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BIOS
Scott Bukatman
Scott Bukatman is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and is the author of three books: Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, published by Duke University Press, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. His writing highlights the ways in which popular media (film, comics) and genres (science fiction, musicals, superhero narratives) mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His latest project is a book-length study of Winsor McCay, an early innovator in both newspaper comics and animated film.
Torsten Zenas Burns
Torsten Burns received his BFA in experimental video in 1990 from the New York State College of Art at Alfred University and his MFA in video and performance art from The San Franscisco Art Institute in 1993. He has created video, net art, photographs and installation projects exploring speculative content, including reimagined educational practices, experimental space programs, zombie /afterlife relationships, medical manifestations, and improvisational choreographies. Other projects include long term collaborations with Anthony Discenza under the name HALFLIFERS and media artist Darrin Martin. Burns' video work is distributed by VTAPE, Canada, The Video Data Bank in Chicago, Lux Center in England, and Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. Over the past 10 years Burns has participated in 7 residency programs including Headlands Center for the Arts, L.M.C.C. World Views Studio Program and Eyebeam. He has had video work screened at the the Museum of Modern Art's Video Viewpoints and Premieres series, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pacific Film Archive, Scanners: The New York Video Festival, The New York Underground Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the European Media Arts Festival, the Impakt Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, the fiftieth Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Most recently, he screened his new collaborative video "The Abominable Freedom" at Cinematexas 11. Burns is a Visiting Associate Professor teaching in the Graduate School of Digital Design at KyungSung University, Pusan, South Korea.
Anthony Discenza
Anthony Discenza was born in New Jersey in 1967 and currently resides in Oakland, CA. He received his BA at Wesleyan University in 1990 and an MFA at The California College of Arts and Crafts in 2000. Since the late 1990s, Mr. Discenza's work has focused primarily on our relationship to mainstream media. In addition to his personal work, he devotes a great deal of time to HalfLifers, an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist Torsten Z. Burns. Mr. Discenza's solo and collaborative work has been shown at numerous national and international venues, including The New York Video Festival, The Pacific Film Archive, The Impakt Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Discenza is currently represented by The Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and the Video Databank of Chicago.
Arthur Elsenaar
Arthur Elsenaar is an artist and an electrical engineer. He used to run his own pirate radio station, and he built the transmitters for many illegal radio and television stations throughout the Netherlands. His radar-controlled interactive sculptures were shown in several international exhibitions. Currently, Elsenaar works on a Ph.D. thesis about the artistic potential of the computer-controlled human face at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, UK.
Huge Harry
Huge Harry is a speech synthesis machine, designed in the 1980's by Dennis Klatt at the MIT Speech Laboratory. As president and spokesmachine of the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam, Huge Harry is an ardent advocate of the complete automatization of art production. Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha have jointly developed a series of automatic performance-pieces and video-installations which involve computer-controlled facial expression and algorithmic music. These pieces (often involving the collaboration of speech-synthesis machine Huge Harry), have been presented throughout Europe and the United States.
Elizabeth Kessler, Stanford University
Elizabeth Kessler is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Elizabeth graduated in March 2006 from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D from the Committee on History of Culture. Her research focuses on the intersections between the visual culture of art and science, and she is currently working on a book on the aesthetics of images from the Hubble Space Telescope. In it, she considers the methods astronomers use to translate the telescope's data into aesthetically pleasing scenes that communicate with non-scientists and ultimately argues that the images rely on the visual language of Romantic landscapes to convey a sense of wonder and awe as well as propose the possibility of conquering another frontier. Elizabeth conducted much of her research on the topic as a predoctoral Guggenheim Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Before pursing her doctorate, she earned an M.A. in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Kevin Mack
Academy Award® winner Kevin Mack, visual effects supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, recently completed work on the recently-released action adventure, Ghost Rider based on the popular comic book and starring Nicolas Cage. Mack joined Imageworks in 2002 to supervise the visual effects for Tim Burton's Big Fish, which went on to be nominated for a BAFTA Award for Achievement in Visual Effects. While at Digital Domain, Mack was visual effects supervisor on the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, where he was intimately involved with director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman in pre-production conceptualization of the visual depiction of John Nash's genius. This creative and collaborative relationship with Howard was formed when Mack supervised the effects on Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. He also worked with director David Fincher on Fight Club, supervising visual effects and collaborating with Fincher to design the seminal "brain fly-through" opening sequence of the film. Mack won the Academy Award® in 1999 for Achievement in Visual Effects for his work on What Dreams May Come as visual effects supervisor. His other visual effects supervisor credits include Vanilla Sky, Red Corner and The Island of Dr. Moreau. He also served as digital effects art director on the Academy Award-nominated Apollo 13. Previously, Mack had an extensive career as a freelance visual effects artist creating matte paintings and miniatures for films ranging from Airplane 2 to the Oscar-winning The Abyss.
