LASER Presenters

Leonardo Art Science Evenings

Past and future program

Biographies

(As they were the day they presented at a LASER)

Dor Abrahamson is currently Assistant Professor of Cognition and Development in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. Abrahamson researches mathematical intuition, reasoning, and learning, the relations among them, and the roles that artifacts can play in facilitating deep conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. Abrahamson holds a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences (Northwestern University) and an M.A. in Cognitive Psychology (Tel Aviv University). He is a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Luca Antonucci is a practicing artist and co-founder of Colpa Press. He received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and is currently in an Artist in Residence at the Kala Art Institute for Printmaking. He resides in San Francisco and was part of a group show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in January. His frequent collaborations with Daniel Small led to their project First Light.
Deborah Aschheim makes drawings, sculptures and installations that try to give form to invisible worlds of the mind and brain. her recent work exploring the subject of memory has led her to collaborate with musicians and neuroscientists on projects that are a mixture of science and poetry. she has exhibited recent projects at the Armory Center and the Pasadena Museum in Pasadena, ca; at the Austin Museum in Texas; the weatherspoon museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis and the mattress factory in Pittsburgh. Aschheim is the Hellman visiting artist at the memory and aging center in the neurology department of UC San Francisco.
Henrik Bennetsen is the CEO of Katalabs and maintains a strong interest in 3D collaborative spaces and open source technology. In a previous life Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self expression augmented by technology.
Jesse Austin and Charles Lee are members of the architecture collective BIOS. Living organisms are distinguished from inanimate objects in that they exhibit metabolism, reproduction, and response to stimuli. Living organisms communicate: depending on feedback to find optimal patterns for their continued existence. They self-organize, living in negative entropy. As designers we find the patterns of life and use them to negotiate the layering of diverse parameters and constraints inherent in architectural design.
Ruzena Bajcsy is director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley
Sam Bower is co-founder and executive director of greenmuseum.org, an online museum of environmental art, launched in 2001. Prior to this, Sam created environmental art for 8 years as part of a San Francisco Bay Area collaborative art group known as Meadowsweet Dairy. He helped found Cellspace, a non-profit community art space in San Francisco, and Co-Directed Crucible Steel Gallery. Sam has worked as a solo artist, puppeteer, web designer, in advertising, events planning and the environmental non-profit sector in the United States and in Ecuador.
Robert Buelteman has published 4 books of photographs and thirteen limited-edition portfolios of his work. He has been honored with three residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the subject of his monograph Eighteen Days in June (2000), as well as a three year residency at the Santa Fe Institute. He is currently working on a new collection of images as a guest of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. His work is found in the permanent collections of he Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Santa Fe Institute, Yale University Art Museum, Stanford University and numerous corporate and private collections as well.
Jim Campbell, who studied Mathematics and Engineering at the MIT, is an electronic artist whose work is included in the collections of several museums around the world. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the USA. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.
Helena Carmena, a former science educator, is the Manager of Teacher Services at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She has been active in curriculum development for use in the museum and classroom setting and has delivered numerous inquiry-based educational programs for children and adults. Helena has worked with many organizations to develop multi-disciplinary curricula. The most recent project has been focused on art, science, and literacy integration in collaboration with the de Young Fine Arts Museum and the San Francisco Unified School District.
Chris Chafe is a composer/ cellist / music researcher with an interest in computer music composition and interactive performance. He has been a long-term denizen of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University where he directs the center and teaches computer music courses. His doctorate in music composition was completed at Stanford in 1983 with prior degrees in music from the University of California at San Diego and Antioch College. Two year-long research periods were spent at IRCAM, and the Banff Center for the Arts developing methods for computer sound synthesis based on physical models of musical instrument mechanics. Two recent discs of his works are available from Centaur Records.
Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist who has been active in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. Recent premieres include a large orchestral work commissioned by the Orchestra Filarmonica of Torino "Ragazzi Incoscienti Scarabocchiano Sulla Porta Di Un Negozio Fallito" "TomBoy" for piano and a video by Terry Berlier, and "Movements", a multimedia work for 16mm film, dan bau and amplified film projectors produced in collaboration with filmmaker Rick Bahto. Chessa has just composed "Come un'Infanzia", a guitar + string quartet piece for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and is collaborating with performance artist Kalup Linzy and the Ensemble Parallele on an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to be premiered at YBCA in August 2011. As a music historian Chessa has written "Luigi Russolo, Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult" (UC Press, 2012). In 2009 Chessa supervised the first reconstruction of Russolo's "intonarumori" orchestra. His recordings include: Humus Destination X (1997), Entu (2000), Tryptique pour Gerard (2008), Peyrano (2008) Money is Money and Time is Time (2008) the dvd Tom's Heart (2008) The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners Vol. 1 (Sub Rosa, 2012).
Irene Chien is a PhD candidate in Film and New Media at UC Berkeley. She writes and teaches about race and gender at the intersection of cinema and new media, including a column "Camera Ludica" for Film Quarterly.
Grisha Coleman, assistant professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and School of Dance at Arizona State University works as a dancer, composer and media artist in performance and experiential media systems and is currently a resident at the Montalvo Arts Center in Silicon Valley. She has created large scale works for a variety of residencies and venues, e.g. the site-specific sound/kinetic installation for public interaction and participation "Reach, Robot", commissioned by the Robotics Institute.
