Amy Alexander is a professor and hackernaut who has been making computationally-based art projects since the 1990s. Amy is a Professor and Area Head of Computing in the Arts in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. She is an algorithmic filmmaker and performer who has focused throughout her career on the fuzzy borders between media and the world. Amy’s work has frequently addressed algorithmic fragility and subjectivity in digital culture by creating transparently biased and fragile, sometimes funny alternatives. She is currently developing new work that returns to this theme — this time taking on the attention economics and social influence of algorithmic bias. Using computer vision and machine learning-based methods of curation and production, she is developing a perpetual live stream that depicts the cinematic fantasy of the surveillant AI robots who “see” the social media content few humans get to experience.
Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist, and curator with twenty years of experience in the cultural sector with a focus on art and technology. As a curator she has produced exhibitions, events, and publications inter- nationally. Her interdisciplinary practice is conceptually driven and has included participatory work, objects, photography, video, events in urban space, generative text systems, and experimental narrative forms. Her exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), ISEA 2006/ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge (San Jose, California), Yerba Buena Centre (San Francisco, California), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, Alberta), Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey), and the Whitney Museum (New York).Armstrong is based in Vancouver, Canada.
She is the author of Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture (Michigan State University Press, 2002) in addition to numerous essays. She recently contributed to For Machine Use Only: Contemplations on algorithmic epistemology (&&& c/o The New Centre for Research and Practice, 2016). Other books include Medium (2011), Source Material Everywhere (2011), and Path (Publication Studio Vancouver, 2012). Artworks include Space Video (2012), Why Some Dolls are Bad (2007), Grafik Dynamo (2005), and PING (2003). Armstrong’s works are held in public and private collections including Rhizome, the Rose Goldsen Archive in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University, the Library of the Printed Web, and the Whitney Museum.
Ian Angus: Professor Emeritus, Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University,
While an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became involved in the politics of the New Left. While this influence has changed and developed, it has never left his work. Ian’s intellectual formation began at the same time with the 20th century European philosophies of phenomenology and the Frankfurt school of critical theory. His teacher in phenomenology was José Huertas-Jourda and in Critical Theory William Leiss (himself a student of Herbert Marcuse).
His dissertation from the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University was revised into a first book, Technique and Enlightenment (1984) which probed the historical sources of the ‘instrumental reason’ that legitimates the modern advance of technology and argued for a form of technology assessment that is not only ethical but pertains also to the construction of human identity. A significant turn in Angus’ work occurred when he began a critical engagement with the history of English Canadian social and political thought, which resulted in A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness (1997), which was widely reviewed in both the academic and popular press.
He's currently working on a manuscript on phenomenological Marxism for the 21st century.
Peter Babiak: Born in an ethnic enclave of Oakville, Peter Babiak grew up in Hamilton, Kitchener, and Toronto, Ontario. He studied English language and literature at the University of Waterloo, McMaster, and York, and has taught literature, history and social sciences at a jail for young offenders, contract law and critical thinking at George Brown College, and economics at Dominion College, all in Toronto. Peter moved to Vancouver in 1994 to take an adjunct position teaching English at the University of British Columbia, where he worked for ten years. From 2000 to 2002 he coordinated a barrier-free lecture series and educational facility/book room on Powell Street in Vancouver’s Eastside, and then from 2002 to 2006 he was Academic Director of Humanities 101, a pioneering outreach program—the first of its kind in Canada—that brought classes in the liberal arts, social sciences and “grammar boot camp” to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He has been teaching English literature, linguistics and grammar/rhetoric at Langara College for well over a decade.
Stafford Beer was born in London, where his father was chief statistician at Lloyd's Register of Shipping. He began a degree in philosophy and psychology at University College London, but in 1944 left it incomplete to join the army. He saw service as a company commander and in intelligence in India, and stayed there until 1947, leaving the army with the rank of captain in 1949. Stafford Beer was one of the key figures in the field of Operational Research (OR). He wrote a number of highly regarded books; was a world leader in the development of systems ideas; and founded the field of ‘Management Cybernetics’ (or in his words “the science of effective organisations”).
