to the book MediaArtHistories

Biographies of MediaArtHistories Contributors

Rudolf Arnheim is Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. His books include Film as Art (1957), Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1974), The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977), and The Split and the Structure: Twenty-Eight Essays (1996).

Andreas Broeckmann (b. 1964) lives and works in Berlin. Since the autumn of 2000 he has been the Artistic Director of transmediale—festival for art and digital culture berlin. With its 35,000 visitors, transmediale is one of the major venues for the presentation and discussion of media art in Europe. The festival has paid particular attention to recent debates about the understanding of media art and its latest developments, including electronic music, software art, and locative media. Broeckmann studied art history, sociology, and media studies in Germany and Britain. He worked as a project manager at V2_Organisation Rotterdam, Institute for the Unstable Media, from 1995–2000. He co-maintains the Spectre mailing list and is a member of the Berlin-based media association mikro, and of the European Cultural Backbone, a network of media centers. In university courses, curatorial projects, and lectures he deals with media art, digital culture and an aesthetics of the machinic. See http://www.transmediale.de/, http://www.v2.nl/abroeck/.

Ron Burnett, President, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and author of How Images Think (2004, 2005), is the former Director of the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University, recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for service to Canada and Canadians, Educator of the Year in Canada in 2005, member Royal Canadian Academy of Art, Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Film and Video Department at York University, Burda Scholar at Ben Gurion University, and William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago. Burnett is also the author of Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary (1995) and the editor of Explorations in Film Theory (1991). Burnett is on the Board of Governors of BCNet and was one of the founders of the New Media Innovation Centre in Vancouver.

Edmond Couchot is a doctor of aesthetics and visual arts. From 1982 to 2000 he was the head of the Department of Arts and Technologies of Image at the University Paris 8 and continues to participate in theoretical and practical research in the Digital Images and Virtual Reality Center of this university. As a theoretician, he is interested in the relationship between art and technology, in particular between visual arts and data-processing techniques. He has published about a hundred articles on this subject and three books: Image. De l’optique au numérique (1988); La technologie dans l’art. De la photographie à la réalité virtuelle (1998, translated in Portuguese); and L’art numérique (2003–2005), in collaboration with Norbert Hillaire. As a visual artist, Edmond Couchot created in the mid-1960s cybernetic devices requiring the participation of the spectator. He later extended his research with digital interactive works and was involved in about twenty international exhibitions.

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Previously Professor of Media Arts at Liverpool John Moores University, he is the author of Timeshift: On Video Culture (1991), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (1993), Digital Aesthetics (1998), Simulation and Social Theory (2001), The Cinema Effect (2004), and EcoMedia (2005); and coeditor of Aliens R Us: Postcolonial Science Fiction with Ziauddin Sardar (2002) and The Third Text Reader with Rasheed Araeen and Ziauddin Sardar (2002). He is the author of over 300 articles, chapters, papers, and catalog essays on contemporary arts, culture, and media. A member of the editorial boards of Screen; Third Text; International Journal of Cultural Studies; Futures, Time, and Society; Journal of Visual Communication; Leonardo Digital Reviews; Iowa Web Review; Cultural Politics; fibreculture journal; International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics; Public; and Vectors, he has lectured and taught on four continents, and his work has been published in Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese as well as several European languages in publications from Latin and North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. He has also curated video and new media exhibitions and authored videos, courseware, and Web poetry. He is currently working on a book on techniques of light of MIT Press.

Dieter Daniels initiated 1984 the Videonnale Bonn. He was director of the ZKM Video Library from 1992 to 1994, and since 1993 he is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Design. As well as authoring and editing numerous publications (including Duchamp und die anderen. Der Modellfall einer künstlerischen Wirkungsgeschichte in der Moderne, 1992; Media Art Interaction. The 1980s and ’90s in Germany, 2000; Kunst als Sendung. Von der Telegrafie zum Internet, 2003; Vom Readymade zum Cyberspace. Kunst/Medien Interferenzen, 2003), and curating many exhibitions (e.g., 1994 Minima Media, MedienBiennale Leipzig) he is coeditor of the Internet project mediaartnet.org. Since 2006 he is Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research., in Linz, Austria.

