GOSH! Workshop & Summit Participants
From Gosh! 2009: Open Source Hardware Summit
Paul Badger
Paul Badger is an artist who teaches courses in electronic media and hardware at Rhode Island School of Design. His artwork addresses issues surrounding informal public address in public art. His work has been seen at ISEA, SIGGRAPH and on the streets of several U.S. cities.
He is also a designer and manufacturer of various open source hardware products, which can be seen at http://www.moderndevice.com. As a participant in several open source initiatives, Paul is also interested in models of collaboration and group dynamics.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist and Ph.D. candidate, as an HEA MMRP (Multimedia Research Programme) fellow, in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor of communications at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).
Brucker-Cohen worked as an R&D OpenLab Fellow at Eyebeam in NYC from 2006-07, and as a research fellow in the Human Connectedness Group at Media Lab Europe from 2001-04. He received his master’s from ITP in 1999, and was an Interval Research Fellow from 1999-2001. His work and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing Networks,” which includes projects that attempt critically to challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience.
Brucker-Cohen is co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group) and a recipient of the ARANEUM Prize, sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Art, Science and Technology and Fundación Arco. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications, including WIRED, MAKE Magazine, Rhizome.org and Gizmodo.com, and his work has been shown at events such as DEAF (’03, ’04), Art Futura (’04), SIGGRAPH (’00, ’05), UBICOMP (’02, ’03, ’04), CHI (’04, ’06) Transmediale (’02, ’04, ’08), NIME (’07), ISEA (’02, ’04, ’06, '09), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (’04), the Whitney Museum of American Art’s ArtPort (’03), Ars Electronica (’02, ’04, ’08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (’04-05), the Museum of Modern Art, NYC (’08) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (’08).
Projects: http://www.coin-operated.com/projects
Blog: http://www.coin-operated.com
Scrapyard Challenge Workshops: http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com
Diana Burgoyne
Diana Burgoyne refers to herself as an electronic folk artist. Her performances and installations have been exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, New York, France, the Netherlands and Estonia. She was commissioned by Telus Science World to collaborate on a piece that was exhibited as part of Contraption Corner. She has been the artist in residence at the Surrey Art Gallery’s Tech Lab, participated in SCANZ in New Zealand and has just finished a work entitled Audio Quilt, as artist-in-residence at the Roundhouse Community Centre. Audio Quilt is an interactive installation that reflects the sounds and voices of the Roundhouse community by utilizing one hundred audio chips, each recording ten seconds of sound.
The Banff Centre awarded Burgoyne the 2009 Fleck Fellowship. She has also taught “Creative Electronics” at Emily Carr University of Art and Design since 1998.
Website: http://www.ecuad.ca/~dburg
Alexandre Castonguay
Born in Hull, Québec, in 1968, Alexandre Castonguay studied at the University of Ottawa (B.F.A., 1991; B.A., 1993) and at Concordia University, Montreal (M.F.A., 2004). He currently teaches at the University of Ottawa, and is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporainin Montreal .
Castonguay’s practice is based in new media and digital art, and his works exploit both obsolete technologies and open source software. He was a founding and active member of Artengine, the not-for-profit media lab, which seeks to explore the artistic potential of new technologies while addressing concerns of inequality of access to media tools. Castonguay’s recent works occupy the uneasy space between the exploitation and criticism of media art practices.
For more than ten years, Castonguay has produced a multi-disciplinary body of work that includes digital photography, video, computerized installation and the Internet. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally. In 2005, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal presented “Elements,” a solo exhibition of his work. His interactive installation, Digitale, was featured at the Beijing International New Media Arts exhibition (2006), and has been previously presented in Paris, Graz, Austria, Montreal and Ottawa. An earlier work, Générique, was shown at the Glendon Gallery at York University, Toronto (2003), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2004) and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City (2001). His digitally mastered photographs have been featured in group exhibitions at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Jack Shainman and Laurence Miller Galleries in New York City and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa.
Castonguay’s work is represented in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, as well as corporate and private collections.
Marie Cieri
Marie Cieri is a social geographer who combines geographic techniques and perspectives with ones drawn from the arts to create alternative representations of space and place with populations who generally have little access to the tools and forums of the public sphere. She currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and is co-director of Artists in Context, a flexible organizational framework based in Boston, which fosters new situations of collaborative, multidisciplinary engagement for artists, scholars and other creative thinkers.