In the early 1970's he went to Chile to work with the socialist President Salvador Allende, to apply his cybernetics-based control systems thinking to Chile’s entire social economy via real-time computerised systems.
The aim was to use computers and telex communications to allow the government to maximise production while preserving the autonomy of workers and lower management.
After the CIA sponsored coup led by General Pinochet’s in 1973 resulted in the death of President Allande the subsequent military junta abandoned Beer’s work.
In mid-1970, being deeply affected by what had happened to those that had become his close friends in Chile, Beer renounced material possessions moved to mid-Wales and developed strong interests in poetry and art. In the 1980s he established a second home on the west side of downtown Toronto and lived part of the year in both residences. He was a visiting professor at almost 30 universities and received an earned higher doctorate (DSc) from the University of Sunderland and honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds, the University of St. Gallen, and the University of Valladolid. He was president of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics.
Larissa Blokhuis (interviewer) completed her BFA at the Alberta University of the Arts in 2008.
In 2017 she joined the board of Curiosity Collider Art-Science Foundation, a non-profit arts organization that creates events which highlight the many connections between art and science.
Dr. Ron Burnett is the past President + Vice-Chancellor of Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver. In this position he served the University for 22 years, from 1996 to 2018. In 2013, Dr. Burnett received the Order of Canada and in 2015, he received the Order of British Columbia. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010 and received the International Digital Media and Arts Association Outstanding Leadership Award. He received his BA, MA and PhD from McGill University in the areas of media arts, communications and cultural studies. Dr. Burnett began his career as a post-secondary professor and administrator at Vanier College in Montreal where he founded the Creative Arts Department. He went on to work at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia and then became the Director of the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University.
In a career spanning forty years, Dr. Burnett has published three books; book chapters and reviews; over 150 articles; as well as two monographs. Internationally known for his work in media and distance education, he served on an “eminent persons panel” at UNESCO in Paris to advise on the development of Internet resources for the Third World. He was the Chair of the BC Association of Institutes and Universities (BCAIU) and a member of the Executive Committee and Board of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design(AICAD).
Claudia Casper is the author of four novels. Her most recent, The Mercy Journals, a post climate-crisis, post-apocalyptic story of murder, memory and hope, won the 2017 Philip K. Dick Award for distinguished science fiction.
She has been a faculty member at the Iceland Writer’s Retreat, Whistler’s writer-in-residence, and a speaker at TedX Vancouver.Her best-selling debut novel, The Reconstruction, is being adapted for film in a France/Canada co-production.
Thomas Dreher studied since 1978 art history, philosophy and classical archeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.
Since 1985 he has written articles, critiques and reviews for art magazines ("das kunstwerk", "Artefactum", "Artscribe", "Wolkenkratzer", "Kunstforum" etc.).
1991 participation in "Kunst als Grenzbeschreitung: John Cage und die Moderne/Art as a Means to Walk on Limits: John Cage and Modern Times", Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst/State Gallery for Modern Art, Munich.
1995-2000 preparations for and completion of "Performance Art since 1945: Action Theater and Intermedia" (Munich 2001, in German) as a part of the DFG (German Research Foundation)-Project "Das Problempotential der Nachkriegsavantgarden/The Problem Potential of the Postwar Avant-gardes" (supervisor and co-editor: Prof. Georg Jäger).
Since December 1999: Lessons in NetArt for IASL (International Archives of Social History of German literature) online (site of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Institute of German Philology, Munich).
2007 Prix Ars Electronica (in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Medien.Kunst.Forschung), Linz: Media.Art.Research Award: The website "IASLonline Lessons in NetArt" receives an "Acknowledgement of a Contribution to the Field" (in 2007: network-based art forms).
