Keynote Speakers
Richard Coyne is Professor of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh. Richard’s research and teaching explores a broad interdisciplinary framework for examining the relationship between digital media, design, and contemporary cultural theories. His latest book is entitled The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media. Other books with MIT Press include Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age, Technoromanticism, and Cornucopia Limited. Recent projects under the Design for the 21st Century AHRC/EPSRC initiative include (a) Orienting the future: design strategies for non-place, and (b) Branded meeting places: ubiquitous technologies and the design of places for meaningful human encounter. He is Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Environment that includes architecture, history of art and music. He inaugurated an MSc in Design and Digital Media which attracts students from diverse backgrounds.
Christopher Pressler is Director of Research and Learning Resources at the University of Nottingham. He is responsible for the University’s libraries, manuscripts and special collections and e-learning programmes at Nottingham’s seven campuses in the United Kingdom, Malaysia and China. He also leads on the University’s project management programmes for the Research Excellence Framework, institutional data management, communications technologies, global collection management and technology-enabled learning. He is also a member of the Executive Board of Nottingham University Press. He is a Director of the Centre for Research Communications at Nottingham and plays a national role in the development of scholarly communications and publishing as Chair of the RLUK/SCONUL Research Communications Group and as an advisor on a number of national and international boards. He is Co-Founder (with Dr Paul Ayris, UCL) of the DART-Europe E-Theses Portal, which now provides access to theses from over 200 universities in 16 countries. Christopher also plays a key role in the Open Learning Courseware community as co-founder of the BERLiN project and in developing links with OER Africa, Google and Apple. Previous posts have been held at UCL, JISC, Dartington and the University of London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2004.
Thecla Schiphorst is a Media Artist/Designer and Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her background in performance, somatics and computing forms the basis for her research through art, which focuses on embodied interaction, sense-making, and the aesthetics of interaction. She is particularly interested in the poetic forms that cultivate affect, sensuality, materiality and experience-modeling within design processes of technology. She is a member of the original design team that developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography and worked with Merce Cunningham since 1990 supporting his creation of new dance with the computer.
She is the recipient of the 1998 PetroCanada award in New Media awarded biennially to a Canadian artist, by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her media art installations have been exhibited internationally in Europe, Canada, the United States and Asia in many venues including Ars Electronica, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF), Future Physical, Siggraph, the Wexner Centre for the Arts, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, and the London ICA. Thecla Schiphorst leads the whisper[s] research group an acronym for: wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive systems. She holds an interdisciplinary M.A. in Dance and Computer Science from Simon Fraser University and a PhD from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA) program at the University of Plymouth. Her doctoral research explored the Varieties of User Experience: Bridging Embodied Methodologies from Somatics and Performance to Human Computer Interaction.
Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
STELARC, Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and Senior Research, Fellow in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney. Stelarc is a performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. He has made 3 films of the inside of his body- probing two metres of space into his lungs, stomach and colon. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a STOMACH SCULPTURE and EXOSKELETON, a 6-legged walking robot. His FRACTAL FLESH, PING BODY and PARASITE performances explored involuntary, remote and internet choreography of the body with electrical stimulation of the muscles. MOVATAR is an inverse motion capture system where an avatar can perform in the physical world by accessing and actuating a host body. He is presently attempting to surgically construct and stem-cell grow an EXTRA EAR on his arm. His PROSTHETIC HEAD project involves an avatar which speaks to the person who interrogates it- an embodied conversational agent with real-time lip syncing and facial expression. The MUSCLE MACHINE is a 6-legged walking machine completed in 2003, actuated by pneumatic rubber muscles
In 1995 Stelarc received a three year Fellowship from The Visual Arts/ Craft Board, The Australia Council and in 2004 was awarded a two year New Media Arts Fellowship. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1998. In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Laws by Monash University. He has completed Visiting Artist positions in Art and Technology, at the Faculty of Art and Design at Ohio State University in Columbus in 2002, 2003 & 2004. He has been Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit and a Visiting Professor at The Nottingham Trent University, UK. He has recently been re-appointed as Chair in Performance, School of Arts, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK. He is also Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the MARCS Lab at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His artwork is represented by the Scott Livesey Galleries in Melbourne.
stelarc@va.com.au
Second Life link- http://tr.im/jFGN