Biographies




Robert Adrian X 1935, Toronto, lives in Vienna. Adrian X has shown his installations, paintings, sculptures and telecommunications projects at the Venice Biennale [1980 and 1986] as well as at the Sydney Biennale and numerous other international exhibitions. One-man shows in Europe and North America. Adrian X’s works are included in the collections of international museums and he has completed several large-scale projects in public spaces. Since 1979, he has been involved, in both theory and practice, with art in and by means of the new communications technologies.

Peter Assmann 1963, Zams in Tyrol, lives in Linz since 1991. Assmann studied art history, German language and literature and history at the University of Innsbruck, where he was subsequently an assistant professor in the Department of Art History. Assmann’s research projects took him to Italy and France, and he was a free-lance staff member of the Museum of the Province of Tyrol. Since 1992, he has headed the Galerie im Stifterhaus and the Gallery of the Province of Upper Austria. He is also an associate professor at the Institute for Design and the Catholic Theological Institute in Linz.

Sam Auinger 1956, Linz, lives in Linz. Intensive involvement with questions of composition, computer music, sound design and psychoacoustics since the early 1980s. Work in film, theater, radio, video, … Exhibitions and festivals … in Europe and the US … Since 1989, regular collaboration on sound installations with Bruce Odland: Garten der Träume [Ars Electronica 90], TrafficMantra [Forum Trajanum, Rome 1991]. They were also responsible for the sound design for Peter Sellars’ Die Perser [1993].

Doug Back has been working with computers since 1979. He has shown his work in many places in Canada, the United States, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Mexico. He teaches in the New Media and Sculpture/Installation Departments at The Ontario College of Art in Toronto. He has built machines that allow arm wrestling and teleport weather over the telephone lines. Robotic simulations of the inner ear, computer controlled shadow projections, and computer controlled chairs which heat up or cool down depending on the emotional content of video recordings.

Konrad Becker is a hyperreality researcher/developer and interdisciplinary event designer. He is chairman of tØ/Institute for New Culture-Technologies [Public Netbase; Brain.Vader], the Institut für Wissenschaftliche Sensation and Public Tranceport Systems. He is a founding member of Monoton and other groups, providers of fine electronic underground music and psycho-acoustics since 1979. Presentations and publications include text, video, music, installations and environments focusing on subjective science and culture synthesis. http://netbase.t0.or.at/~konrad/

Beusch/Cassani 1963/66, Bern, have lived in Paris since 1991. Beusch/Cassani are responsible for a few of the most remarkable multimedia projects of recent years. What emerged from this collaboration with European radio stations, museums and festivals has been interpreted by some as a refreshing parallel narrative to the communications media, while others have seen it as off-beat mediatainment or the playful re-encoding of the clichés of video culture. The [inherent] dynamism generated by means of a media fiction, the mixture of sound, text and image, and the central position occupied by interaction with users – qualities shared by all projects realized to date – are also in evidence in the Internet project SOS RADIO TNC. Beusch/Cassani see themselves as two pixels whose power of illumination is constantly unfolding in new constellations.

Gudrun Bielz Studies at the Institute for Artistic and Industrial Design in Linz, Institute for Applied Art in Vienna and Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London. Associate professor at the Institute for Artistic and Industrial Design in Linz and the Institute for Applied Art in Vienna. She has shown her work and taken part in exhibitions [including film festivals] in Austria and abroad, including Aperto and the Venice Biennale 1990. Areas of specialization: video sculpture and installation, spatial installation, artistic video tape Su8 and 16mm film, photography, video set design, artistic advertising videos, short stories, sound work.

Rainer Born 1943, Mühlhausen/Thüringen, lives in Linz. Ass. Prof. Univ. -Doz. Mag. phil. Dr. rer. nat. Rainer Born has been an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Theory of Science at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz since 1979. Born is also a lecturer in the Department of Data Processing at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, as well as for epistemology, formal logic and introduction to scientific thought at the Catholic Theological Institute in Linz. He has organized scholarly symposia and congresses, and has been, since 1977, the co-publisher of the philosophical journal Conceptus as well as Conceptusstudien.

Reinhard Braun 1964, Linz, lives in Graz. Braun studied art history and philosophy in Graz. He is a staff member of the magazine Camera Austria. Diverse catalogue contributions as well as published works on the subject of the theory of photography and media.