From October 2011 to December 2012 "History of Computer Art" was published chapter by chapter (IASLonline Lessons in NetArt: Theory ). The English translation followed from August 2013 until June 2014.
He lives in Munich.
e-mail: TDreher[at]onlinehome.de
Alisha Dukelow grew up in the Cowichan Valley, on unceded Hul’qumi’num territory. She completed an MA in Creative Writing in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and is beginning a PhD in English Literature in so-called Los Angeles, on the traditional land of the Tongva people. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, Room, and subTerrain. She is now drafting a collection of short stories, and has two small books on the way: A Modernist Affect Grid, a series of essay-poems about the Place Ville Marie building and the emotion theories of Silvan Tomkins and Magda Arnold, published by Anteism and the Centre for Expanded Poetics; and pareidolia, a debut chapbook of poetry through Anstruther Press.
Igor Goryunov/Artist: Born in Siberia and Living in Saint Petersburg, Igor Goryunov studied at the St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts. Trained as a videographer, Goryunov draws on the opportunities of digital technology to create a digital art form that perpetuates the fantasies of Giger in the AI era. Goryunov's creatures swirl with the ease and grace of android dancers, speed lines accentuate their dervish whirl to make them lose their minds ... and they love it. It is this pleasure of the cyborg in mutation, who sees his body emerge from human finitude to claim the eternity of the gods that the artist captures in a debauchery of nuances.
https://www.the-one-museum.com/
Oliver Hockenhull, initiator, editor, producer is a palimpsest of pure mutt heritage. Being of good courage he creates films, writings, and digital experimental media. Films & media installations have shown at such film festivals and venues as — The International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Hot Docs, Toronto, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Sao Paulo International Film Festival, The Melbourne International Film Festival, MIT/Boston, The Contemporary Cultural Centre of Barcelona, The Vancouver International Film Festival, IMAGES | Toronto, The International New Media Festival, Seoul, The Chicago International Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Arte Experimental, Bilbao, Spain, Tribeca Center for the Arts, NYC, & Lincoln Center, NYC, etc.
Oliver has also been involved in the study, theory, and application of new media imaging and authoring technologies since the early days of personal computing and the net. He was a research associate with The Centre for Image and Sound Research in Vancouver and a director/resident at The Banff Centre for the Arts.
He was a visiting filmmaker lecturer at Northwestern University, was a mentor to media students at ECUAD and an instructor at both S.F.U. and U.B.C.
As a member of WebWeavers Network Society, he contributed to the online launch of one of the first cultural websites in Canada, and with Thecla Schiporst initiated a premiere online gallery & curated festival for digital media arts (digital earth foundation 1994 — 2000).
“Damp: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts”, a critical hardcover book which he co-edited and co-designed, with Alex MacKenzie was released by Anvil Press in 2008.
He lives gratefully in the vicinity of the gravity anomaly of the Sooke gabbro on Vancouver Island. More: shinynewfilms.com
Keiko Honda: After receiving her PHD in Public Health from New York University in 2002, Keiko trained and worked as a cancer epidemiologist in Columbia University in NYC. After moving to Vancouver in 2009, Keiko realized that Vancouverites suffered from social and cultural isolation, an effect of its status as a growing metropolis of new immigrants — from other parts of Canada as well as from abroad.As a passionate advocate for emerging artists, she started with a simple act: she opened her house to artists, invited local residents to join them, and hosted artists' salons, known as Artists-in-Residence. Her artists’ salons have become so successful that the City of Vancouver awarded Keiko the Remarkable Women Award in 2014. Keiko believes that community is as important as the joys of life-long learning. True to her vision, she founded the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society (VACS), to bridge generations and cultures and to ensure that members of marginalized communities in Vancouver have access to cultural opportunities for artistic self-discovery. Keiko recently started teaching a course, Social Artistry Through Co-Creation at Simon Fraser University to shed light on the shared roots of artistic development and of systems change to create more possibilities in our community. https://www.myvacs.org/
Jon Ippolito, Professor of New Media Co-director, Still Water
Director, Digital Curation graduate program The University of Maine.