Alan Cooper is an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and consulting professor at Stanford. He has 28 years experience working on Antarctic studies and heads the Antarctic Seismic Data Library System for Cooperative Research under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. He has published more than 250 research papers. Alan is also co-concertmaster of the California Pops Orchestra and performs with the Left Bank trio and Fiume di Musica.
Anna Couey works at the intersection of art, communications, information and social justice, using participatory media tools and story-collecting methods to re-imagine and restructure power. During the 1980s-1990s, she helped develop art telecommunications projects such as the Art Com Electronic Network and Arts Wire, as well as producing temporary cross-cultural communications events as social sculpture. Since the mid-1990's, Anna has applied social sculpture strategies outside the art world, collaborating with alternative media makers; librarians, educators, and youth; and poor and working class communities of color organizing for social justice. Her communication sculptures have been exhibited at digital art festivals internationally, including ISEA and SIGGRAPH.
Mathias Crawford is a researcher in IFTF's Technology Horizons program. Mathias has written extensively about changing patterns of urban mobility, the future of education, and using games to change real world behaviors. He has participated in research into the technological forces that are contributing to changing structures of community support; the nature of collaboration, especially as it is practiced in open source communities and by youth; and the future of mobile communications devices. Mathias has also been integrally involved in development of the Foresight Engine, IFTF's platform for massively collaborative thought experiments that address provocative scenarios about the future.
Beatriz DaCosta is an Associate Professor of Arts, Computation, Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. A former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble and a co-founder of Preemptive Media, she works at the intersection of contemporary art, engineering, politics, and the life sciences.
Sharon Daniel is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice. Her research involves collaborations with communities that focus on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion.
Joe Davis is an artist-researcher who has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for 29 years. He has been a Research Fellow and Lecturer at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and for most of the past two decades, he has been a Research Affiliate at MIT Biology in the laboratory of Alexander Rich. Joe is noted as a pioneer in the field of art and molecular biology. He was the 2008 recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media and has widely published in both artistic and scientific venues.
Terrence Deacon, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University and formerly a neurologist and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, is the author of the seminal book "The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of language and the brain" (2007). His research combines Neurolinguistics, Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, Semiotics and Complex Systems Theory. His work extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language.
Bonnie DeVarco is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and curator and Media X Distinguished Visiting Scholar. With an academic background in cultural anthropology, dance ethnology and archives management, she writes and lectures on Design Science, virtual worlds, next generation geographic information systems, information visualization and the culture of cyberspace. She is currently co-authoring Shape of Thought, on the history and evolution of visual language with Eileen Clegg and is co-editing a book on Ludic Cartographies with Matteo Bittanti and Henry Lowood of the Stanford University's Humanities Lab.
Brad Drda is the environmental manager for Recology San Francisco. He manages energy efficiency and renewable power projects at Recology San Francisco facilities and is an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco's Environmental Management program.
Robert Edgar is a digital media producer presently living in the Bay area. Robert creates and employs software engines to examine mediated artifacts forged at his zone of proximal development. His engines include Memory Theatre One (1985), Living Cinema (1988), Sand, or How Computers Dream of Truth in Cinema (1992), Memory Theatre Two (2003), and Simultaneous Opposites (presently under development). He holds an MFA from Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts, presently works at Stanford University, and teaches at the Art Institute of Sunnyvale.
John Edmark teaches design, color theory, and animation at Stanford University. His creative investigations range from geometric kinetic works and transformable objects, to products for storage, kitchen, and creative play. Previously, he researched 3-D virtual environments at Bell Laboratories. He has Masters degrees in Product Design (Stanford), and Computer Science (Columbia), and is named inventor on nine U.S. utility patents. His other interests include hyper-stereo landscape photography, ultra-light backpacking, and throat singing.
Rachel Beth Egenhoefer is an artist, designer, writer, and educator. Her work explores the intersections between textiles, technology, and the body on historical, constructional and conceptual levels; and often incorporates tactile elements such as candy, knitting, and machines to represent intangible computer codes and conceptual spaces. Egenhoefer is currently an Assistant Professor in Design in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
Ken Eklund is a game designer and a thought leader in the area of serious games and collaborative gameplay for the social good. He is the creator of World Without Oil, a landmark massively collaborative alternate reality game, and currently team lead on EVOKE, "a ten-week crash course on changing the world." Ken has long been interested in the positive social effects of games and open-ended, creative play. Ken and his partner on ZOROP, Annette Mees, both seek ways to use technology to create new narrative forms and experiences - he approaches it as a game designer, she is a director of immersive theater in London. Both believe "participation through play can make stories more personal, meaningful and adventuresome."
Mona El Khafif is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Project Coordinator of the CCA URBANlab, who holds a doctorate in urban design from the TU Vienna. El Khafif worked in architectural offices in Germany and Vienna, on projects which received important urban design awards including the Otto Wagner Urban Design Award for the BUSarchitecture Homeworkers project and the Ortner & Ortner Museumsquartier. El Khafif is a founding principal of phase 1 Fox_El Khafif_Nuhsbaumer, a co-author of URBANbuild local global, and has recently published Staged Urbanism: Urban Spaces for Art, Culture and Consumption in the Age of Leisure Society in Germany.
Hasan Elahi is an assistant professor at San Jose State University's CADRE laboratory for New Media. He is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues worldwide.
Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of Drawing-Projects, which utilize systems developed by the artist that produce complex abstract compositions. Viewer interactivity plays an integral part in his drawing installations, large-scale artworks in which participants influence the outcome of a drawing that is created by a small robot over the duration of an event or exhibition. Foucault has participated in numerous exhibitions nationwide and has curated several art events.