John L. Casti received his Ph.D. in mathematics under Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California in 1970. He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, and served on the faculties of the University of Arizona, NYU and Princeton before becoming one of the first members of the research staff at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis [IIASA] in Vienna, Austria. In 1986, he left IIASA to take up his current post as a Professor of Operations Research and System Theory at the Technical University of Vienna. He is also a Resident Member of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, where he is working on the application of biological metaphors to the mathematical modeling of problems in economics, finance and road-traffic networks. In addition, he has been actively working on the question of limits to scientific knowledge.

Luc Courchesne 1952, St. Léonard d’Aston, Québec. Courchesne studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax [Bachelor of Design in Communication, 1974], and at MIT, Cambridge [Master of Science in Visual Studies, 1984]. He began his exploration in interactive video in 1984 when he co-authored Elastic Movies, one of the earliest experiment in the field. He has since produced several installations which has been shown worldwide. Courchesne is a professor at the Ecole de design industriel, Université de Montréal, and currently artist in residence at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, ZKM/Karlsruhe

Richard Dawkins 1941, Nairobi, Kenya. He moved to England at the age of eight and was educated in Oxford. After a few years at the University of California at Berkeley he returned to Oxford, where he is now Reader in Zoology and a Fellow of New College. Richard Dawkins broke new ground in the theory of evolution with his book The Selfish Gene, published in 1976 [second edtion 1989]. He has continued to promote the Darwinian cause with his other best-selling books, The Extended Phenotype and The Blind Watchmaker, and in his forthcoming book based on his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

Louis-Philippe Demers is a lighting designer, software engineer and independent electronic artist. His robotic installations were exhibited in major international festivals and, with Kunst Macchina, he commercializes control software for performance. His lighting design and interactive performances are applied in dance, opera, theatre and installations. He completed one year of Doctoral studies in robotics [McGill] and was artist in residence at The Banff Centre [Media Arts].

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His writings on fringe culture, technology, and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, Mondo 2000, Virtual City, New Media, The Discovery Channel Online, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century [Grove Press, http://www.well.com/user/markdery/], a critique of fringe computer culture.

Wolfgang Dorninger 1960, Linz, lives in Vienna and Linz. Dorninger attended the Institute for Applied Art in Vienna where he completed the Master-level Program for Visual Media Design. He is also a musician, playing in the groups Monochrome Bleu, Josef K. Noyce and Wipe Out. Dorninger has composed numerous musical works for film, theater and dance. He operates the Sonic Sound Studio in Linz.

Joe Engelberger was born in New York and currently resides in Newtown, CT. Engelberger, usually honored as the Father of Robotics, is the chairman of HelpMate Robotics Inc. The mission of HRI is to give robots a spectrum of sensory perception so that mobile, sensate robots can work shoulder to shoulder with human mentors in service activities. The company’s flagship product is "HelpMate", a robotic hospital courier, currently installed in over 50 U.S. hospitals as well as in Europe and Japan.

Gerhard Funk 1958, lives in Linz. 1977-82: studied mathematics and art education in Linz/1983-93: secondary school teacher of mathematics, data processing and graphic arts, associate professor and research project staff member at the Kepler University in Linz and at the RISC in Hagenberg. 1989 Doctorate in the field of theoretical computer science under Prof. Buchberger at the RISC. 1992-93: associate instructor at the Art Institute of Linz. Since 1993: data processing instructor at the Art Institute of Linz.

Masaki Fujihata 1956, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo. Board Member of Japan Animation Film Association, Member of ASIFA, Associate professor, Faculty of Environmental Information, Kelo University. Among numerous exhibitions were group and one-man shows in Tokyo, New York and at the SIGGRAPH in Detroit and Minneapolis.

Ken Goldberg Artist and Assistant Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research [IEOR] Dept, University of California at Berkeley. Goldberg directs the Alpha Research Lab. He ist also associated with the Engineering Systems Research Center and the EECS Robotics and Intelligent Machines Laboratory. And the Modular Robotics Lab at USC. Research interests are Robotics for automated manufacturing, motion planning algorithms for feeding, sorting, fixturing, and assembly. Design of parts and devices for automation. Robotics in multi-media applications.
Joe Santarromana is an artist on the faculty at UC Irvine.
George Bekey is Gordon Marshall Professor of Computer Science at USC.
Steven Genter is CEO of www.hunchback.com.
Rosemary Morris architect and landscape designer in L.A .
Carl Sutter is on the staff of USC’s Center for Scholarly Technology.
Jeff Wiegley is pursuing a Phd in robotics under Prof. Goldberg.