Jon Ippolito is an artist, educator, new media scholar, and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Ippolito studied astrophysics and painting in the early 1980s, then pursued Internet art in the 1990s
https://umaine.edu/scis/people/jon-ippolito/
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. He has won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, as well as top genre honors in Japan, Spain, and France, among other countries.
Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers play the role of wizards. His debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.
Liu is also the translator for Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” and Vagabonds, Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide, as well as the editor of Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, anthologies of contemporary Chinese science fiction.
Julia Maddison (interviewer) is formally trained in ecology (MSc, UBC Forestry) and informally practiced at sculpture, with an interest in complex adaptive systems, metaphors, and interactive embodied experiences.
Julia is development director of Curiosity Collider Art-Science Foundation, a non-profit arts organization that creates events which highlight the many connections between art and science.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist and author, currently living in Toronto where she teaches at the university of Toronto. Her flash fiction Alien Land- scape appeared in “The Group of Seven Reimagined” by Heritage House, Vancouver. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna publications in 2020.
Dr. Lev Manovich: is one of the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide and a pioneer in the application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of 15 books including Cultural Analytics, AI Aesthetics, Theories of Software Culture, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design" in 2013 and the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" in 2014. Manovich is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. The lab created projects for the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), New York Public Library, Google, and other clients. Manovich's latest book "Cultural Analytics" was recently published by The MIT Press in Fall 2020.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher, whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the US and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life.
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.
Sarah Newman is Director of Art & Education at metaLAB at Harvard, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center. Working at the intersection of research and art, her work engages with technology’s role in human experience.
In addition to her art practice, she is also a facilitator and educator, and leads customized workshops to use creative materials to address interdisciplinary research problems. Newman holds a BA in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has exhibited work in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, and London, and has held artist residencies in Germany, Sweden, and Italy. Newman is a 2017 AI Grant Fellow, a member of the 2018 Assembly Cohort, a co-founder of the Data Nutrition Project, a 2019 Rockefeller AI Resident Fellow, and the 2020 artist-in-residence at Northeastern University’s Center for Law, Innovation, and Creativity. Her current work explores the social and philosophical dimensions of artificial intelligence and uses interactive art as a means of critique and public engagement.
Randall Packer: Since the 1980s, multimedia artist, composer, writer and educator Randall Packer has worked at the intersection of interactive media, live performance, and networked art. He has received critical acclaim for his socially and politically infused critique of media culture, and has performed and exhibited at museums, theaters, and festivals internationally, including: NTT InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), ZKM Center for Art & Media (Karlsruhe), Walker Art Center, (Minneapolis), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The Kitchen (New York City), ZERO1 Biennial (San Jose), Transmediale Festival of Media (Berlin), and Theater Artaud (San Francisco). Packer is a writer and scholar in new media, most notably the co-editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (https://www.zakros.com/writing/w2vr/) and the author of his long running blog: Reportage from the Aesthetic Edge. He has written extensively for publications including: MIT Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, the Leonardo Journal for the Arts & Sciences, LINK, ART LIES, Hyperallergic, and Cambridge University Press. He holds an MFA and PhD in music composition and has taught multimedia at the University of California Berkeley, Maryland Institute College of Art, American University, California Institute of the Arts, Johns Hopkins University, The Museum of Modern Art, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. At NTU he founded and directed the Open Source Studio (OSS) project, an educational initiative exploring collaborative online research and teaching in the media arts. He also organized the Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposia in 2015 and 2018, global events that featured speakers, live performances, and participants from more than 40 countries around the world. Currently he is developing the Third Space Network (3SN), an Internet broadcast channel for live media arts and creative dialogue from his underground studio bunker in Washington, DC.