Anne Fougeron has provided architectural services in the Bay Area since her graduation from the Masters program in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley 25 years ago. Currently her firm's work ranges from feasibility studies to new construction projects in the commercial, health care and residential sectors. Some of her major projects include: the two phase remodel of Planned Parenthood MacArthur Clinic started in 1996 and completed in 2003 (winner of several awards), a 2005 award-winning vacation house in Big Sur, mixed-use housing developments and urban planning studies, and supervising the redevelopment effort for San Jose's downtown area. Fougeron has taught architectural design to both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and at the California College of Arts.
Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Formerly an executive in high-technology, using her background in engineering and high-technology she explores science, compulsive organization and the current culture of continual partial attention. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Amerian Academy in Rome, McColl Center for Visual Art, The Lower East Side Printshop, Djerassi Fellowship and the Headlands Center for the Arts. The body of work from her Spring 2011 show at Edward Cella in Los Angeles are experiments in brain rhythm using time studies of daily activity logs and sleep charts. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Frick lives and works in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York.
Linda Gass is an Artist in Residence at the Palo Alto Cubberley Studios. Textiles have been an important part of her life since childhood when her grandmother taught her to sew doll clothes. In her early adult life, she took a detour through the software industry. Linda returned to making textiles 14 years ago, this time for the wall, and now exhibits her work internationally in galleries and museums. She is an avid backpacker and travels extensively in the wilderness areas of the West where she finds much of the inspiration for her work.
Evelyne Gayou is a researcher and electroacoustic composer with a master degree in cinema and a PhD in musicology at the Sorbonne. She is editor in chief of the collection "Portraits Polychromes" books and multimedia documents for INA in Paris. Involved in audiovisual activities as an editor for Radio France for many years, she also performs in concert and lectures at universities. As a GRM member since 1975 she has had the opportunity of collaborating with the experimental musical milieu in Europe, from Pierre Schaeffer to Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in the USA especially with the computer music pioneers, Max Mathews, John Chowning, and many others. She published a history of the discovery and development of Musique Concrete under the title "GRM, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, 50 ans d'histoire" (2007).
Eri Gentry is the founding President and Executive Director of BioCurious, the Bay Area's first bio-hackerspace, where members come to think and create in a collegial, informal setting. Her mission is to make positive change in the world by enabling innovation in science through collaboration and education. Eri serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of SynBERC and is a Citizen Science blogger at MAKEzine. She enjoys forex trading, sailing, and swinging kettlebells. Eri was previously CEO of Livly, a nonprofit biotech on a mission to cure cancer, and received a bachelor's in Economics at Yale.
Zann Gill started her career as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation, including a networked system of urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. She moved to Australia in 1989 to work on a proposal from the Japanese government to the Australian government to build an IT "city of the future", the so-called Multifunction Polis (MFP). At NASA she developed plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. Zann is currently working with Australia's National ICT Center Excellence (NICTA) to reposition the "eco-sustainable city of the future" initiative to harness smart systems technology, ubiquitous computing, and social networks.
Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, where he is currently Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Goldberg's art installations such as the Telegarden have been exhibited. Goldberg is an IEEE Fellow and Vice President of Technical Activities for the Robotics and Automation Society. His PhD is in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Christian Gonzenbach is an experimenter and an explorer at the edge between the normal and the bizarre. It is the unexpected, the little weird thing, that the artist focuses on. Hence he has created installations in which a landscape is made out of corn flakes, a video in which all the people are pickles, that play soccer, go for a dance or a boxing match, etc. His works look familiar but always disorient the viewer.
Laura Granka is a User Experience Researcher at Google, Inc, and is working towards her PhD at Stanford University. She has spent the past seven years studying how people look for information, specifically in online search environments. Laura has approached information discovery through several research methodologies, including the behavioral (eyetracking), the implicit (clickthrough data), and the qualitiative (ethnography). Laura has applied these key learnings towards improving UI design and result ranking algorithms while at Google. She has authored over 20 publications and presentations on this topic.
Kathelin Gray, artistic director, Theatre of All Possibilities, is known for her wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaborations involving performance, music, science and installations. She is co-founder of October Gallery and Institute of Ecotechnics in London, October Galley in London, Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe, Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center in Texas, and more. Theatre of All Possibilities is a 35-year-old international performance and event production company (www.allpossibilities.org). She has traveled all over the world, organised 30 interdisciplinary conferences, been selected as one of the most innovative CEO's by the Tarrytown 100, served on the board of directors to the Biosphere 2 project.
Bathsheba Grossman is a mathematical sculptor, instantiating her own designs as well as scientific illustrations as 3D physical objects. She is a pioneer in the use of freeform fabrication in metal for art, as well as 3D laser etching in glass.
Minna Harri received an MFA in Performance and Theory from Theater Academy Helsinki in her native Finland, relocated to San Francisco in 2008 via Amsterdam in the Netherlands (2003-2008) and has since created several choreographies in different locations in the Bay Area, as well as danced for choreographers Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit (Goldie winner 2010) and Macklin Kowal. Her previous projects have included dance: Life Sustenance, Raja, Everything Under Control that represented Theater Academy Helsinki in Warsaw Theater Schools Festival in 2003, singing in the group Calle Real (2003-2006), three solo shows in galleries in Helsinki (1998, 1999, 2001), published articles in Finnish periodicals and by Theater Academy, and co-curating a performance art salon in Helsinki (2003).
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are an artist team, emeritus professors from the University of California San Diego, Department of Visual Arts. They are pioneers in the development and evolution of what can be described as ecologically-based art from a systems perspective.