Heidi Grundmann In 1987, after working for many years as a cultural journalist, critic, editor and producer at the ORF (Austrian National Radio/TV) Heidi Grundmann founded the weekly radio program KUNSTRADIO-RADIOKUNST which she curates and produces. KUNSTRADIO consists entirely of original works for radio by artists of all disciplines.

Heidi Grundmann also lectures and writes on art and new media and has organised and curated many symposia and exhibitions related to art practice in the electronic media – especially radio and TV. She is on the advisory panels concerning visual arts of the Austrian Ministry of Culture and on the music jury of the DAAD, Berlin. She is at present chairperson of "Ars Acustica International", the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) experts group on radio art.

Heidi Grundmann is a founding member and president of TRANSIT – a-not-for-profit association for the production of cultural projects in the public space of the electronic media.

Helmuth Gsöllpointner born 1933 in Brunnwald bei Bad Leonfelden, Upper Austria; lives in Linz. From 1948 to 1951, he attended the School for Steel Cutting in Steyr; from 1951-55, study at the Institute for Applied Art in Vienna. Since 1973, Gsöllpointner has taught the Master-level Program in "Metal" [Object and Product Design] at the Institute for Artistic and Industrial Design in Linz, where he served as rector for four years beginning in 1977. Since 1954, Gsöllpointner has exhibited at numerous one-man and group shows in Austria and abroad. His works can be found in public and private collections.

Daniel Harris 1943, Chicago. Underwater Engineering & Supervision. Harris received a diverse musical training. His early teachers were members of the Chicago Symphony, various Chicago jazz musicians and several musical instrument inventors. After receiving degrees in Clarinet and Composition at the Eastman School of Music and Yale University, he became a member of several New York City avant garde musical ensembles and the American Symphony Orchestra. From 1969 to 1981 he was Director of the Electronic Music Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1982 he has been residing in New York City where he currently works as an audio/video/multimedia systems designer for Sync Sound. Since 1973, Daniel Harris and Michel Redolfi have collaborated on numerous sound design projects. From 1989 to the present, Harris has been in charge of developing new technical and artistic resources for underwater music with the CIRM.

Harwood is an international multi media artist who previously co-foundet The Working Press and Underground Press and is a regular contributor to conferences on the electronic art. Harwood works at Artec with long term unemployed.

Francis Heylighen is a Senior Research Associate for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research [NFWO]. He works at the Free University of Brussels [VUB], where he is an associate director of the transdisciplinary Center Leo Apostel. He is co-editor of the Principia Cybernetica Project [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/], which attempts to consensually develop a cybernetic philosophical system. The main focus of his research is the evolutionary development of higher levels of complexity, and especially the development of knowledge. He tries to apply these ideas to the integration of knowledge from different disciplines into an encompassing, conceptual framework or "world view".

Perry Hoberman is an installation and performance artist who works with a variety of technologies, ranging from utterly obsolete to seasonably state-of-the-art. His installation Bar Code Hotel was awarded the top prize at the 1995 Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles, and has also been shown at Ars Electronica. Faraday’s Garden, a viewer-activated appliance installation, has also been exhibited widely. Other ongoing projects include a variety of stereo 3D installations and performances, and The Empty Orchestra Café, a radical neo-Karaoke bar. Hoberman currently teaches in the graduate Computer Art Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is the Art Director at Telepresence Research, a company specializing in virtual reality and telepresence installations for arts and industry.

Natalie Jeremijenko is a conceptual artist working in the design of new technologies. An Australian, living in San Francisco and completing her PhD in Engineering at Stanford, she worked on the Ubiquitous Computing Project at Xerox PARC and teaches at the San-Francisco Art Institute. She has recently been commissioned by the Bureau of Inverse Technology [BIT] to examine probablility risk analysis techniques used in public sector benefit-cost analysis, sperm bank distribution systems and other economic conditions. Thanks are due to those at Xerox PARC who assisted in the construction of early proto-types of the voice boxes and thanks generally to the PAIR program within PARC for its support of many interesting projects.

Herbert Hrachovec Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He does not remember how he got there.

