Symposium Co-Chairs

Randall Packer, multimedia artist, composer, writer and educator, has worked at the intersection of interactive media, Internet art and culture, and live performance since the 1980s. He has received international acclaim for his socially and politically infused critique of an increasingly technological society, and has performed and exhibited at museums, theaters, and festivals throughout the world. Packer is also a writer and scholar in new media, most notably the co-editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality and the author of his long running blog: Reportage from the Aesthetic Edge. He is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he teaches networked art practice.

Keynotes

jonCates is the Chair of the Film, Video, New Media & Animation department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, known as the most influential art college in the United States. His projects are presented internationally in cities such as Aix-en-Provence, Austin, Berlin, Beijing, Boston, Cairo, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Linz, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mexico City, New York, Vienna and Warsaw, and widely available online. His research and writings appear online and in print publications from MIT Press, Gestalten, The Penn State University Press, Intellect Books and Unsorted Books. In 2005 he created the concept of Dirty New Media and is widely recognized as developing concepts, communities and discourses of Glitch Art.

Steve Dixon is a world-renowned academic, researcher and interdisciplinary artist with a distinguished career in both higher education leadership and the professional creative industries. He has been President of the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore since 2012. Following a successful career as an actor and award-winning director of film and digital media productions, Steve became an academic in 1991. He established an international reputation for his research in the use of media and computing technologies in the performing arts, and is co-founder of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge). His 800-page book Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Installation (MIT Press) is recognised as the most comprehensive scholarly work on the subject and won international awards including the Association of American Publishers Award for Excellence in Music and the Performing Arts.

Peter Looker is currently the Head of the Teaching, Learning and Pedagogy Division at NTU. For twenty years he was a faculty member at the University of New South Wales teaching English Literature, Drama and Film. Since 2002, he has worked in faculty development at UNSW, the University of Newcastle, and as a consultant at City University Hong Kong. His research interests are in student assessment, academic identity, and cultural difference in higher education.

Session Chairs & Panelists

Tim White is a Professor of Materials Science at Nanyang Technological University where he teaches crystallography, electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction to undergraduate and graduate students.  In 2006, he introduced a suite of teaching modules for materials scientists called On-line Micro- and Nano-characterisation Instruction (OMNI) that were extended by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council to create MyScope, a national curriculum for blended learning in microscopy and imaging. Tim developed the first comprehensive on-line course at NTU called Symmetry and Crystals from which this MOOC on Beauty, Form and Function: An Exploration of Symmetry evolved.

Anne Balsamo, dean of media studies at the New School for Liberal Studies, is a groundbreaking national leader in media studies, a scholar and media-maker whose work links cultural studies, digital humanities, and interactive media. In 2011, she published Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, a transmedia book (with accompanying DVD and web linkages to interactive media projects) that synthesizes and theorizes the links between her cultural studies scholarship and digital media projects. She is a co-facilitator of the DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) project, exploring histories of feminist engagements with technology and cultural innovation: a feminist rethinking of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that has been widely used in distance learning education.

Deborah Howes is Director of Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Previously she was Assistant Director and full-time faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies program. She has over 25 years of museum experience, and prior to coming to Johns Hopkins, she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where as the Museum Educator in charge of Educational Media, she led an interdisciplinary 25-member team of educators, producers and technicians to create award-winning educational materials in print, video and web formats for both inside and outside museum use.

David A. Ross, Chair of the MFA Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has more than 30 years experience as an art museum professional and has served as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He is noted as a pioneering curator of new media and video art, overseeing Bill Viola’s 25 Year Retrospective Exhibition that originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Anne-Marie Schleiner is engaged in gaming and net culture in a variety of roles as a cultural critic, curator, anti-war activist, and gaming artist/designer. She has taught at universities and artist workshops and participated in art residencies in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Mexico. She has exhibited in international galleries, museums and festivals, most recently at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona. Documentation of her performative culture work is available on the Video Data Bank. She holds a doctorate in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam, is currently working on two book projects, and teaches game design in the Communication and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore.

Marc Garrett is co-director and co-founder of the Internet arts collectives and communities – Furtherfield.org, Furthernoise.org, Netbehaviour.org, also co-founder and co-curator/director of the gallery space formerly known as ‘HTTP Gallery’ now called the Furtherfield Gallery in London (Finsbury Park), UK. He has c-curated various contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, projects nationally and internationally. He is currently working on an Art history Phd at the University of London, Birkbeck College.