Matt Heckert has been working as an engineer, as well as a performance and sound artist, since 1978. He operates his own design-build shop where he does design, fabrication and machining. One of the founding directors of Survival Research Laboratories, he has built robots and designed soundtracks for performances and films. In 1989 he conceived and developed a group of sound producing machines know as the Mechanical Sound Orchestra and toured it in the United States and Europe. Matt is obsessed with making sound-noise-music with the mechanical devices he builds.
Taraneh Hemami is an Iranian-born artist who relocated to the USA after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Hemami's work examines the liminality of her existence, of being of two world that are continuously and contentiously at odds with one another. Through her projects she explores personal and collective stories and histories while creating spaces for creative exchange and dialogue.
Rhonda Holberton is an interdisciplinary artist. Her recent installation work addresses the circuitry of power and investigates the game-like structures that direct systems of desire and control. The work relies on a displaced scientific/corporate language to question systems of commerce, capitalism, consumption, corporate futures, media, and resource supplies. Recently Rhonda co-organized the Rising Tide Conference, a joint effort between CCA and Stanford to bring together an international gathering of artists, scientists, policy-makers, and business professionals to engage in conversations about the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and environmentalism.
Robert Horn did did not start out to be an artist. He have had several previous careers: political scientist; entrepreneur; CEO; futurist; cognitive science researcher; author. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Human Sciences and Technology Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR) and the author of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. His mural work was represented in the first-ever exhibits of information design as a fine art at the Stroom Museum in The Hague and at the Coventry (UK) School of Art and Design in 2000. One of his info-murals - for Nirex, the British government agency that regulates nuclear waste disposal - incorporates the history and future plans of the agency going out twelve thousand years, and hangs in its cafeteria. You can view the Vision 2050 poster and mural.
William Hsu is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. His interests are in interactive computer music, computer architecture and performance evaluation.
Jeff Hull's aim, As a street artist and guerrilla events producer, was "to infuse more variability and play into the civic realm" and to create opportunities for real cultural exchange in negative urban space. The result was Oaklandish, a decade strong grassroots community arts organization with 21 consecutive "Best of the East Bay" Awards to its credit. Having dabbled in many creative professions, he was not satisfied until he invented his own job; Creative Director at Nonchalance, a hybrid arts consultancy with an expertise in Situational Design. Their mission is to provoke discovery through visceral experience and pervasive play.
Suzanne Husky is a French American visual artist that has been living and practicing in the Bay Area since 2000. She obtained my MFA from the Beaux-Art school of Bordeaux, France, spending half of the program duration at CCAC. The socialist ideologies and the rural environment of 1970s France molded her upbringing and became important components of her work. Our intimate relations with plants, animals, the earth, and how we interact together in poetic and political ways, are examined through sculpture, installation, drawing, documentary photography, and film. Problems relating to the exploitation of natural resources, landscape use and globalization are the persistent backdrop of her multimedia practice.
Amy Ione, an international lecturer, painter, and writer, is presently the Director of the Diatrope Institute in Berkeley. She has published several books, most recently Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths (Rodopi, 2005), and is working on a special issue for the Journal of the History of Neuroscience on Visual Images and Visualization.
Elizabeth Jameson's fascination with medical imaging and brain scans has a personal basis. Diagnosed with the disease of multiple sclerosis, She found herself confronting stark images of her brain that seemed equally frightening and mesmerizing. In tackling this contradiction, s he reinterpret ed these images and used them to explore the amazing biological structure of the brain. Her current artwork saturates these cold, two-dimensional computerized pixels with rich colors that transform scientific images into portraits of individuals with all the frailties, humor, and idiosyncrasies that make us human.
Cosmo Kichman, nee Dr. Daniel Grupp, is a well-published and patented nanotechnology physicist and entrepreneur. Prior to making art, he was most recently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering department. His transistor technology is currently being developed at Sematech. He has always sought to maintain a sense of play, evident in activities from costuming to fire performances, to scientific innovation, and now to sculpture. His current work will be on exhibit and visitors can participate in creating art while he is the Artist in Residence for the month of March 2009 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
Shona Kitchen is an international multidisciplinary artist/designer. Graduating in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London, she continued for several years within the Interaction Design Department, while running her own London-based design partnership KRD (Kitchen Rogers Design) until 2004. Now Residing in California, Kitchen is a parttime professor of Digital Media Art at San Jose State University's "CADRE Lab" and serves as a thesis advisor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Most recent works are a multi-site electronic installation DATA NATURE (Hooker & Kitchen) centered at San Jose International Airport, conceptual housing project ELECTROPLEX HEIGHTS (Hooker & Kitchen) part of a touring exhibition commissioned by Vitra Design Museum & Art Center Pasadena, DOMESTIC WILDERNESS CHANNEL (Shona Kitchen) a site-specific exhibition at Montalvo Arts Center, DREAMING F.I.D.S., commissioned for San Jose International Airport, and THE GREEN CORRIDOR for Deptford Creek in East London, a 328-foot long, 10-foot high solar-powered billboard.
Walter Kitundu is an artist and designer, instrument builder and photographer. He is a Senior Design Developer for the Studio Gallery at the Exploratorium. In this capacity he helps to design and build environments for learning, develops and facilitates activities, and provides artistic direction. As an artist he has created hand built record players powered by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. Walter has performed and been in residence at art centers and science museums internationally. He has performed with the renowned Kronos Quartet, bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, the electronic music duo Matmos, and the legendary Marshall Allen - in venues from Carnegie Hall to a high school library in Egilstaadir, Iceland.