Before becoming a geographer, Cieri had a diverse career as an arts producer, curator, consultant and practitioner. She was the founder and, from 1987 to 2000, the director of The Arts Company, a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which collaborated with contemporary artists on the production, presentation and touring of new work in a variety of art forms. Her freelance work has included long-term cultural projects for the Rockefeller Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, MIT and The Kitchen.
Cieri has also has held professional positions at Ohio State University’s Department of Geography and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her publications include Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and a forthcoming book, Irresolvable Geographies, based on the idea that spaces and places are constructed and continually contested from a number of cultural, economic and political perspectives. Some of her work for Irresolvable Geographies was included in the exhibition “Just Space(s)” at LACE in Los Angeles (2007).
Florian Cramer
With an academic background in comparative literature and art history, Florian Cramer has been writing on computing, literature, arts and culture since the 1990s. He is a Free Software activist, and has collaborations in Neoism and anti-copyright culture and with Sebastian Lütgert, Cornelia Sollfrank and Mez Breeze.
Cramer is a research professor and head of the Networked Media Master program of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University.
Much of his writing is available at: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl.
Steve Daniels
Steve Daniels uses electronics and communication technologies to create kinetic sculptures, ubiquitous spaces and networked events. He is currently interested in the non-utilitarian possibilities of DIY social devices. Through his practice, Daniels juxtaposes disparate knowledge systems and experiences in an effort to reveal their underlying structures and assumptions.
Daniels has recently presented his work at Nuit Blanche (guerrilla intervention), DigiFest, Mobile Nations, Together Elsewhere and Future Sonic. He was the recipient of the InterAccess emerging artist award in 2003 while still a student. Daniels was hired by Ryerson University shortly after graduating in 2004, and is currently assistant professor and program director of the New Media option in the School of Image Arts. He teaches courses in Physical Computing, Telepresence and Networked Objects. He holds an M.Sc. from the University of Manitoba and is a graduate of the Integrated Media program at OCAD (Toronto).
Chris Csikszentmihályi
Chris Csikszentmihályi directs the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which develops new technologies and techniques to strengthen geographic communities.
Csikszentmihályi has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, and the arts for thirteen years, lecturing, showing new media work and presenting installations in both Europe and North America. He is a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and recently finished a solo exhibition at the Location One Gallery in New York’s SoHo. Csikszentmihályi has taught at the University of California at San Diego, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at Turku University.
He has toured museums and nightclubs with his mechanical hip-hop device, DJ I, Robot, which was nominated for the Best Artistic Software award at Berlin’s Transmediale, while a previous piece, Natural Language Processor, was commissioned by the KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland. The catalog for his installations, Skin and Control, is published by Charta and distributed by DAP. He has also served on the National Academy of Science’s “IT and Creativity” panel.
Csikszentmihályi received an M.F.A. from the University of California at San Diego, and a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently David and Roberta Loge Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Brian Evans
Brian Evans is an artist who creates minimalist installations using electronic media to explore the utility of semi-intelligent objects. He is currently an assistant professor of art and area coordinator for the Sculpture Program at Metropolitan State College of Denver. In 2008, Evans received an M.F.A. in Art at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught an interdisciplinary course in electronics and mechanics for artists.
Evans’ work has been shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art and the CSULB University Art Museum. He is the designer of a soon-to-be-released microcontroller adapted from the Arduino platform, and actively contributes to the open source hardware community, having presented his work at Dorkbot SoCal, as well as editing the Arduino Programming Notebook.
Peter Flemming
Peter Flemming is a Montreal-based artist who uses bits and pieces of discarded industrial objects, obsolesced consumer technologies, machine processes, DIY mechanical devices and custom electronics cut-and-pasted into installation works. He has shown his work internationally.
He teaches electronics for artists at Concordia University in the Intermedia Cyberarts Program. He has conducted workshops in electronics and programming at artist-run centres internationally.
Gwendolyn Floyd
Gwendolyn Floyd is a co-founder of REGIONAL, an interdisciplinary design and research office that performs and applies original analysis of global society, culture and technology, uncovering and developing opportunities for design innovation and meaningful cultural intervention.
