Artist Bios:

 

Johannes Grenzfurthner (http://www.monochrom.at/english/) is an artist, writer, director, and DIY researcher. He founded monochrom (an internationally acting art-tech-theory group) in 1993. He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech) festival in San Francisco and co-hosts Roboexotica (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics). He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria. Recurring topics in his work are: contemporary art, activism, performance, humour, philosophy, sex, communism, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.

 

Heather Kelley - moboid - is a media artist and video game designer. Most recently, she was Artist in Residence for Subotron at Quartier21, Museums Quartier Vienna, where she created “SUGAR,” a cross media collaborative event featuring an original game, scent-generating networked electronics, and couture fashion. She is co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, with whom she produces and curates the annual Gamma game event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. Previously, Ms. Kelley was Creative Director on the UNFPA Electronic Game to End Gender Violence, at the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.
Heather's twelve-year career in the games industry has included AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games and web communities for girls. In Spring 2008, she was Kraus Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, and Adjunct Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center, at Carnegie Mellon University, where she organized The Art of Play symposium and art game arcade. Her biographical sex game concept with Erin Robinson, “Our First Times,” won the 2009 GDC Game Design Challenge, and her game concept “Lapis” based on female masturbation won the 2006 MIGS Game Design Challenge.
As moboid, she has created interactive projections using game engines such as Quake and Unreal. Her experimental art game work with Lynn Hughes, “Fabulous/Fabuleux,” was created at Montreal's Hexagram Institute and integrates gameplay into a full-body interactive installation using custom "squishy" interface hardware. For seven years, Heather served as co-chair of the IGDA's Women in Game Development Special Interest Group. She holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is an alumna of the Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory.

http://www.kokoromi.org
http://rapport.moboid.com

 

Karen Marcelo (k0re) is a travelling software engineer. She has worked with various teams in academia and industry from developing 3D Authoring Tools for the Web to Internet Telerobotics to writing games for 'training' expert systems to work in Information Visualization and Ubiquitous Computing. She helped Stelarc implement his Prosthetic Head, and architected and developed parts of Biota.org's Nerve Garden. She started a dorkbot in San Francisco almost 8 years ago and has been a Survival Research Labs crew member since 1995 most known for coding multi-threaded chaos into the first civilian telerobotics system for lethal devices over the web.

http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf
http://srl.org
http://karenmarcelo.org

 

Bonni Rambatan (http://posthumanmarxist.wordpress.com/) is an artist and cultural theorist. His primary field of research is the role of technology in shaping contemporary human subjectivity, sexuality, and society. He started his critical theory blog, The Posthuman Marxist, but left it after a year to start an open-content media/activism startup and finally write his much-demanded book on cyberspace philosophy.