Randal Koene heads the organization carboncopies.org, which is the outreach and roadmapping organization for action towards Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM). Dr. Koene is a neuroscientist and neuroengineer, and he is director of the Analysis team at the nanotechnology company Halcyon Molecular in Silicon Valley. Between 2008 and 2010, Koene was director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, the third largest private research organization in Europe. Dr. Koene has been involved with organized research in artificial general intelligence (AGI) since the first AGI conference in 2008.
Fred Kuttner is currently Lecturer in Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds degrees in physics from MIT and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coauthor with Bruce Rosenblum of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, published by Oxford University Press.
Therese Lahaie studied Fine Art at Emmanuel College and Glass Technology at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA. She is a kinetic sculptor using glass, low rpm motors and LED lighting and also has a background in architectural lighting design. At a 2010 Djerassi Artist Residency she collaborated with NY choreographer Leigh Evans. Their performance installation called "Quite Two Departure," will be premiered at PS. 122 in NYC in July 2010.
Miu-Ling Lam is a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute. Her research interests include Robotics, Computational Geometry, Pattern Formation, Complex Systems and Bioinformatics. She received the Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, the Croucher Fellowship and the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship.
Robert Lang, after a 15-year career doing research and development in semiconductor lasers and optoelectronics, became a full-time origami artist devoted equally to the art of origami and its practical applications. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 9 books on origami and his work has been exhibited in shows worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Wayne Lanier is earned his PhD degree in microbial genetics at the University of Chicago. Wayne professed these, and similar subjects at New York University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and London Polytechnic. He has been Research Director in Biotechnology and a Consultant in Clinical Studies. Finally, Wayne gracefully retired and now wanders the San Francisco Bay salt marsh, examining the natural history of life at the bottom of the food chain. "Hidden Ecologies" is the title of his program.
Cheryl Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument builder. Over the last decade she has focused on investigating sounds, structures and objects from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers and bones as musical instruments. Leonard uses microphones to explore the intricate sounds hidden within these instruments and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. She has also composed numerous soundtracks for film, video, dance and theater, and created sounds for museum exhibits Her commissions include works for Kronos Quartet, Illuminated Corridor and Michael Straus.
Caroline Lewis and Robert Davis are Artists in Residence at the Montalvo Arts Center. Caroline Lewis is a lecturer in Social Science teaching, Psychology, Sociology and Social Policy. She trained as a Psychologist at University of Wales and University of London, where she followed a masters program in Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is currently leading a multi disciplinary team from San Jose State University (SJSU) as part of the San Jose Climate Clock Initiative. Robert Davis is a software developer, engineer, and artist who currently works as Systems Developer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. For the last sixteen years he has been actively involved in research in the field of Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. He has also created interactive installations with particular emphasis on ways in which adaptive systems interact with each other, whether biological or mechanical in substrate.
Darlene Lim is a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and is the Principal Investigator of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (www.pavilionlake.com). She has conducted field work from the Arctic to the Antarctic and specializes in limnology (study of freshwater) and geobiology.
Roger Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in space instrumentation and optics, previously Director of the NASA EUVE Observatory at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS. He serves on the Comite National of the French CNRS for astronomy and on the French National Commission on Cosmology. He is also Chairman of the Board of Leonardo/International Society for the Arts/Sciences and Technology in San Francisco and President of the sister association in Paris.
Margarita Marinova's main research interests are in characterizing extreme environments, and understanding the surface of Mars. She has worked at NASA Ames Research Center on understanding extreme environments and the limits of habitability for Earth life. Margarita received her PhD in Planetary Science from Caltech in 2010, where she examined planetary-scale impacts and their implications for the early history of Mars and the solid Solar System planets. Her research interests focus on understanding interesting processes and features on Mars through simulations and field measurements. Her study sites range from the High Arctic, to the Sahara Desert in Egypt, the bottom of a lake in British Columbia in Canada, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and to the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
Jamie McHugh RSME (Registered Somatic Movement Educator) is a fine art photographer and a master teacher of somatics. He has taught body-based work internationally for over twenty-five years to people of all ages. Jamie has been on faculty in the Holistic Health Department at John F Kennedy University since 1991 and at Anna Halprin's Tamalpa Institute since 1988. Jamie divides his time between San Francisco and The Sea Ranch. www.SomaticExpression.com www.NatureBeingArt.org
Chris McKay is a Planetary Scientist with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human exploration. Chris been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, traveling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama desert to study life in these Mars-like environments. His was a co-I on the Titan Huygen's probe in 2005, the Mars Phoenix lander mission in 2008, and the Mars Science Lander mission for 2011. He is the deputy program scientist for Constellation - the NASA program for future human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Tom McKeag is the founder of BioDreamMachine, a nonprofit educational institution dedicated to bringing bio-inspired design education to K12 schools (www.BioDreamMachine.org). He established the nation's first public elementary school course in biomimicry in 2006, and still teaches the subject through the State of California's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program in the Dixie school district, Marin County, California. Tom teaches bio-inspired design to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he is a Senior Lecturer. He is a member of the Biomimicry Institute's Educational Advisory Board. He writes a regular blog about biomimicry at www.greenerdesign.com.