Ruth Catlow is Co-founder and Artistic Director of the Furtherfield online community for arts, technology and social change since 1997, now also a public gallery in the heart of Finsbury Park, North London. She is an artist working with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics in arts, technology and social change, informing artistic, research and organisational developments to engender shared visions and infrastructures.

Alex Adriaansens studied at the Royal Academy for Art and Design in ‘s Hertogenbosch (NL). With Joke Brouwer he is one of the founders of V2_. Art, science and technology and how they critique and construct the realities we live in is a major point of interest in his presentations. As the artistic director he’s also responsible for the DEAF bi-annual festival one of the major European festivals on art, science and technology.

McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media at the New School for Liberal Arts, New York is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for his writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. Gamer Theory combined Wark’s interest in experimental writing techniques in networked media with his own developing media theory.

Charlotte Frost is an academic focusing on contemporary and digital arts, art historiography and digital art histories, and media theory. She has worked online and off with a variety of key organisations including the Guardian, Arts Council England, Furtherfield, where she is Associate Context Editor, Rhizome and a-n. A member of the CAA Committee on Intellectual Property, she is also the founder and director of PhD2Published, a web resource offering publishing advice to early-career academics. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media, City Universiy of Hong Kong.

Melinda Rackham has worked in the arts and new technologies arena for thirty years, with an international career as an internet-based artist and scholar investigating intimacy and identity in human and machine relations. In the past decade she has been actively engaged as a curator and producer across the broader spectrum of contemporary art, craft and design practices, working in Australia and China. As her early network art finds a new generation of viewers, Melinda’s focus has shifted back to a creative media arts practice and to writing on the processes of artists and artworks. She is currently writing her first novel.

Featured Artists

Helen Varley Jamieson is a writer, theatre practitioner and digital artist from New Zealand, currently based in Munich, Germany. She completed a Master of Arts (Research) at Queensland University of Technology (Australia) in 2008, investigating her practice of cyberformance (live performance on the internet), and works as an independent artist and researcher. Helen is one of the founders of UpStage, an artist-led open source online platform for cyberformance, and has collaborated in the organisation of six online festivals of cyberformance using UpStage (2007-12). In 2012 she was one of the organisers of the CyPosium, a one-day online symposium about cyberformance and networked performance, after which she co-edited with Annie Abrahams CyPosium – the book, published in 2014 by Link Editions.

Nick Briz && i’m a new_media artist / educator / organizer living + working in chicago, IL. i’m critically obsessed w/the Internet + all my work is re:to digital culture; specifically: digital literacy + ecology, netizen rights, glitch art, net art, remix. i organize events on these topix ( GLI.TC/H, NO-MEDIA, etc ) && teach on these topix ( SAIC, Marwen, www ) && produce work on these topix ( independently && commercially w/Branger_Briz ). my work’s been shown internationally ( FILE Media Arts Festival, the Images Festival, the Museum of Moving Image, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, etc. ) && i’ve been featured in on/off-line publications around the world ( VICE, Rhizome.org, Fast Company, El Mundo, Neural, etc. ). my work is distributed through Video Out Distribution as well as openly and freely on the web.

Joseph Yølk Chiocchi: I am Generative Artist obsessed with scale. I architect and build large scale applications and systems architecture, exploiting the abundance of services available through the cloud. This obsession also allows me to delve into smaller scales such as embedded systems, audio-visual installations, and performances. I am an autodidact who learns programming as a means to an end. I deeply engrossed and concerned with the extent of human ingenuity, the aggressiveness of humanity, and how far the human mind can be pushed.

Juan Camilo González studied Visual Arts at the Javeriana University of Bogotá, Colombia. With the support of the Annenberg Fellowship, he finished in 2011 his MFA in Animation & Digital Arts from the University of Southern California. Director and co-founder of the group Moebius Animación dedicated to exhibit artists, films and research around experimental animation in Latin America and Spain. Currently a PhD candidate at the School of Art Design & Media at NTU in Singapore where his thesis focuses on the theoretical and practical research of data-driven hand drawn animations.

Furtherfield

Based in London, UK, Furtherfield is an alternative arts organization and website for exhibition, discussion and critical review with two physical spaces in the heart of Finsbury Park. The Furtherfield Gallery at the McKenzie Pavilion hosts exhibitions and pop-up up events and Furtherfield Commons is a technology and community space for discussions, workshops and informal residencies. Furtherfield believes that through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and technology people are inspired and enabled to become active co-creators of their cultures and societies. Art and technologies play a central role in the way we see and form our societies, and so it is important that programming and productions involve more, and more diverse people at a fundamental level.