Invited Artists, Producers, Theorists & Curators

Nina Czegledy (Canada/Hungary)

Artist, curator and writer works internationally on collaborative art&science&technology projects. She has exhibited widely, won awards for her artwork and has lead and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide. ElectromagneticBodies, Digitized Bodies Virtual Spectacles and the Aurora projects, via on-line and on-site events, reflect her art, science and  technology interest.  Czegledy has curated and presented numerous international touring projects and published extensively. The City of Toronto commissioned Czegledy’s public art collaboration  (with Greg Judelman and Daniel Barber) on climate change "What will you do to cool the earth?" for Nuit Blanche 2007.  She developed (in collaboration) educational workshops and meetings of experts at the International Conference on the Arts in Society, Mutamorphosis, re:place2007, FILE POA 2008, and the Festival de la Imagen. Czegledy is a Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Associate Adjunct Professor Concordia University, Montreal, Honorary Fellow, Moholy Nagy University of Design, Budapest, member of the international space art network, president of Critical Media, outgoing chair of the Inter Society of Electronic Arts (ISEA) and co-chair of the Leonardo Education Forum (LEF). http://www.criticalmedia.ca http://artsci.ucla.edu/LEF/ http://kmdi.utoronto.ca/

Brett Stalbaum

Brett Stalbaum is a C5 research theorist specializing in information theory, database, and software development. A serial collaborator, he was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998, for which he co-developed software called FloodNet (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html), which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as the Pentagon. As Forbes Magazine put it "Perhaps the first electronic attack against a target on American soil was the result of an art project." For EDT, this was all learned behavior taught by the example of the Zapatistas. Stalbaum has been part of many other individual and collaborative projects, and has published widely on digital art, its context and aesthetics, and location aware media. He is a past editor of Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE digital media lab.



Current projects revolve around landscape experimentation, software development, location aware media and interdisciplinary theory. In collaboration with C5 (www.c5corp.com), Stalbaum has participated in the development of the C5 Landscape Initiative, (http://www.c5corp.com/projects/landscape/index.shtml), and is the lead developer for the C5 Landscape Database, an open source API for accessing and processing GPS and GIS data. In collaboration with Naomi Spellman, Stalbaum helped organize the "Locative Media in the Wild" workshop in July 2005.

Sally Jane Norman

Born in Napier, Aotearoa, Sally Jane’s background and interests are in live performance, art & technology, and interdisciplinary research. She followed a Master of Arts from Canterbury with a Doctorat de 3ème cycle (PhD) and Doctorat d’état at the Institut d’Etudes théâtrales, Université de Paris III, funding her research as a scientific translator. Commissioned papers include publications for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture; she has led art and technology events including the New Images Conference at the Louvre (992) and performance research at the International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mézières, Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam (as artistic co-director), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, and IRCAM in Paris. Sally Jane worked on EU Framework projects at the ZKM before becoming Director General of the Ecole supérieure de l’image in France (Angoulême/ Poitiers), where she launched a pioneering practice-based Digital Arts doctorate with Poitiers University.  Since 2004, as founding director of Newcastle University’s Culture Lab, a digital laboratory working with Newcastle’s three faculties (Humanities, Science, Medicine), her role is to seed and host a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects. Sally Jane ensures consultancy for numerous international research and policy bodies; as a stubborn believer in the power of collaborative, interdisciplinary energies to spearhead innovative cultural and technological processes, she tends to work naturally in unclassifiable discomfort zones. http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/people/profile/s.j.norman

Sarah Cook

Dr. Sarah Cook is a curator of new media art co-editor of CRUMB (an international website and mailing list for media art curators – www.crumbweb.org), and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sunderland. She has a master’s degree from Bard College’s Centre for Curatorial Studies in New York, and is co-author with Beryl Graham of a book on curatorial practice and new media art (forthcoming from MIT Press). Recent exhibitions include “Broadcast Yourself” (http://www.broadcastyourself.net with Kathy Rae Huffman) for the AV Festival 2008, Hatton Gallery and Cornerhouse Gallery (UK) and “My Own Private Reality” 2007 (http://myownprivatereality.wordpress.com with Sabine Himmelsbach) for the Edith Russ Site for Media Art (Oldenburg, Germany). In 2008, Sarah will be an AHRC-funded Curatorial Fellow at EYEBEAM in New York.

