prints of the Showa Period exhibit. Continuing her curatorial work in new media, she has hosted Videopticon, an Atlanta area digital video art festival. Her current project is a large scale pedagogical project that uses digital media to make visible the filmic form that has been obscured by the use of video within film studies.


Marita Sturken is Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering and the forthcoming Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright). She has written about cultural memory, video art, art and technology for such publications as Afterimage, Representations, Social Text, History and Theory, and Positions.


Douglas Thomas is Assistant Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. He is author of Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically and Hacking Culture, a study of the cultural, social, and political dimensions of computer hacking. Currently, he is working on Technology and New Media, a survey of recent approaches to technology and new media and their impacts on society, and Viral Style: Information, Subculture, and the Politics of Infection, which examines the underground production of computer viruses and cultural responses to them.


Vivian Sobchack is an Associate Dean and Professor of Film and Television Studies at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her work focuses on film and media theory and its intersections with philosophy, perceptual studies, historiography, and electronic culture. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; two edited anthologies, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event; and forthcoming, Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change. She is currently completing a collection of her own essays called Carnal Thoughts: Bodies, Texts, Scenes and Screens.


Björn Thuresson is a doctoral student in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. He currently works at the Centre for User Oriented IT Design at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) on his dissertation, Digital Stories: Narrating in a Digital Environment, as well as on several projects with different industrial partners. He also teaches at KTH, Department of Cinema Studies, Konstfack (a university college for arts, crafts, design, and art education), and the Dramatic Institute.


Alison Trope received her PhD in Critical Studies from USC. Her research focuses on the place of film and new technologies in the museum and other alternative venues. Her essay, "Museum (Dis)Play: Imagining the Museum on CD-ROM," recently appeared in the anthology, On A Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology. She is currently Associate Producer of the Labyrinth Project and TV Dinner Party, and co-organizer of the Interactive Frictions conference and exhibition.


Yuri Tsivian has a PhD in film studies from the Institute of Theater, Music and Cinema, Leningrad. His recent books are Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, and in collaboration with Yuri Lotman, Dialogues with the Screen. His most recent work includes the bilingual CD ROM, Immaterial Bodies: Cultural Anatomy of Early Russian Films. He is the chair of film studies at the University of Chicago.


Mika Tuomola is a new media script writer/director, also a frequently requested consultant, lecturer and writer. Among his most recognized works are the award winning web drama Daisy's Amazing Discoveries (http://daisy.uiah.fi/) and the philosophical strategy game, Socrates. In 1998, Mika completed his research Commedia dell'Arte as a Design Metaphor for Multiuser Virtual Worlds, ordered by ICL-Fujitsu. The research has developed a design methodology for the avatar world production under planning in the new media production company, Coronet Interactive Ltd., Mika's current employer.


James Verdon is an artist and academic working primarily with electronic media and emerging technologies, often utilizing light as a primary interactive element. He is Course Coordinator and teaches both theory and studio components of Electronic Design and Interactive Media in the Arts Department at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He is also a Masters student in Media Arts at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is currently preparing installations for exhibition in 1999, including a permanent installation for the new Museum of Victoria, works for the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, for Bedig Art Gallery, and Stripp Gallery in Melbourne. 


Karen Voss is a doctoral candidate in Critical Studies at USC's School of Cinema-Television. She is completing a dissertation on 1970s American urbanism, national identity and contemporary American film, emphasizing the "urbanized" West. She recently edited an issue of Spectator titled Street Smarts: Visual Media and the Urban Imagination and has published articles in Wide Angle, Enclitic, and Filmmaker Magazine. She is currently working with USC's New Literacy Project to pilot the integration of multimedia and production in undergraduate honors courses.


Fabian Wagmister is an audiovisual communicator particularly interested in the expressive specificity of digital media. He was the driving force behind the Laboratory For New Media at UCLA and is the principal investigator for the HyperMedia Studio research project. He recently developed a database-driven installation called ...two, three, many Guevaras. He is also concerned with the absorption, uses and impact that digital technology will have in the Third World. He works with groups throughout Latin America and writes about culturally empowering technological strategies. 


Femke Wolting is the Programmer of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and curator of Exploding Cinema, which deals with the boundaries of the moving image and beyond. She is also a staff member of VPRO-Digital, a research department focusing on the effect of information and communication technology on production, distribution, and consumption of media within the context of a Dutch public broadcasting organization. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Lifesavers, a project in which mediamakers and artists create innovative interactive programs for the Internet. She has been involved in several projects for VPRO-Television, including De Nieuwe Wereld and Laatop De Avond Na En Korte Wandeling. 


R. Michael Young is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University. His previous work has focused on the connection between communication and action and has dealt specifically with the generation of discourse describing complicated plans in effective ways. His current research extends these notions in computational and cognitive models of agent-to-human discourse in collaborative settings and computational models of narrative. 


Eric Zimmerman is a commercial game designer, artist, and academic exploring the emerging field of game design. His commercial work includes on-line multi-player games, educational games, and CD-ROMs, including the award-winning Gearheads. His first boardgame will be published by Semiotext(e) in 1999. He teaches at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and has lectured and published widely on games, interactive narrative, and digital culture. 

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