Joshua S. Lateiner His research has long focused on interactive computer graphics, interface usability, and computer simulations. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology he was involved in constructing interactive computer simulations of physical phenomenon merging computer graphics with video imagery. This research later led to the development of Dataspace: an alternative method of representing 3D models based on voxel datastructures. At the University of North Carolina [Chapel Hill] he further developed the Dataspace concept and designed an interactive volume rendering system. While at Tufts University, the Dataspace concept expanded to incorporate a threedimensional, distributed object store and metacomputing engine. In 1993, using Lateiner Dataspace’s technology, he helped Vox-L Inc. develop the Vox-L Stereoscopic Workstation which allows the interactive, stereoscopic viewing of volume data.

Hannes Leopoldseder 1940, lives in Linz. He has been working for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation since 1967. Since 1974 he has been General Manager of the Upper Austrian Regional Studios. In 1979 he co-founded Ars Electronica and the Linz Sound Cloud, in 1987 he initiated the Prix Ars Electronica and in 1993 the Ars Electronica Center.

Geert Lovink media theoretician, member of Adilkno, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge. Books of Adilkno: Cracking the Movement [New York, 1994], Media Archive [Amsterdam, 1992], The Data Dandy [Amsterdam, 1994]. Co-organizers of the conferences Next Five Minutes [Amsterdam, 1993/1996], Ex Oriente Lux [Bucharest, 1993], Interface 3 [Hamburg, 1995] and Metaforum [Budapest, 1994-96]. Currently working with Pit Schultz and others on the mailing list "nettime", a collaborative text production on "net criticism".

Albert Lichtblau 1954, Blindenmarkt. Lichtblau completed his studies in history and political science in 1980; thereafter, numerous scholarly projects in the field of housing and renter protest movements; worked for Amnesty International and as a truck driver. Since 1985, research concentrated on migration, ethnicity, history of prejudice, Jewish history and the history of anti-Semitism, autobiography, oral history and video history. Currently: member of the research staff of the Institute for the History of the Jews in Austria and docent in the Department of History of the University of Salzburg.

Tod Machover has been widely praised for music that boldly breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, offering a unique and innovative synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, of symphony orchestras and interactive computers, of operatic arias and rock songs, and that consistently delivers serious and powerful messages in a accessible and immediate way. Machover was Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM Institute in Paris [1978 – 85]. Since 1985, he has been Professor of Music & Media, and Director of the Music Group at the MIT Media Lab. Machover’s music has been performed by many of the world’s most important performers and performing organizations, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble InterContemporain [Paris], the Ensemble Modern [Frankfurt], the Tokyo String Quartet. In addition to his work as a composer, Machover is widely noted as a designer of new technology for music.

J. A. Merrit Merrit’s work deals with the boundaries between human behavioral patterns and driving compulsion. Using the tools of noise [Krüppelschlag] and mechanical sculpture [Gyroscope], and fanning conceptual sparks to catch fire [Contained], he attempts to track down the traces of human bio-mechanical dependencies; to find out what is.

Christian Möller 1959, Frankfurt, lives in Frankfurt. Möller studied architecture in Frankfurt; he received a grant to work with Gustav Peichl at the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna. In 1990, he opened a private architectural practice which includes a laboratory for electronic media and software development. He has been a member of the staff of the Institute for New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt since 1991.

Netband Franz F. Feigl, Erik Hobijn, Dick Verdult

NL.DESIGN consists of Mieke Gerritzen, Marjolein Ruyg, together with students of the Rietveld Art Academy [Amsterdam] and the Art Academy HKU [Utrecht].

Roberto Paci Dalò 1962, theatrical director, composer, media artist. Theatrical and musical productions include: Nodas [Vienna State Opera, Kronos Quartet 1993], Lost Memories [ORF Kunstradio/ESC Graz 1994, Prix Italia official selection], Auroras [Berlin, Hebbel Theater/Inventionen 94], La lunga notte [Rimini/Cologne/Innsbruck/Jerusalem 1993], Realtime [Ars Electronica Prize for Interactive Art 1994]. In 1985, he and Isabella Bordoni founded "Giardini Pensili" as a theatrical company and media lab. In 1995, he founded the on-line cult radio station Radio Lada. Artistic director of the radio and media festival LADA/L’Arte dell’Ascolto and trustee of the Mediterranean Network for the telematic projects Horizontal Radio and Rivers & Bridges [1995, 1996].