With REGIONAL, Floyd researches, consults and teaches on the frontiers of technology and design with a current focus on the relationship between cultural anthropology, ubiquitous and physical computing, and social change. Recent projects have covered implementing custom media technologies for restrictive informational and political environments, researching the innovative technology adoption and community enterprise models of the Old Order Mennonites, and developing the service design for the first cradle-to-cradle shoe.
She has worked as an industrial, service and strategic designer with companies like Philips, Droog, Harvard’s Berkman Center, the BBC, eBay and the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Her design work has been widely published and shown, most notably as part of the American National Design Triennale at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum and in the MOMA’s Design for the Elastic Mind. Coverage of her work has been featured in the International Design Yearbook, Fork and the book Ecodesign.
Gisle Frøysland
For more than a decade, Gisle Frøysland has been one of the key figures of the Norwegian electronic arts scene. He is a founding member of the Bergen Centre for Electronic Art (BEK), initiator/maintainer of the FLOSS video-software MøB and initiator/main organizer of the Piksel festival for FLOSS + art in Bergen, Norway. Since the early 1980s he has been working as a musician, VJ and visual artist.
Web Sites:http://www.gislefroysland.com | http://www.220hex.org | http://piksel.no
Tim Hanson
Tim Hanson has been interested in open source software since using part of the Linux kernel to implement an embedded TCP/IP stack on a military camera during a college internship. More recently, he has been involved in the development of open source EDA (electronic design automation) software, and has enjoyed the camaraderie and discussion accompanying the development. Using this and many other open source software tools, he and Jon Kuniholm have designed Myopen, an open hardware, open source electromyography processor. This device is aimed at prosthetic control and more general EMG interfaces like computers or video games.
The open hardware approach was chosen for this project as it permits users and researchers to engage and catalyze innovation in a democratic and user-purposed manner. Furthermore, it reduces the redundant engineering work embodied in proprietary systems, reduces the number of flaws and errors through openness, honesty and easy examination, and increases further innovation in unrelated or unanticipated devices and applications.
Tim received a BS EE/CS from Cornell University, spent a year working with Dr. John Chapin at SUNY Downstate on the Roborat project and is presently a graduate student at Duke University in the laboratory of Miguel Nicolelis.
Darsha Hewitt
Darsha Hewitt is a Canadian artist from Ottawa, Ontario, currently residing in Montreal, Quebec. She makes sound installations and performances using experimental electronics, open source programming software and hardware, and aging technology.
Her interest in working with electronic sound lies in its capacity to act as an audible indicator for processes, information and natural occurrences that we cannot see, or that would otherwise go unheard. By handcrafting, rebuilding and cross-wiring basic electronics, she strips them of their commercial obligations and exposes them to the noisy and invisible ethereal realm. Hewitt’s artwork makes use of public vicinities and it responds to the environments or people that surround it. It often questions the role of automation in everyday life and how our technology-reliant society silences and reinterprets identity.
Her main areas of research are late nineteenth and early twentieth century audiovisual and communication technology. She studies the practices of mid-twentieth century amateur electronics and radio enthusiasts and how they used homemade technology to augment and understand the world around them. She often draws on the formulas and aesthetics found in vintage DIY electronics magazines like Popular Mechanics and Electronics Illustrated.
In addition to her art practice, Hewitt teaches workshops on experimental approaches to versatile technologies and does consulting with communities new to electronic media and open source practices.
Website: http://www.darsha.org
Pamela Jennings
Pamela Jennings’ Ph.D. career path has been rooted in research environments that support a hybrid integration of creative practices and the development of innovative information technologies. She is the research manager of the Advanced Research Technology Labs [1], iCORE (Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence) Visiting Professor at the Banff New Media Institute, and Adjunct Faculty in the University Of Calgary’s Department of Computer Science. Prior to these appointments, she held a joint professorship at Carnegie Mellon University in the School of Art, College of Fine Arts, and the Human Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science. She has also worked as an interaction design researcher in human-centered computing and educational technology at the IBM Almaden Research Center and the SRI International Center for Technology in Learning, both in Silicon Valley.