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard, as part of the new Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC), while maintaining a part-time office at MIT’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering as a research scientist. Her latest book Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image is now out in paperback. She is coauthor with Harvard chemist George M. Whitesides of On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Frankel creates images for journal submissions, presentations, and publications for general audiences. Her column, ‘‘Sightings,’’ in American Scientist Magazine, addresses the importance of visual thinking in science and engineering. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design for her previous work photographing the built landscape and architecture. Frankel’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, LIFE Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Science Friday, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. Her images and graphical representations have appeared on the covers and inside pages of Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, PNAS, Wired, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, New Scientist, and others. See web.mit.edu/felicef/.

Oliver Grau is Professor for Bildwissenschaft and Dean of the Department for Cultural Studies at the Danube University Krems. He is also head of the German Science Foundation project Immersive Art, whose team since 2000 developed the first international Database of Virtual Art. He lectures in numerous parts of the world, has received various awards, and is widely published. Recent works include Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003) and Art and Emotions (2005). His research focuses on the history of media art, the history of immersion and emotions; and the history, idea, and culture of telepresence, genetic art, and artificial intelligence. Grau is an elected member of the Young Academy of the Berlin–Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He is chair of Refresh! First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology, Banff 2005. See http://www.mediaarthistory.org/ and http://www.virtualart.at/.

Erkki Huhtamo (born Helsinki, Finland, in 1958) is a media archaeologist, educator, writer, and exhibition curator. He is Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of California Los Angeles, Department of Design | Media Arts. He has published extensively on media archaeology and the media arts, lectured worldwide, curated media art exhibitions, and created television programs on media culture. His recent work has dealt with topics such as peep media, the history of the screen, and the archaeology of mobile media. He is currently working on two books, one on the history of the moving panorama, and the other on the archaeology of interactivity.

Douglas Kahn is founding Director of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis. He writes on the history and theory of sound in the arts, experimental music, auditory culture, and the arts and technology, and coedited Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (1992) and wrote Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999). He is an editor of Senses and Society (Berg) and Leonardo Music Journal (MIT), and is currently researching early computing and the arts and the cultural incursion of electromagnetism from the nineteenth century to the present.

Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Ph.D., is a professor of cultural and media studies at Lodz University, where he is Head of the Electronic Media Department. He is also a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz (theory of art, media art) and Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (media art). He writes about the problematics of information society, theory of media and communication, cyberculture, and multimedia arts. He also critically investigates the issues of contemporary art theory and alternative art (avant-garde). In the years 1990–2001 Kluszczynski was a chief curator of film, video, and multimedia arts at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He curated numerous international art exhibitions. Some of his publications include: Information Society. Cyberculture. Multimedia Arts, 2001 (second edition, 2002); Film–Video–Multimedia: Art of the Moving Picture in the Era of Electronics, 1999 (second edition, 2002); Images at Large: Study on the History of Media Art in Poland, 1998; Avant-Garde: Theoretical Study, 1997; Film—Art of the Great Avant-Garde, 1990. See http://kulturoznawstwo.uni.lodz.pl/.

Machiko Kusahara is a media art curator and a scholar in the field of media studies. Her recent research is on the correlation between digital media and traditional culture. Drawing on the fields of science, technology, and art history, Kusahara analyzes the impact of digital technologies and their background from a cultural point of view. Her recent publications include analyses of Japanese mobile phone culture, game culture, and visual media. She has published internationally in the fields of art, technology, culture, and history, including sixteen laserdiscs on computer graphics, and coauthored books including Art@Science and The Robot in the Garden, among many others. Projects on which she collaborated with others in the fields of net art and virtual reality were shown at SIGGRAPH. She has curated digital art internationally since 1985, and was involved in founding the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and ICC. Kusahara has also served as a jury member for international exhibitions including SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, LIFE, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Since 2004 she has been involved in the Device Art Project with colleague artists and researchers, which won a five-year grant from the Japan Science and Technology Agency. Kusahara holds a Ph.D. in engineering from University of Tokyo. She is currently a professor at Waseda University and a visiting professor at UCLA.