Nancy Paterson is a Toronto based electronic media artist working primarily in the field of interactive video installations. She is an Instructor at the Ontario College of Art Facilities Manager at Charles Street Video in Toronto.

Simon Penny is an Australian artist, theorist, teacher and curator in the field of electronic and interactive media art. His art practice consists of interactive and robotic installations, which have been exhibited in the US, Australia and Europe. His most recent project is the Autonomous Robotic Artwork Petit Mal. He is Associate Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University where, among other things, he teaches Robotic Art Studio. During his 6 years in the USA he has established the Electronic Intermedia Program at the University of Florida; curated Machine Culture [at SIGGRAPH 93 in Anaheim, CA], and has edited the anthology Critical Issues in Electronic Media [SUNY Press 1995].
Jamieson Schulte is a student at Carnegie Mellon University and has worked with Simon Penny on Petit Mal and Sympathetic Sentience.

Sadie Plant is the director of the Cybernetic Culture Unit of the University of Warwick, UK. Her first book The Most Radical Gesture. The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age was published in 1992 by Routledge. Her second book Zeros and Ones will be published this year by Fourth Estate [London] and Doubleday [N.Y.].

Heimo Ranzenbacher 1958, Kapfenberg, lives in Graz as journalist, art critic, theorist and artist. Diverse publications in catalogues and specialized journals; diverse addresses at symposia; diverse art projects, including: Klang-Figur, interactive sound performance [in collaboration with Werner Jauk], steirischer herbst, Graz 1991; founded TXTD.sign – a studio for aesthetic services, 1993; Lichtzeichen, Utopie-Kunststraße installation, Innsbruck 1994; Sonderartikel Esc, Graz 1995.

Erwin Redl 1963, Gföhl, Lower Austria, lives in Brooklyn.

Michel Redolfi 1951, Marseille. He is the Director of the Centre International de Recherche Musicale [CIRM] in Nice since 1986, co-founder of the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Marseille [GMEM] in 1968, continues to explore situations in wich musical innovation implies a playful rapport with the listener. Also pursues the field of electroacoustic music, with compositions that are specially conceived for multi-speaker theaters.

Winfried Ritsch born in Tyrol, lives in Graz. Winfried Ritsch has been an associate professor since 1989 and an assistant professor since 1994 in the Department of Electronic Music at the Institute for Music and Visual Arts in Graz. Ritsch has composed works for recording, sound installations and solo performances using computers. In 1994, he founded the sound studio ”Algorythmics." He is currently working on the development of electronic musical instruments and cybernetic models for the operation of this equipment, as well as on the interactive creation of computer music. His artistic works have included telematic [network] projects and performances, installations and sculptures in connection with the medium of radio.

Don Ritter 1959, Canada. After beginning an artistic career in painting and sculpture, Don Ritter’s work since 1986 has focused on interactive installations and performances. He began working with computer graphics and electronic media in 1979 when he was a human interface and circuit board designer for Bell-Northern Research and Northern Telecom. He is a Professor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. He holds a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT, a joint Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts & Psychology from University of Waterloo, and a diploma in Electronics Engineering from Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. His interactive installations, performances, telecommunication events and video tapes have been presented at various festivals and museums in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Jocelyn Robert Founding member and president of l’Association de création et diffusion sonores Avatar, in Québec, involved in the Meduse project, working solo, with Diane Landry, with Bruit TTV, in audio art, installation, interactive machineries, long distance performance, typographic contortions, epistolary computing, urban manoeuvres, worried by the quality of imprecisions, by the ambiguous pairs artwork/context, music/noise, object/place.