Jennings’ digital media works make visible personal narratives by revealing hidden realities, while simultaneously encouraging public discourse by integrating practices and methodologies from digital media, interaction design and human-centered computing and engineering. She has exhibited at Science World, Vancouver; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh; Parsons School of Design, NYC; MIT List Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts; 707 Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe; Studio Museum of Harlem, NYC; Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; and at many international film and video festivals.
She is a MacDowell Artists Colony fellow and has received funding from the Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence (iCORE), the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Jennings received her Ph.D. in Human Centered Systems Design from the Center for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts at the School of Computer Science, University of Plymouth, U.K.
Web Sites: BNMI Research http://www.BNMIResearch.ca and http://wwww.pamelajennings.org
Daniel Jolliffe
A media/visual artist since 1989, Daniel Jolliffe’s work combines fields as diverse as sculpture, performance, electronics and web art to query how embodied conscious experience has been changed by the intervention of technology.
His research interests include anonymous speech, open source approaches to creating artworks and cultural objects, and interventionist and kinaesthetic art, among others.
His work has been performed and exhibited widely, and received international media attention from sources as diverse as Wired News, the Yahoo Directory, the Dow Jones News Wire and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Daniel is an assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal, where his teaching focuses the transformative perceptual and social possibilities of an art and technology practice.
Web Sites: http://www.danieljolliffe.ca | http://www.onefreeminute.net | http://www.freeduino.org
Joshua Kauffman
Joshua Kauffman is an advisor and designer. He is a co-founder (with Gwendolyn Floyd) of REGIONAL [2], which develops systems and strategies for spatial, social and commercial settings. REGIONAL has recently been active in China, Egypt, Cuba, Canada, Europe and the United States.
With REGIONAL, Kauffman is currently implementing custom media technologies for operating in the restrictive informational environment of Cuba, is acting as an advisor to the non-profit democracy-advocacy group Freedom House on new-media initiatives in Egypt, and is principal advisor to the Design Policy Program at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology.
Kauffman has recently led workshops or lectured at Harvard, Stanford, UCSD, SCI-Arc, Intel, O’Reilly’s Etech, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and Hong Kong Polytechnic’s schools of Business and Design. He has played early-stage strategic and service-design roles for companies including Philips, Nike, Honda, eBay and the BBC.
Blog: http://www.regional-office.com Email: info at regional-office dot com
Susan Kennard
Susan Kennard is director and executive producer of the Banff New Media Institute at The Banff Centre, leading the training, production, research and development activity of the institute. She facilitates partnership, exchange and dialogue at the local, national and international levels, with a focus on creating an environment at The Banff Centre that supports creative pluralism, different modes of inquiry, the production of new work and the engagement of artists, producers, technologists and researchers with new media aesthetics and digital culture.
Prior to this, Kennard worked in television as an associate producer for the International Hour, CBC Newsworld Calgary and Dateline NBC, New York. Her radio career roles were writer/broadcaster for CBC Radio Calgary, fundraising coordinator for CKUT Montreal, station manager for CKIZ Community Radio Pincher Creek and board member with the National Campus and Community Radio Association.
Susan has extensive experience in policy development, training and advocacy for the arts and cultural media sectors across Canada; she is a co-founder of radio90.fm, a hybrid Net/FM radio station. In 2005, Kennard concluded a master’s degree in communication for development at the University of Malmö, Sweden, on the relationship between contemporary art practice, social change and civil society in postwar Sarajevo. Kennard participates on numerous juries and review committees in Canada and abroad, is on the board of governors of the Canadian Conference on the Arts and serves as a board member of the Banff YWCA.
André Knörig
André Knörig is an interaction designer with a distinct interest in physical, embodied interactions. André holds degrees in computer science and design. His creative research has been published at conferences such as TEI and CHI, and been exhibited at Ars Electronica and NIME.
Currently, André is working as a research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, where he is project lead of Fritzing, an ambitious open source hardware initiative. He is also managing the Berlin-based IxDS Interaction Design Studios, a design research firm that creates innovative interactive products and services.
Jon Kuniholm
Jon Kuniholm is a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering at Duke University, in the lab of Dr. Rob Clark, working on grasp control for the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program. Jon has degrees in industrial design and mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University, and is a graduate of Dartmouth College.