Timothy Lenoir is the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society at Duke University. He has published several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present, and is currently engaged in an investigation of the introduction of computers into biomedical research from the early 1960s to the present, particularly the development of computer graphics, medical visualization technology, the development of virtual reality and its applications in surgery and other fields. Lenoir has also been engaged in constructing online digital libraries for a number of projects, including an archive on the history of Silicon Valley. Two recent projects include a Web documentary project to document the history of bioinformatics, and How They Got Game, a history of interactive simulation and videogames. In support of these projects, Lenoir has developed software tools for interactive Web-based collaboration.

Lev Manovich (www.manovich.net) is Professor at the Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego, where he teaches new media art, theory, and criticism. His publications include DVD Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and the book The Language of New Media in addition to over eighty articles on new media aesthetics, theory, and history.

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, and editor of Critical Inquiry. His publications include ‘‘Iconology’’ (1986), ‘‘Picture Theory’’ (1994), and The Last Dinosaur Book (1998). His latest book is What Do Pictures Want? See http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/home.htm/ http://www.chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/home.htm/ http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/main.html/

Gunalan Nadarajan, currently Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State University, is an art theorist and curator. His publications include a book, Ambulations (2000), and several academic articles and catalog essays on contemporary art, philosophy, new media arts, and architecture. He has curated several exhibitions internationally including 180kg ( Jogjakarta, 2002) and Negotiating Spaces (Auckland, 2004) and was contributing curator for Documenta XI (Kassel), and Mediacity 2002 (Seoul). Gunalan, who is on the Board of Directors of the Inter Society for the Electronic Arts, was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK).

Christiane Paul is Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and her book Digital Art was published in July 2003. She teaches in the MFA Computer Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Digital Media Department of the Rhode Island. School of Design and has lectured internationally on art and technology. At the Whitney Museum, she curated the show ‘‘Data Dynamics’’ (2001), the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, as well as the online exhibition ‘‘CODeDOC’’ (2002) for artport, the Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet art for which she is responsible. Other curatorial work includes ‘‘The Passage of Mirage’’ (Chelsea Art Museum, 2004); ‘‘Evident Traces’’ (Ciberarts Festival Bilbao, 2004); and ‘‘eVolution—the art of living systems’’ (Art Interactive, Boston, 2004).

Louise Poissant (Ph.D., philosophy) is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Université du Québec à Montreal where she directs the Groupe de recherche en arts médiatiques since 1989 and the Centre interuniversitaire en arts médiatiques since 2001. She is the author of numerous works and articles in the field of new media art that have been published in various magazines across Canada, France, and the United States. Among her accomplishments, she supervised the writing and translation of a new media art dictionary published by the Presses de l’Université du Québec (PUQ) in French, and sections in the Leonardo Journal published by the MIT Press in English. An online version is available at http:// www.dictionnaireGram.org/. She cowrote a television series on new media art in collaboration with TV Ontario and TÉ LUQ, and she collaborated on a series of video portraits with the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (MACM). Her current research is on art and biotechnologies, and on the new technologies used in performing arts.

Edward A. Shanken is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at the Savannah College of Art & Design. He edited a collection of essays by Roy Ascott, entitled Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (2003). His essay, ‘‘Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art’’ received honorable mention in the Leonardo Award for Excellence in 2004. He recently edited a special series for Leonardo on the topic ‘‘Artists in Industry and the Academy: Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations.’’ Dr. Shanken earned his Ph.D. in art history from Duke (2001) and his M.B.A. from Yale (1990). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies. He serves as an advisor to the REFRESH conference, the journal Technoetic Arts, and the Leonardo Pioneers and Pathbreakers project, and is Vice Chair of the Leonardo Education Forum.

Barbara Maria Stafford does research at the intersection of the visual arts and sciences from the early modern to the contemporary era—with a specific focus on visualization strategies and optical technologies. She is completing a book dealing with visuality and the cognitive turn.

Peter Weibel in 1984 was appointed Professor for Visual Media Art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, and from 1984 to 1989 was Associate Professor for Video and Digital Arts, Center for Media Study at the State University at Buffalo, New York. In 1989 he founded the Institute of New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt on the Main. Between 1986 and 1995 he was in charge of the Ars Electronica in Linz as artistic consultant and later artistic director. From 1993 to 1998 he was curator at the Neue Galerie Graz. Since 1999 he has been Chairman and CEO of the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.