Deborah Munk is the director of the Artist in Residence Program at SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. and has spent the last eight years working with artists who make art out of garbage. She was the assistant editor of "Parallels and Intersections, Women Artists in California" published by UC Press, in 2002 and is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University with a Masters in Educational Technology focusing on art and media. Deborah also manages the Educational Learning Center at SF Recycling & Disposal where she teaches children and adults the importance of sustainability and recycling.
Julie Newdoll is a painter who merges life science, mythology and culture. Her artwork has been featured on over 20 journal covers in the last few years, and is in collections world wide, including several universities. Newdoll, who studied microbiology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and medical illustration at the University of California at San Francisco, runs the "Brush with Science" Gallery in Menlo Park.
Steven Oscherwitz is a digital media artist, an art and science historian and an educator who most recently taught "Comparative History of Ideas" at the University of Washington.
Bob Ostertag has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and three books. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, transgender chanteuse Justin Bond, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings available as free digital downloads. He has a new book in press about labor organizing in Nevada, and is working on another about the construction of human identities through technology. He is currently Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.
Chris Palmer is a Fine Artist who has specialized in traditional and modern geometric art, textile design, traditional ornament and folding. After four years teaching Digital Fabrication in schools of architecture in Chicago (IIT) and the University of Colorado at Boulder he now works with Rob Bell in a design build studio in San Francisco CA. He is a member of an international design team doing architectural ornament in middle eastern styles for the American Institute of Mathematics Research Conference Center in San Jose.
Jennifer Parker is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research is rooted in sculpture, interactive and kinetic art, and cross-disciplinary and collaborative research. Current and past projects explore new methodologies for art making that engage art and science thinking. She is co-founder and director of The OpenLab Network at UCSC and has been working with Barney Hyanes since 2008 developing the SonicSENSE interactive art platform. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Local venues include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork; The Lab; Gray Area Foundation for the Arts; Kala Art Institute; and ZER01:10SJ Biennial.
Kris Paulsen is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a dual BA in the History of Art and Semiotics from Brown University. Her work focuses on intersections of technology and the arts from the 19th century to the present. She is currently finishing her dissertation, 3Real Time over Real Space: Artists in the Telecommunications Network�- a study of liveness, remote witnessing, and telepresence in the arts from the 1960s to the present.
Kavita Philip is Associate Professor at UC Irvine's Program in Women's Studies. Her research interests are in technology in the developing world; transnational histories of science and technology; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory.
Frank Pietronigro is an interdisciplinary artist and author, an Associate Fellow at the Studio For Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, and the co-founder and director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium. In 1998 he pioneered "drift paintings" where his body floated within a three-dimensional painting in zero gravity aboard NASA's KC135 turbojet. The Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, founded in 1999, is a space arts organization dedicated to fostering greater access for artists to zero gravity space through international partnerships with space agencies.
Sheila Pinkel is a Professor of Art at Pomona College where she has worked since 1986. She has exhibited and spoken nationally and internationally. Most recently she co-curated the exhibition "In Transition Russia 2008" in Ekaterinberg and Moscow, Russia, and participated in a symposium with this title.
Leonard Pitt is an actor, author and teacher. He originally studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux in the 1960s and settled in Berkeley in 1970. He has performed and taught around the world. He currently operates The Flying Actor Studio in San Francisco offering a one-year conservatory program in the art of physical theatre. He has written three books about Paris, Walks Through Lost Paris, Paris a Journey Through Time, and Paris Postcards, the Golden Age, plus A Small Moment of Great Illumination about the life of Valentine Greatrakes, a 17th century Irish healer.
Martin Pohl is an experimental physicist who has worked on major particle physics experiments at particle accelerators for 35 years, exploring the structure of matter, elementary forces, space and time. He also contributes to space-borne experiments measuring cosmic particles to investigate their nature as well as their sources. He is interested in the contributions of science to culture and its interaction with other cultural activities: "A major point of contact between fundamental physics and the arts ought to be that neither scientists not artists should ever expect anything but the unexpected".
June Power has degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and University College London. She has published numerous research papers in the area of distributed systems and has been invited to speak on this topic at several universities. She is also the co-founder of Altor Systems, a company that has developed, patented and licensed technology for 3D applications, including games.
Phillip Prager has recently completed his PhD at the Cambridge University Digital Studio and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Foundation in Berkeley. His work relates scientific research on creativity and play to the historical and digital avant-garde.
Paul Rabinow is is professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and a co-founder of the Berkeley program in French Cultural Studies. He was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (1987); taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1986) as well as the �cole Normale Superieure (1997), was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Iceland (1999). He was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1998 and was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the Ecole Normale Superieure for 2001-2.
Gertrude Reagan was born in Washington, DC in 1936, and spent her early years in the Southern Appalachians where her father was doing geology. She moved to California in 1954. In 1956, Gyorgy Kepes' book "The New Landscape" celebrated images from science as art. It validated images like her father's geologic maps as subjects for her work. Myrrh began mining science and natural patterns for art ideas by finding analogs in crafts media for natural patterns. In 1981, she founded YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, which held forums and had a publication for 28 years. She now conducts a special interest group in patterns in nature and visual math.
Robert Rich has released over 30 albums in the last three decades, mostly instrumental electronic music. He became somewhat notorious for performing all-night Sleep Concerts in the '80s. He studied for a year at Stanford's CCRMA while getting a degree in Psychology, and now tours occasionally, creates sound design for films and electronic instruments, and has begun teaching courses on audio mastering and studio engineering. More at http://robertrich.com.