Kuniholm is a partner at Tackle Design Inc., an industrial design and research-and-development firm. His work there revolves around Tackle’s help with the fledgling Shared Design Alliance and its Open Prosthetics Project, started by Jon and the rest of the Tackle partners following Jon’s injury as a Marine in Iraq.
Until June 24, Kuniholm will be climbing Denali, Alaska’s highest peak, with a team of disabled veterans as part of Operation Denali 2009.
Caroline Langill
Caroline Seck Langill is a writer, artist and independent curator working as an assistant professor in Liberal Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design, in Toronto. Her interdisciplinary practice began with a degree in Biology, which she followed with studies in sculpture/installation at the Ontario College of Art.
In the early 1990s, as visual arts programmer at Galerie SAW Vidéo in Ottawa, Langill curated a series of exhibitions revolving around artworks that incorporated new technologies. After completing an M.F.A. at York University, she pursued scholarly research in new media art history. These studies led to a Ph.D. in Canadian Studies at Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario), as well as a research residency at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology (Montreal, Quebec) in 2006.
Her on-line project, Shifting Polarities: Exemplary Works of Canadian Electronic Media Art Produced Between 1970 and 1991 [3], is the culmination of a decade-long investigation of electronic and new media art. She continues to curate exhibitions and write about new media art in an ongoing attempt to rectify the exclusion of this genre from the art historical record.
Angus Leech
Angus Leech is a writer, editor and new media practitioner. He is currently senior mobile researcher for the BNMI’s Advanced Research Technology Mobile Lab. His current projects focus on enriching the experience of Banff National Park and the Town of Banff for visitors and residents.
Leech served at the BNMI as Interactive Content Writer for Global Heart Rate, during its first phase of content development (January to June, 2005). Individual projects included dramatic writing, content research and information design for a science-based, outdoor role-playing game for cell-phone media, and conceptual design for a GPS-locative trail documentary, also for cell phone. Both projects innovate by combining elements of mobile media, cinema, sound design and digital gaming into holistic experiences in which the hiker’s enjoyment of nature trails is augmented and enriched via complementary narratives delivered in interactive fashion on portable, location-sensitive devices.
Previously (2002-05), Leech was the English editor of HorizonZero, an interactive web magazine showcasing the digital arts and culture scene in Canada, produced in collaboration between the Banff New Media Institute and Heritage Canada. HorizonZero delivered written and multimedia content covering everything from digital documentary and Aboriginal storytelling to nanotechnology and wearable computing. As the senior editor, he planned content, managed the web zine’s editorial process, supported and mentored contributing writers, facilitated the creative development of interactive content and composed numerous articles and interactive scripts.
Before stepping aboard HorizonZero, Leech was an editor and staff journalist with the Calgary Straight, an urban weekly newspaper. He has also been a freelance writer, geologist, public educator and park interpreter. He received his Master’s of Environmental Studies (M.E.S.) in 1999 from York University, where his work focused on media and the environment, and, in particular, relationships between landscape and memory.
Zachary Lieberman
Zachary Lieberman’s work uses technology in a playful way to explore the nature of communication and the delicate boundary between the visible and the invisible. He creates performances, installations and on-line works that investigate gestural input, augmentation of the body and kinetic response.
Working with collaborator Golan Levin, he created a series of installations — Remark and Hidden Worlds — which presented different interpretations of what the voice might look like if we could see our own speech. These were followed with Messa Di Voce, a concert performance in which the speech, shouts and songs of two abstract vocalists were radically augmented in real time by interactive visualization software. Lieberman’s installation/performance, Drawn, in which live painted forms appear to come to life, rising off the page and reacting to the world around them, recently won awards at the Ars Electronica and CYNETart competitions.
Most recently, he helped create visuals for the facade of the new Ars Electronica Museum, wrote software for an augmented reality card trick, performed by Marco Tempest, and helped develop an open source eye tracker to help a paralyzed graffiti artist draw again.
In addition to making artistic projects, Lieberman is co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. He teaches at Parsons School of Design.
David A. Mellis
David A. Mellis is an interaction designer at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, where he teaches in the Interaction Design Pilot Year (run in collaboration with the Danish Design School). He is a co-founder of and the lead software developer for the open-source Arduino electronics prototyping platform. David has a master’s degree from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (2006) and a bachelor’s in mathematics from MIT (2003). In September, 2009, he will begin graduate studies at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Leah Buechley.