You can reach Randall Packer at the Underground Studio Bunker: rpacker@zakros.com
Archer Pechawis: Performance, theatre and new media artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and educator Archer Pechawis was born in Alert Bay, British Columbia. He has been a practicing artist since 1984 with particular interest in the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology, merging "traditional" objects such as hand drums with digital video and audio sampling. His work has been exhibited across Canada, internationally in Paris, France and Moscow, Russia, and featured in publications such as Fuse Magazine and Canadian Theatre Review.Archer has been the recipient of many Canada Council, British Columbia and Ontario Arts Council awards, and won the Best New Media Award at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and Best Experimental Short at imagineNATIVE in 2009.
Archer has worked extensively with Native youth since the start of his art practice, originally teaching juggling and theatre, and now digital media and performance. He is currently a member of the Indigenous Routes collective, teaching video game development to Native girls: www.indigenousroutes.ca
Of Cree and European ancestry, he is a member of Mistawasis First Nation, Saskatchewan.
Dinka Pignon works with spatial video installation, situated in the field of 'mixed reality'. In her installations, large-scale video projections reshape the architecture of the space and create illusionary effects over objects. Operating on the borderline between the real and the virtual, the work is characterized by her strong affinity for the phenomenal, liminal, conceptual and minimal.
Over the last four decades, Dinka has produced a large body of work that has exhibited world wide. Parallel to her own practice, she has coordinated and curated interdisciplinary art events, festivals, experimental workshops and international art exchange programs. Devoted to artist-run culture, she has spent most of her working life in artist-run centers: 15 years at the Fylkingen for New Music & Intermedia Art in Stockholm and 10 years at VIVO Media Arts Center in Vancouver. She now lives in a Buddhist monastery in Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfycMFQNJ5eNiJfYj0isrQA
Niranjan Rajah is faculty at the School of Interactive Art and Technology, SFU. He has been a member of the Media Arts Advisory Committee for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Board of Directors of the Inter Society for Electronic Art (ISEA). He was the convenor of two installments of the New Forms Festival Conference, Vancouver. Niranjan’s web art work, The Failure of Marcel Duchamp / Japanese Fetish Even! (1996) is recognised as the first in Southeast Asia. He co-curated Malaysia’s First Electronic Art Show (1997) and co-founded E-Art ASEAN (2000) the first regional portal for electronic art in Southeast Asia, His contribution to New Media was acknowledged in a two-man retrospective titled ‘Relocations’ at the ISEA, Singapore, 2008. Niranjan’s ongoing photo-performative Koboi Project has been exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Lisbon, Tokyo, Bangkok and Black Rock City and at the Singapore Biennale (2016). The Koboi Project participated in the KL Biennale (2017) with work about Ananda Coomaraswamy’s biographer and bibliographer Dr. Durai Raja Singam. Please visit www.koboiproject.com
Natasha Ramoutar is an Indo-Guyanese writer by way of Scarborough (Ganatsekwyagon) at the east side of Toronto. She has been published in The Unpublished City II, PRISM, Room, Living Hyphen, and more. Her first book of poetry Bittersweet will be published in 2020 by Mawenzi House.
Derek Robinson lives cheaply in Victoria British Columbia where he enjoys puttering about with books and computers and ideas. In 2000 he created the second in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor, in JavaScript — the first was by Tim Berners-Lee, written in Objective-C for the NeXT computer in 1991. (It is too often forgotten that the web was intended as a two-way convivial medium.)
Lectured in Photoelectric Arts / Integrated Media at the Ontario College of Art and Design, 1986-1998.
He publishes sparingly, however in 1995 an essay (“Index and Analogy: A Footnote to the Theory of Signs”) appeared in Rivista di Linguistica, Special Issue on Analogical Modeling of Language, and in 1993 a novel algorithm* for feature discovery in very large databases was presented before the International Joint Congress of AI Special Workshop on AI and the Genome. As well there were three articles in "Software Studies / a Lexicon" (MIT Press 2008).
He takes his time.
* The ‘coincidence sets’ algorithm would become a core component of the bio-informatics software suite developed by Molecular Mining Corporation, Kingston Ont. (R.I.P.)