Sarah has a longstanding relationship with the Banff Centre in Canada, contributing to programming and summits with the Banff Centre’s New Media Institute, the Banff International Curatorial Institute and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada) since 1998. She co-curated “Database Imaginary” (2004) with Steve Dietz and Anthony Kiendl which toured to four venues across Canada (http://databaseimaginary.banff.org) and “The Art Formerly Known As New Media” (also with Steve Dietz) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of new media art research at Banff. Sarah is co-editor of the (forthcoming) publication “Euphoria and Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues, 1995-2005” and was a keynote speaker at the BNMI Interactive Screen workshops in 2007.

From 2000 to 2006 Sarah worked with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, UK), where she organized conferences and managed artists’ residencies including those of Lev Manovich and Darko Fritz. Her curatorial projects included an ASCII web commission by Vuk Cosic, Germaine Koh’s “Relay”, which translates SMS text messages into Morse code then broadcasts them via the lights on the side of the building, and “Package Holiday” a new commission by Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg based on their digitally-generated mountain landscapes.

Sarah has organized exhibitions, commissioned new media art and managed educational projects for the Bellevue Art Museum (Seattle), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Reg Vardy Gallery (Sunderland), Locus+ (Newcastle), and at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). She has lectured and published widely on new media art and curatorial practice including presentations at ISEA 2006 (San Jose, CA), ISEA 2004 (Helsinki), The British Film Institute (London), The Enter Festival (Cambridge), Video Vortex (Amsterdam), The Centre for Contemporary Art Andalucia (Seville), TATE Online, Tate Britain, and Tate Modern (all London), and FACT (Liverpool). She was an instigator of NODE.London’s ‘Season of Media Arts’, and is a founding researcher in the Faculty of Taxonomy at the University of Openess (www.twenteenthcentury.com/uo).

Jacques Sirot

Jacques Sirot is an independent French film-maker whose creations over the past thirty years range from art works including graphic, photographic and multimedia installation pieces as founding member of CAIRN artists’ cooperative in Paris, to films on live performance and creative technologies events, and documentaries commissioned by local bodies and industrial organisations. Jacques has taught video and multimedia in a variety of professional development and art school contexts. His New Zealand productions include Tane’s Revenge, a film on forest destruction by opossums which premiered on NZTV in 1992 with an ecological “possum rap” music video (co-production with The Pauas), and a documentary on Tapu Te Ranga Marae and its founder, Bruce Stewart (Island Bay, Wellington). Recent Aotearoa inspired work includes audiovisual meditations on Raranga tangata, screened as part of Sally Jane Norman and Sylvia Nagl’s joint conference presentations at Duke University, US (2007) and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin (2008). Video works can be viewed at http://www.dailymotion.com/user/keoracobus and http://idisk.mac.com/mirlitant-Public. Jacques’ blog as an alien discoverer of  Newcastle upon Tyne is at http://vendredi.blog.lemonde.fr/

Andrew Gryf Paterson

Andrew Gryf Paterson is a Scottish artist-organiser, cultural producer and researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. His work involves variable roles of initiator, participant, author and curator, according to different collaborative and cross-disciplinary processes, across the fields of media/ network/ environmental activism. He pursues this practice through workshops, performative events, and storytelling. http://agryfp.info

Dr Melinda Rackham

Dr Melinda Rackham is an Australian Networked Media Artist, Writer and Curator who founded and produced the influential empyre online media arts forum.

An early investigator and commentator on the aesthetic, technological and psychological aspects of identity, locality and sexuality in web, 3d multi-user, game and mobile environments her artworks are widely shown – including Beyond Interface, Arco Electronico, transmediale, File, Art Entertainment Network, The Montreal Biennale, European Media Art Festival, MAAP, Perspecta, Biennial of Buenos Aires, lab3D, NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, ISEA and documenta 12 magazine project.

Dr Rackham is currently the Executive Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, Australia’s peak body for artists working at the convergence of art, science and emerging technologies. http://www.subtle.net/about.html

Dominic Smith/The Polytechnic

The Polytechnic is an Arts organization based in the North east of England which has an emphasis on hand-on and distributed approaches to working with technology. Dominic Smith is an artist, programmer, musician and currently studying towards his PhD with CRUMB at Sunderland University. In 2005- he co-founded Polytechnic: a new media arts organization in Newcastle http://ptechnic.org. His work has been shown widely across the UK and he has done many residencies. Smith will represent the Polytechnic at SCANZ.