Website: http://dam.mellis.org/
Katherine Moriwaki
Katherine Moriwaki is an artist and researcher investigating clothing and accessories as the active conduit through which people create network relationships in public space. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin, her work has appeared in IEEE Spectrum magazine, and numerous festivals and conferences, including numer.02, at Centre Georges Pompidou (’02), Futuresonic (’04, ’07), Break 2.2 (’03), SIGGRAPH (’00, ’05), Ubicomp (’03, ’04), eculture fair (’03), Transmediale (’04), CHI (’04, ’06), ISEA (’04), Ars Electronica (’04) and WIRED Nextfest (’05).
Katherine received her master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design’s M.F.A. Design Technology program, and has taught at Rhode Island School of Design’s Design Media Arts program. She was a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from Spain’s Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundación Arco.
Projects and work: http://www.kakirine.com/projects
Scrapyard Challenge: http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com
Juergen Neumann
Juergen Neumann started working with information technology in 1984, and since then has been looking for ways to deploy ICT in useful ways for organizations and society. As a consultant for ICT strategy and implementation, he has worked for major German and international companies, as well as on many non-profit projects.
Besides his professional engagement, in 2002 he co-founded http://www.freifunk.net, a non-profit campaign to spread knowledge and social networking about free and “open' networks” — a campaign globally regarded as one of the most successful grassroots community projects in this field.
Then, frustrated from reflashing hundreds of wireless access points over the past years, in 2007 Neumann initiated the Open Hardware Initiative — an alliance of activists lobbying for open source hardware at the sidelines of both eastern and western hardware industries. In 2008, he co-organized the first Open Technology Summit in Taiwan.
Besides his job as CEO of a private consultancy company, his recent activities include digging deeper into the possibilities of manufacturing open source(d) chip designs and lobbying for new and more open licensing models for the radio spectrum.
Dr. N. Sai Bhaskar Reddy
With some fourteen years experience contributing to environment and development projects, Dr. N. Sai Bhaskar Reddy is an ardent campaigner for open source technology and Creative Commons, and against patents.
One of Dr. Reddy’s important achievements is designing fifteen types of “Good Stoves” [4], an open source, Creative Commons technology for the common good. Intended for use by tribal dwellers in India’s deep forests, as well as poor, landless and small farmers, Good Stoves contribute to climate change mitigation, health improvements, biomass conservation, etc. Dr. Reddy has declared a “one million Good Stoves mission to be achieved in partnership with various stakeholders within the next five years. Requiring low costs, high efficiency and diverse designs, the world needs at least 0.5 billion Good Stoves, in order to meet the social, environmental, economic and cultural aspirations of communities living in developing world.
Dr. Reddy is also founder and CEO of Geoecology Energy Organisation (GEO) [5], an initiative to mitigate climate change through adaptation. GEO’s membership is growing rapidly, and the knowledge created through its various initiatives is accessed by more than 500 people each day, and shared via over 200 web links. GEO also provides on-line support for hundreds queries, and helps to build capacities with interested people, organizations and agencies.
BIOCHAR [6]
Peggy Reynolds
Peggy Reynolds is an artist/scholar whose work explores the material effects/affects of technogenesis, or the on-going, co-evolutionary process that shapes both humans and technology. Her artwork, which has been widely exhibited in the U.S., generally takes the form of interactive objects or environments that explore the nonlinear, networked topologies of social and physical systems, while her academic writings investigate a similar terrain through a theoretical analysis of scale, temporality and their interrelationship.
Currently on her second non-teaching fellowship from Ohio State University, Reynolds is working to complete her dissertation, entitled Depth Technology: Bringing Becoming Into Being, a project that focuses on how the co-constitutivity of technology and the human being is leading the latter towards a more haptic/proprioceptive and less ocularcentric engagement with interior and exterior topologies. Both her interactive installations and academic work in the field of Science and Technology Studies draw on concepts from evolutionary biology, dynamical systems theory and cognitive science, and juxtapose these with work currently being done on the non-analytical, affective capacities of the body.
Jessica Rylan
Using her home-built synthesizers in sound installations and high-energy musical performances, Jessica Rylan defies genre. The intuition of folk meets the academic techniques of the avant-garde: a cappella mixes with white noise, and imaginary numbers are applied to aesthetics.