Darin Martin
Darrin Martin's work frequently creates interpersonal metaphors around various sensory interfaces and explores how technology blurs the space between labor, play and relaxation. His videos and performances have exhibited internationally at festivals and museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the DIA Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts, Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the European Media Art Festival in Germany. His installations have exhibited at venues such as The Kitchen and WRO Media Arts Biennale in Poland. He frequently collaborates with Torsten Zenas Burns building diverse speculative fictions around reimagined educational practices. Their videotapes are distributed by Vtape in Toronto, and their collaborations have exhibited at venues including Oberhausen Short Film Festival, The NY Video Festival, Cinematexas, The Madrid Museum of Contemporary Art, The Paris/Berlin International and Eyebeam in New York. They have also launched a high-band width net art project titled Lesson Stalls: learning nets, http://www.eai.org/lessons, which was commissioned by Electronic Arts Intermix.
Larry Niven
Larry Niven has been a published writer since 1964. He has written at all lengths, for books, magazines, anthologies, TV scripts, comics including the background "bible" for the Green Lantern, and the script for a circus that didn't happen. He lives with his wife, a cat and several fish, in Chatsworth, California.
Tim Pratt
Tim Pratt is an SF and fantasy writer living in Oakland, California. He has been nominated for the Nebula, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and various other awards. His latest story collection, Hart & Boot & Other Stories, was published early this year, and his next novel, Blood Engines, will appear in October. He is also senior editor at Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field. For more, visit http://www.sff.net/people/timpratt
Rudy Rucker
Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rudy Rucker studied mathematics, earning a Ph. D. from Rutgers in the theory of infinite sets. He worked first as mathematics professor, then as a computer science professor, coming to rest in Silicon Valley. Rucker has published twenty-eight books, including non-fiction popular-science books on infinity and the fourth dimension. His recent THE LIFEBOX, THE SEASHELL, AND THE SOUL is about the meaning of computation. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker often writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. In his latest novel, MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE, two Berkeley grad students woo the same woman and open a gateway to alternate worlds. Other recent publications are a story anthology, MAD PROFESSOR, and a second edition of THE HOLLOW EARTH, a historical SF novel starring Edgar Allan Poe. In Rucker's next SF novel, POSTSINGULAR, nanotechnology augments human mental powers but threatens to destroy Earth. Rucker spends an inordinate amount of time writing and photographing for his blog, http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog.
Remko Scha
Remko Scha is an artist and a computer scientist. He has built an automatic electric guitar band ("The Machines"), designed an image generation algorithm ("Artificial"), and developed a theory about natural-language-processing ("Data-Oriented Parsing"). Currently, Scha is Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. (see also: Huge Harry)
Nathan Schurr
Nathan Schurr is in his fifth and final year as a PhD student in the field of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Professor Milind Tambe. His research interests focus on human interaction with distributed multiagent systems. Recently, he has been exploring how Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics can influence the formation of human-multiagent teams. He was awarded the Viterbi School of Engineering Homeland Security Center Doctoral Fellowship.
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