Jon Rose 1951, England. Lives in Australia and Germany. He started playing the violin at age seven. Throughout the 1970s, first in England and then in Australia, he played, composed and studied in a large variety of musical genres – from sitar playing to country & western; from "new music" composition to sound installations. He became the central figure in the development of free improvisation in Australia. In 1986, he moved to Berlin in order to more fully realize his on-going project [of some 20 years], The Relative Violin. This is the development of a Total Art Form based around this one instrument. Necessary to this concept has been innovation in the fields of new instrument design [over 25 deconstructed violin instruments including the legendary double piston, triple neck, wheeling violin and giant bowed instruments reaching up to 15 meters in length], environmental performance, new instrumental techniques, both analog and the more recently interactive electronics … plus using the media of radio, live performance-film and television to create a new, alternative and personal revised history for THE VIOLIN. Jon Rose performs his group projects and solo music in upwards of 50 concerts every year. He is currently performing The Chaotic Violin, one of a number of highly acclaimed works for violin and interactive software.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of pop-culture and media theory books including Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, a portrait of the 1990’s cyberculture, The GenX Reader, a collection of writings by the elusive, media-wary "slacker" generation, and Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture a journey through the complexities of today’s datasphere and media obsessions. His latest book, Playing the Future, explores the culture of the "screenagers" for their insights on thriving in an increasingly chaotic age. As a journalist, Rushkoff is currently writing a politics column as Contributing Editor for Virtual City, and regularly writes articles about pop-culture, media and technology for magazines and newspapers. Rushkoff has served as a technology and culture consultant to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, as well as companies including Sony, Interval Research, Turner Broadcasting, NIMA, and TCI. As a computer software developer, Rushkoff conceived and developed the Electronic Oracle series of programs. He is also Host of the Mind Conference on The Well. Rushkoff’s web page is at http://www.levity.com/rushkoff. He currently works at Adobe Systems in Seattle.

Thecla Schiphorst is a computer media artist, choreographer, dancer and computer systems designer. She is a member of the design team that has developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography, and has been working with the renowned choreographer, Merce Cunningham in New York City for the past seven years. She ist currently Choreographic Consultant and Artist in Residence at the Computer Graphics and Multi-Media Research Lab at SFU where she is exploring the use of motion capture and gestural input as a real time interface.

Tom Sherman is an artist and theorist currently living in Syracuse, New York, USA, where he is Director of Syracuse University´s School of Art & Design. Sherman is best known for his video art and writing about person/machine relationships. In 1981, with his video Transvideo, he described and critiqued the "information superhighway" in considerable detail. In 1983 he published Cultural Engineering, a comprehensive examination of the conflicts between the individual and state in a democracy held together by electronic media. The same year he foundet the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council, Canada’s federal agency for support of the arts. Troughout the 1990’s Sherman has continued his experiments with voice and image recognition systems and he has spent a lot of time and energy talking to machines as an end itselfs. Recently he has been a frequent on-air contributor to Kunstradio, a radio art program aired bey the ORF, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation.

Scott Sona Snibbe is a filmmaker and a computer scientist. His most recent film is Lost Momentum. As a computer scientist, Snibbe has focused on incorporating gesture and the human element into computer animation. His projects range from new techniques for keyframe animation to live interactive abstract animation over the Internet.

Christa Sommerer 1964, Ohlsdorf/Gmunden, Austria, lives in Linz. Sommerer studied botany at the University of Vienna and, subsequently, sculpture at the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna.

Laurent Mignonneau 1967, Angoulême, France, lives in Linz. Mignonneau studied video at the Academy of Fine Arts in Angoulême. 1994 Artists in Residence, ICC-NTT Japan. Since 1995 invited Researchers and Artists in ATR, Advanced Telecommunication Research Lab, Kyoto, Japan. Sommerer and Mignonneau collaborate since 1992 working in the field of interactivity, Virtual Reality, communication, Artificial Life and Art.

Karin Spaink 1951, Netherlands; education as a teacher and programmer; Karin Spaink is an author and has published seven books on various subjects which all have something to do with the transitory object which we call "body": sexuality, health, questionable therapies, cyborgs, etc. She spends up to eight hours a day in the network; as a result of her homepage, she is currently the defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Scientology cult.

Gerfried Stocker 1964, Möschitzgraben [Styria], lives in Graz and Linz. Stocker is a graduate of the Technical Institute for News Technology and Electronics in Graz, with which he was associated until 1995. Since 1990, he has been a free-lance artist. In 1991, he founded x-space, a group of artists-technicians who are involved in interdisciplinary projects. Up to 1995, numerous x-space projects have been carried out, including EXPO-Sevilla 92, Venice Biennial 93, FISEA-93/94, Minneapolis/Helsinki, SIGGRAPH 94/95, Orlando/Los Angeles, ISEA 95 Montreal. In 1992/93, Stocker was the artistic director of the Steirischen Kulturinitiative and was also involved in setting up the artists network ZEROnet. Since 1995, Gerfried Stocker has been the artistic director of the Ars Electronica Festival and the managing director of the Ars Electronica Center.