In 2006 Rylan started Flower Electronics to produce editions of her synthesizers. Flower’s Little Boy Blue battery-powered synthesizer is now sold worldwide.
Since 2007, Rylan has led a series of hands-on electronics workshops at locations including Piksel Festival; Bergen, Norway, the St. Louis Contemporary Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and Club Transmediale, Berlin. Audiences have ranged from middle-school students to elderly arts patrons, while projects have included analog computers and squeakers.
Her sound has traveled through galleries in the Netherlands to rock clubs across the United States. Her latest LP, Private Time (Part 2), was issued in 2008 on the Weird Forrest record label. Other recordings are available from Important Records, Load and RRR.
Rylan has received grants from the Penny McCall Foundation, the LEF Foundation and Meet the Composer. She is currently a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and studies Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She lives and works in Boston.
Website: http://cavs.mit.edu/jr
Paige Saez
Paige Saez is a visual artist and information architect. In her personal artistic practice, she deals mostly with the creation and consumption of the object and imaginary devices to aid(or disrupt) communication. Sàez is fascinated by structures of participation in the production of knowledge and information and focuses her research on hacktivism, participatory economics and social media.
Sàez has been exhibiting work as a visual artist for the last 11 years and has shown work internationally, from Art Basil in Miami, to the Istanbul Biennale. She frequently collaborates on projects with Red76, a collective she has been working with for the last 10 years.
Sàez work as an interaction designer and strategic planner by day at Wieden + Kennedy. She researches the intersections between visual studies, digital anthropology and art, and believes strongly that these are the center-points of social activism. She recently received her M.F.A. from Pacific Northwest College of Art where she studied interaction design with a focus on mobile computing, participatory culture, and relational aesthetics.
In 2007 she founded the Makerlab with Anselm Hook [7], an arts and technology incubator focused on civic and environmental interactive projects. To date the collaborative has produced two mobile applications focused on evidencing and facilitating local communities; Citybot helps neighbors connect wants with needs, while the Imagewiki allows for information storage in images in a democratic fashion. Under her guidance, the Makerlab collaborative has also hosted weekly events, called Sunday skill‐shares, bringing artists and programmers together for potlucks and social activist endeavors. From 2005‐2006, she worked with Platial, a neogeographical map‐sharing social network where she created over 100 Situationist maps.
From 2004‐2006 she created Little Cities a project involved working with groups of people around the country building ad‐hoc dream houses. Designed as a series of parties Little Cities was a project set in place to try to investigate complicated questions through simplistic, childlike actions. At the same time, Little Cities was a process designed to create new homes, new communities, and new ways to think about the meaning of home and place.
Website: http://paigesaez.org
makerlab.com
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Ravi Shukla
After completing his LL.B. (Queen’s, 1986) and B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (University of Toronto, 1983), Ravi Shukla was called to the Ontario Bar in 1988. He works as Counsel to Lang Michener LLP [8] as of 2000, and is a Registered Canadian Trade Mark Agent.
Shukla’s practice focuses on information technology and Internet law, and emphasizes intellectual property law. Although he at one time had a significant involvement in litigation matters, he currently approaches his practice primarily from the standpoint of a solicitor, and is extremely knowledgeable on both technology and business issues his clients face.
Shukla acts in an ongoing capacity for significant suppliers and customers of IT products and services; projects arising from these relationships have encompassed outsourcing projects, including outsourcing from Canadian financial institutions. His emphasis encompasses structuring technology enterprises, technology development, licensing and transfers. Shukla has experience obtaining, licensing and enforcing patent and trade-secret rights, as well as counseling clients concerning the protection of privacy rights, confidential information and other intellectual property assets.
He has served on the boards of both public and private organizations, ranging in size from large, multi-billion-dollar enterprises to technology-focused start-ups. Shukla writes and speaks frequently on matters within his professional interest.
Bengt Sjölén
Bengt Sjölén is an indepedent software and hardware designer/hacker/artist based in Stockholm, with roots in the home computer demo scene.
