ART CURATOR Name of art curator

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.

Alex Reben is best known for his robots and machine art, including the film-making "BlabDroids". The BlabDroids are making the world's first documentary entirely shot and directed by robots. They have traveled the world asking difficult and meaningful questions in order to learn what makes us human. Alexander holds a graduate degree from the MIT Media Lab where he researched human-machine symbiosis and design. He has built robots for NASA, worked on particle accelerators and consults with executives to help make products more "lovable". He has held fellowships at MIT in the Center for Future Storytelling and CMS DocLab. He is currently a visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department and a director at Stochastic Labs, an art, science and technology incubator. Alexander has exhibited internationally including Ars Electronica, Volta, The Whitney Biennial, Axiom, TFI Interactive, IDFA, ArtBots, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, and Wired among others.

Fabiola Hanna, an artist from Lebanon who is currently at UC Santa Cruz, is a thinker, artist, documentarian and interactive-media programmer. She explores ideas that might strengthen communities through art and technology. Her current work is about post-colonial activism in relation to ideological constructs of history, nation, community and political struggle.

Melissa Day is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, currently at San Jose State University. Her recent work explores the role of singing in civic engagement, deepening dialogue among potentially insular groups. Day is currently building a "Wall of Song" with artist Michael Namkung, a massed singing of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

Greg Niemeyer (UC Berkeley/ Center for New Media), born in Switzerland, started working with new media when he arrived in the Bay Area in 1992 and he received his MFA from Stanford University in New Media in 1997. At the same time, he founded the Stanford University Digital Art Center, which he directed until 2001, when he was appointed at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor for New Media. At UC Berkeley, he is involved in the development of the Center for New Media, focusing on the critical analysis of the impact of new media on human experiences. His creative work focuses on the mediation between humans as individuals and humans as a collective through technological means, and emphasizes playful responses to technology. His most recognized projects are Gravity (Cooper Union, NYC, 1997), PING (SFMOMA, 2001), Oxygen Flute (SJMA, 2002), ar (Pacific Film Archive, 2003), Ping 2.0 (Paris, La Villette Numerique, 2004), Organum Playtest (2005), Good Morning Flowers (SFIFF 2006, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt, 2006), blackloud.org, sevenairs.org, and polartide.org

Purin Phanichphant's works are often playful, interactive, and simple, combining his fun-loving Thai roots, an obsession with knobs, buttons, and screens, and his training as an interaction designer. He was Principal Product & Interaction Designer at IDEO. His most recent works include a land-glider dubbed the Death Wheel 3000dx, an interface for human-computer sex, a wall covered with all the tap lights in the Bay Area, and a machine that churns out Thai food. Purin was born and raised in Northern Thailand, where he spent part of his life as a Buddhist monk.

Climate change data turned into art

Bio

Mitch Altman is a hacker and inventor. While at the University of Illinois, Altman co-organized the first Hash Wednesday in Champaign-Urbana in 1977. Altman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986 to work in Silicon Valley. Altman was an early developer of Virtual Reality technologies, working at VPL Research with Jaron Lanier. Altman left VPL Research in protest when it accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense. Altman co-founded Silicon Valley start-up 3ware in February 1997 with Peter Herz and Jim MacDonald. Altman started Cornfield Electronics as a consulting company. In 2004 Altman released a one-button universal remote control called TV-B-Gone, to be used for turning off TVs in public places. Following extensive involvement in the "Maker" movement and Make magazine, Altman publicly parted ways with the Maker Faire in 2012 after the Maker Faire accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense. Mitch Altman is an important figure in the international "hackerspace" and "maker" movements. While attending the 2007 Berlin Chaos Communication Camp, Altman and Jacob Appelbaum began discussing the idea of a San Francisco hackerspace, at which time there were no hackerspaces in the United States. In October 2008 he co-founded Noisebridge, one of the earliest hackerspaces in the USA.

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.