Allucquère Rosanne Stone Assistant Professor in the Radio-TV-Film Department, The University of Texas at Austin; cultural theorist; performance artist; director of the ACTLab ; and spiritual leader of the cadre of mad, brilliant cybercrazies who inhabit it. She is teaching film and video production; cultural theory; gender and sexuality; interface and interaction theory. The research interests of Sandy Stone is the traffic in the boundaries between art and technology, which includes performance and performance theory; interface and interaction theory; cyberspace; virtual systems; desire, gender and sexuality, and transgender theory in relation to communication prosthetics, the complex interplay of science fiction and fictions of science.

János Sugár 1958, attended the Hungarian Academy of Fine Art, Budapest [Department of Sculpture]. From 1980 – 86, he was member of the group "Indigo", led by Miklós Erdély, 1990 lecturer at the newly [1990] established Intermedia Dept., Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, and from 1990 – 95 Committee member of the Béla Balázs Film Studio. Sugár has participated in many solo exhibitions, performances and international group exhibitions including 5th Biennial of European Graphic Art, Heidelberg, 21. Biennial of Sao Paolo, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sao Paolo, Trigon, 8x2 aus 7, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Revisions, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, Australia; "Documenta IX", Kassel.

Nobuya Suzuki 1969, Houya-City, Tokyo. 1996 Completed graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Japan. Now assistant, International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences.

Tjebbe van Tijen 1944, lives in Amsterdam. Tjebbe van Tijen studied sculpture in Den Bosch, Haarlem, Milan and London. From 1965-68, he completed various installations, environments and expanded cinema projects in London and in several cities in the Netherlands. In 1973, he founded the Documentation Center of Social Movements at the University Library of Amsterdam, which he headed until 1993. Van Tijen has designed exhibitions in Vienna, Milan, Copenhagen, Dortmund and Hamburg dealing with ecology, urban conflicts and alternative and underground culture. He most recently developed, in collaboration with Jeffrey Shaw, the interactive installation Imaginary Museum of the Revolution. Tjebbe van Tijen is currently working as advisor for new media at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and as a multimedia artist and producer under the name "Imaginary Museum Projects."

Bill Vorn 1959, Montréal. Bill Vorn is now a Ph.D. student in Communication Studies at UQAM [Université du Québec à Montréal]. He is currently writing a thesis about interactivity and artificial social systems. He also works as a music composer and sound designer since more than fifteen years. He was a founding member of the electro-beat group Rational Youth in the early 80’s. He then worked closer to the film industry scene as a sound effect editor and film score composer. He now works in the electronic arts field on different interactive robotic installation projects, making real noise for artificial life.

VNS Matrix emerged from the cyberswamp during a Southern Australian Summer circa 1991 … They make works which ironically integrate theory with popular culture. The impetus of the group is to investigate and decipher the narratives of domination and control which surround high technological culture, and explore the construction of social space, identity and sexuality in cyberspace. They believe that by hijacking the tools of domination and control those groups which have been traditionally alienated from high technologies by virtue of class, race or gender can introduce a rupture into a highly systematised culture. Infecting the machines with radical thought diverts them from their inherent purpose of linear topdown mastery, creating new uncolonised and inherently anarchic spaces for the exchange of ideas and information, and cultural expression. VNS Matrix are Josephine Starrs, Francesca da Rimini, Julianne Pierce – with thanks and appreciation to Virginia Barratt. VNS Matrix is a self-governing system, replicating in dangerous and unexpected ways, coming soon to a terminal near you… URL:http://sysx.apana.org.au/artists/vns/

VAN GOGH TV 1987 – Documenta 8 – radio station/50 days-media bus; 1988 – Frankfurt Book Fair – radio project with HR Broadcasting; founding of VAN GOGH TV as a television station in Osnabruck; 1989 – founding of VAN GOGH TV Lab in Hamburg – a laboratory for interactive television; 1989 – East European Tour: VAN GOGH TV/Poland, East Germany, USSR, Hungary; 1992 – Documenta 9 – Piazza Virtuale – VAN GOGH TV – worlds first interactive television project; 1993 – USA Tour/Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York; NHK Tokyo Japan; awarded the German Media Art Prize 93/ZKM; 1994 – Ars Electronica – Service Aeria a.i. –/3sat; combined television and network project; 1995 – founding of VAN GOGH TV Laboratories in Seevetal; lab for network projects; 1996 – Worlds Within network project/Atlanta 1996 for the Art Festival of the Olympic Games.