He is not part of one single group, but rather collaborates with several networks, including Teenage Engineering, a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Stockholm, and aether architecture in Budapest. Collaboration is often in the form of peer production, where the network, rather than the individual, is the author, and where not only is the network crossing discipline boundaries, but so is each individual participant, too, creating a sum larger than its parts through sharing and cross-breeding of ideas.
Sjölén is doing projects in the contexts of media art, science, sound, visuals, architecture and technology. He experiments with, among other things, programmatic generation of design, function, hardware and software. One example of this is customizing computer-controlled machines with parts manufactured by the same machines to enable rapid prototyping of electronics and mechanics from generated designs, bypassing the traditional processes and economics of prototype design and manufacturing.
Sjölén's work has been exhibited internationally in venues like Synthetic Times Exhibition (Beijing), NTT ICC (Tokyo) and the Biennale of Architecture (Venice).
Tuomo Tammenpää
Tuomo Tammenpää has a background in visual arts and design. He works as a media artist and designer in Finland, sharing his time between practice-based research and development, art productions and commercial design work at concept agency YATTA.
After fifteen years of work with interactive installations and screen-based design, he has focused his work on exploring the potential of physical and ubiquitous computing and tangible media in artistic and design practice. He has exhibited award-winning interactive media installations in Scandinavia, Europe, North America and Asia. Tammenpää has been involved in several European cultural networks, most lately Pixelache [9], an electronic arts and subcultures festival. He is a member of Grafia ry and SIGCHI/ACM.
Besides his design work in YATTA, Tammenpää collaborates with English game designer Daniel Blackburn on electronically enhanced games and plays. They are interested in combining the social and physical aspects from plays and board games with the computational possibilities of microcontrolled electronics. In his artistic practice, Tammenpää is studying the use and misuse of everyday electronic devices in the context of the demystification and democratization of technology. Hacking, modifying, circuit-bending and open hardware ideology provide the working context, wherein he questions the relationship between the electronic objects, consumers as users, and the industry.
Website: http://www.google.com/profiles/tuomo.tammenpaa
James Wallbank
James Wallbank is an artist, educator and free technology advocate. Currently he is CEO of Access Space Network [10] in Sheffield, U.K.
In the mid-nineties, Wallbank founded the arts group Redundant Technology Initiative [11] (RTI) with a simple decision: to be creative with no-cost “trash” technology. Two years and several exhibitions later, the RTI warehouse contained more than 2,000 recycled computers. They’d solved the problem of access to technology; now, they needed to get more creative.
The solution was to start Access Space [12]. Opened in 2000, the project provides a free network lab, which invites members of the public to learn, communicate and create with recycled technology and free, open source software. The lab provides the facilities and framework for participants to pursue their own artistic and technical projects. Key to Access Space’s approach is its peer-learning community; participants learn from and teach one another.
Access Space works at the intersection of the creative arts, community learning and urban regeneration, providing a platform for participants to develop their skills, networks and creativity. Recently the organization has worked to understand its longevity and effectiveness, and has been researching wider applications of its approach, helping other groups to set up similar labs for their local communities.
Norman T. White
Norman White majored in Biology at Harvard University with the intention of becoming a fisheries biologist. By graduation, however, his attention had shifted to art. Experimenting with a wide-ranging assortment of jobs and painting styles, in 1961 he happened upon work as an electrician’s helper at the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. The job provided a critical revelation: wiring up a ship’s telephone switchboard could be as creatively satisfying as painting!
Subsequent travel in the Middle East (1964-65) brought White into contact with Islamic art and architecture. Its logical/biological sensibility struck another resonant chord, and, upon settling in London, England, he began painting in a careful and strongly logical style. Within a year, immersed in a culture that was itself just discovering digital technology, he abandoned his paints altogether in favour of functioning electronic circuits. In doing so, he found a way to merge his diverse obsessions, from ciphers and aquatic organisms to switching systems and Islamic design.
White moved to Canada in 1967, drawn by the greater accessibility of technical materials, and embarked on an intense self-education in electronics. In the decades that followed, he went on to create a series of behaviour-intensive “machines,” which expressed themselves through light, sound and motion.
In 1978, White helped to initiate a program dedicated to teaching electronics, mechanics and computer programming to art students at the Ontario College of Art & Design. He now teaches similar courses at Ryerson University in Toronto.
The Normill website: http://www.normill.ca.