Richard Rinehart is a digital media artist and Digital Art Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. He is Associate Director for Public Programs of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Rinehart's papers, projects, and more can be found on his website
Phil Ross is an artist, curator, and educator who places natural systems within frames of social and historic contexts. Phil's living artworks are grown into being over the course of several years, integrating traditional manufacturing techniques with practices and technologies from disparate fields. His recent work includes a trilogy of documentary videos on microorganisms, and the growing of a building composed of living fungus. Phil currated an exhibition on biotechnology for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2007, and is the founder and director of CRITTER, a science and art salon located in San Francisco's Mission District.
Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely and his art work has been shown internationally.
Tanu Sankalia, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco, is currently at work on a book project that examines slots or interstitial spaces in San Francisco-the subject of an exhibition, The Urban Unseen, he curated last February. He teaches classes in architecture, urban design and city planning, and has worked as an architect and urban designer in Mumbai and San Francisco.
Piero Scaruffi is a cognitive scientist who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). He has also written extensively about cinema, literature and the visual arts. An avid traveler, he has visited 121 countries of the world.
Victoria Scott strives to understand the transformation of matter and energy as it flows from one state into another. Working with electronic media, sculpture and social relations, she creates site-specific installations, digital prints, objects and audio works. Her recent projects include constructing 3D paper representations of objects that exist both in simulated environments and real life. She is also developing a series of batteries that are charged by human emotional energy. Scott Kildall is a cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork in the form of interventions into various concepts of space. Zer01 Artists in Residence.
Carlo Sequin has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Graphics, Virtual Environments, and Computer Aided Design Tools. He has built CAD tools for the layout of integrated circuits, for the conceptual phase in architectural design, for the design of mechanical systems, and -- most recently -- for artists who create abstract geometrical sculptures.
Sharon Siskin's artwork has been featured in numerous publications and received numerous awards. She was the Artist in Residence at San Francisco Recycling & Disposal, Inc. in the summer of 2004 and has taught at University of San Francisco, the Graduate Department of Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, California State University East Bay, University of New Mexico and at several California Community Colleges. She is a long-time board member of WEAD (Women Environmental Artists Directory.)
Renetta Sitoy is a Filipino-American new media artist who graduated in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was the recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute MFA Fellowship from 2005-2007.
Daniel Small is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and researcher. His work has been exhibited internationally and his 2011 project The Circumference is Everywhere was included at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa Japan. His project Third Person Eclipse was shown in the Iraqi Embassy in Pankow Berlin as part of the ongoing project Des Chapitres Du Conflit, a collection of interventions that address and inhabit the former Iraq Embassy to East Germany. In his project Partially Recovered, he resurrected an erased image from a hard drive as a large scale photorealist Jacquard tapestry that will be exhibited in the Gruuthuse Museum that houses the largest collection of tapestries from the 14th and 15th century in Brugge, Belgium where it was produced. Excavation II is a triangulation of past, present and future that proposes a full excavation of the remains of Cecil Demille's 1923 film set of The Ten Commandments that was the largest film set ever built and mimics ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Bill Smart is an associate professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he works on problems in robotics, machine learning, and brain-machine interfaces. He is currently on sabbatical at Willow Garage, Inc., a very unusual robotics company in Menlo Park. He is currently looking at how to make humans and robots interact more naturally and effectively.
Tami Spector is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of San Francisco and serves on the Board of Leonardo. She has a strong interest in the intersections of chemistry and art and aesthetics and has published a number of papers related to these topics. She is currently serving as a guest editor for an on-going special section of Leonardo on nanoscience/technology and art and welcomes comments and/or submission on this topic from the audience.
Kal Spelletich is the founder of Seemen, an interactive machine art performance collective, has collaborated with Survival Research Labs and countless others from rock bands to scientists, politicians, NASA, Hollywood television and filmmakers. For 28 years he has been experimenting with interfacing humans and technology to put people in touch with intense real life experiences and to empower them. Kal's work is always interactive, requiring a participant to enter or operate the piece, often against their instincts of self-preservation. He works on the waterfront of San Francisco scouring junkyards and dumpsters for industrial items whose technology can be reapplied. He curates art exhibits and is involved in political activism.
Julianne Stafford was the co-founder of a private consulting firm for investing in natural resources and have a long and varied musical backgrounds in classical and popular music. Stafford also perform with the Left Bank trio and Fiume di Musica.
Cindy Stokes is a photographer and systems biology consultant living and working in the Bay Area. She focuses closely on the curious details of the world, having fun with structural and spatial complexity and ambiguity in her abstracts and still-lifes.
David Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and was Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University, where he has taught "Light, Color and Visual Phenomena," "Pattern Classification," "Optics, perspective and Renaissance painting," and other courses. He holds 35 patents and his five books include Seeing the Light: Optics in Nature, Photography, Color, Vision and Holography with D. Falk and D. Brill and Pattern Classification (2nd ed.) with R. Duda and P. Hart and the forthcoming Computer image analysis in the study of art with Jim Coddington. He has taught the first courses in this new field, and lectured at the National Gallery London, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Modern Art, The Louvre, Venice Biennale, and other museums.
Melanie Swan is the principal of MS Futures Group, a futurist, hedge fund manager, and founder of citizen science organization DIYgenomics. Her educational background includes an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in French and Economics from Georgetown University. Melanie enjoys kick-boxing, independent film, and international travel.