Simon Russell: I'm a UK based freelance motion graphic designer, I live a small town called Ivybridge in south Devon.
I’m a motion designer and 3D generalist but a lot of the work I do is based around music and events. I’ve created visuals for artists like Elton John, Shawn Mendes and U2. I’ve created work for the Commonwealth Games, the LA concert hall and the Barbican.
I’ve also worked on shows like Black Mirror, Watership Down and the upcoming Dark Materials trilogy doing concept development, UI’s and visual effects.
A lot of this work is driven by my more experimental work in visualising audio and sonification. I’ve recently starting producing art with a robotic pen plotter.
See: https://simonfarussell.com/New-Shapes-Forum
https://simonfarussell.com/Quartet-For-The-End-Of-Time
Henry Tsang is a visual and media artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. His projects incorporate digital media, video, photography, language and sculptural elements in the exploration of the relationship between the public, community and identity through global flows of people, culture and capital. Examples include video installations Orange County, 2004, and Olympus, 2006, shot in California, Beijing, Torino and Vancouver, demonstrating a complex understanding of overlapping urban and socio-political spaces; Napa North, 2008, exploring the relationship between wine, real estate and cultural translation in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley; and the Maraya project, with M. Simon Levin and Glen Lowry, that investigates the uncanny similarities between Vancouver’s False Creek and the Dubai Marina in the United Arab Emirates. His public artwork, Welcome to the Land of Light, is a 100 metre-long installation located on the seawall handrail along Vancouver’s False Creek. Comprised of fibre optic cable lighting and marine-grade aluminum lettering, it literally underscores Chinook Jargon, a 19th Century local trade language, and the English that replaced it, to speak about the promise of technology and how different cultures have come to live together in that part of the world.
Curatorial projects include Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity & Chinese-Canadian Artists in Vancouver, 1991; Racy Sexy: Race, Culture and Sexuality, 1993; and City at the End of Time: Hong Kong 1997, 1997), spanning the local, national and international. Henry Tsang has a BFA from the University of British Columbia and a MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He received the VIVA Award in 1993 and is currently an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada.
William Charles Uricchio is an American media scholar and Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Together with Henry Jenkins, he helped to build and direct MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Uricchio was Principal Investigator of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.[1] He is founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab.[2] He is also (co-)author or (co-)editor of several books including We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identity; Media Cultures; Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945; Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films; The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media; and Many More Lives of the Batman. Uricchio is series editor (along with Jesper Juul and Geoff Long) of the MIT Press Playful Thinking Series on game related topics.
https://cmsw.mit.edu/profile/william-uricchio/
https://www.uu.nl/staff/WCUricchio
Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback.
During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction".
R. Hunter Whitworth holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He has appeared in Phantom Drift, Steel Toe Review, Unlikely Stories, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He lives and teaches in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Robert Charles Wilson was born in California but has lived most of his life in Canada. His 2006 novel Spin received the Hugo Award, the Japanese Seiun Award for speculative fiction, and the French Grand prix de l’imaginaire.
https://www.robert-charles-wilson.com/
Zainub Verjee is the laureate of 2020 Governor General's Visual and Media Arts for Outstanding Contribution. She is the editor of the forthcoming book, “The Arts and International Relations— Art, Artist Networks, Art Institutions,” 2021. An artist, critic, writer with expertise in cultural policy and cultural diplomacy, she was at the forefront of the cultural policy work in the 1980s-2000s in Canada and internationally. She held positions in the Federal Government at the Department of Canadian Heritage and Canada Council for the Arts and was responsible for programs relating to Art-Science-Technology Collaborations and digital ecosystem. She has worked on issues of Artist Labour, Racial Equity, Intellectual Property Rights, Cultural Diplomacy and Culture Trade. Former Executive Director of Vancouver's Western Front, her work on the BC Arts Board led to the formation of B.C.Arts Council. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the Galeris Ontario /Ontario Galleries in Toronto.