Leila Takayama is is a research scientist at Willow Garage, studying human-robot interaction. She holds a PhD and MA in Communication from Stanford University (2008) as well as BAs in Psychology and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley (2003). The work she is presenting is from her doctoral dissertation on Throwing Voices: Investigating the Psychological Effects of the Spatial Location of Projected Voices, which won the Nathan Maccoby dissertation award. http://www.leilatakayama.org
Nomi Talisman is an Israeli-born artist who earned her MFA and photography, video and electronic arts from Mills College. She has exhibited her work in four continents. She was chosen to be the first artist to be working on a new series of online works commissioned by the Magnes Museum in Berkeley (2008-09).
James Thompson is a graduate from the Design Program of Stanford University. James Thompson holds an AS in engineering from Shepherd University and a BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia.
Jonathan Trent is the lead scientist on Project OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae)-a system to produce microalgae for biofuels, food, and fertilizer, while treating wastewater, sequestering carbon, and promoting environmentally sustainable aquaculture. Jonathan has conducted research in microbiology and molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the University of Paris (Orsay) in France, and at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale Medical School in the USA. He moved to Argonne National Laboratory to study environmental bioremediation, before going to NASA Ames Research Center, where he is currently working. At NASA he has contributed in the fields of Astrobiology and Bio-Nanotechnology and, in 2007, he founded GREEN (Global Research into Energy and the Environment at NASA), which ultimately led to Project OMEGA. In addition to his position at NASA, Jonathan is an Adjunct Professor in the Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.
Niki Ulehla is is a puppetmaker and goldsmith. She was born in Tennessee and moved 17 times before coming to California in 1997. She received a BA in Drawing and Painting from Stanford University. After completing her degree she studied marionette making in the Czech Republic and goldsmithing in San Francisco. Her jewelry has been shown in the Bay area and across the US. She has been building marionettes (including but not limited to George Washington, the Chicken, the Crow and the Crowmonster) since 2000 and performing with them and other collaborators throughout the SF Bay area and in the Czech Republic.
Liena Vayzman s hybrid practice incorporates photo-based and curatorial projects. Vayzman co-curated "Chance Operations" and "Night Light: An Evening of Luminous Environments". She organized "Captured Accidents: Valencia Street Live," an interactive media project by digital artist Tim Thompson at Artists Television Access (ATA) and "HOME: The Aesthetics and Politics of Home in Contemporary Art" at Root Division. Vayzman started the bands Jerk Alert and I Like Action! and is currently at work on "The Lemon Tree Project, a yearlong photographic and narrative collaboration with a fruit tree in Oakland CA, and a book project on food and agriculture in contemporary art. In 2008-09, she taught in the Photography Program at San Jose State University.
Victoria Vesna (UCLA) is a media artist, professor at the department of Design & Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts, director of the UCLA Art & Science center and the UC Digital Arts Research Network. Her work explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions worldwide, and is the recipient of many grants, commissions and awards. Her most recent installations (Blue Morph, Mood Swings and Water Bowls) aim to raise consciousness around the issues of our relationship to natural systems. She published an edited volume, "Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow" (2007), and is co-authoring "Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts" (2010).
After an extensive career in strategy and business consulting for the technology industry, for the past several years Gian Pablo Villamil has been working with notable artists to bring to life complex technology-based artworks.
Wayne Vitale is a composer, performer, author, teacher, recording engineer, and instrument conservator in the field of Balinese music. He is the director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org), an ensemble of sixty musicians and dancers that has achieved an unparalleled international reputation for its cross-cultural creative work. As a composer, he has created numerous works for gamelan that have directly impacted the evolution of Balinese kebyar music. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), releases critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music. He has also devoted himself to the metallic art of gamelan tuning, grinding and filing his way throughout the US and Europe to restore Balinese instruments.
Mark Wagner is a digital and traditional artist, and educator. Wagner moved from art school at Pratt Institute in Brookln NY to the high desert plains of New Mexico in the mid 80's. He's been involved in Native American Indian ceremony for over 30 years. He has been involved in the film industry as a concept artist and consultant, in addition to his work as graphic designer, illustrator, author, musician, and fine artist. He is currently working with the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History where the Paleo Indian department is featuring his artwork throughout their new web site. Wagner worked at Pixar Studios on the new Disney feature film John Carter, and has worked on other films; Terminator 3, DreamKeeper, and The Book of Stars. Wagner is also an internationally know street painter and chalk drawing artist. He founded the 501(c)3 nonprofit Drawing on Earth that inspires art and creativity in youth and communities around the world. Their first project set a Guinness World Record for the largest chalk drawing. Their current project is an Global Illustrated Story.
Steve Wilson is a San Francisco author, artist and art professor who explores the cultural implications of emerging technologies and scientific research. His interactive installations & performances have been shown internationally in galleries and art shows. He won a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship and the Prize of Distinction in Ars Electronica's international competitions for interactive art and several honorary mentions. He is also author of many books and articles including Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. (MIT Press, 2002)
Imin Yeh (San Francisco, CA) is fresh off of an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artist Programs of Montalvo Art Center. She is a recipient of the 2009 Barclay Simpson MFA Award, the San Francisco Foundation's Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship (2008) and the Yozo Hamaguchi Endowed Scholarship in 2007. BA, University of Wisconsin, Madison; MFA, California College of the Arts.
Thomas Zimmerman is an inventor and educator, exploring the frontiers of human-computer interaction at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His 30+ patents cover position tracking, user input, wireless communication, music training, biometrics and encryption. His Data Glove invention established the field of Virtual Reality, selling over one million units. His electric field PAN invention, developed with Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, sends data through the human body. He also founded and directs the Extreme Science Program at the Latino College Preparatory Academy (LCPA) in East San Jose.

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