Professor Suchman runs courses at Lancaster on Virtual Cultures and a graduate course on the Antropology of Cybercultures – she also teachers in Gender studies and feminist theory.

Her work at Xerox ‘combined ethnographic studies of work and technologies-in-use with the in-situ development of new prototype information systems’.

Professor Suchmann has written two books on the human-machine nexus. The first based on her Dissertation, Plan and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication (1987) and the second a reprise or sequel of the first Human-Machine Reconfigurations: plans and Situated Actions 2nd Edition (2007).

Yee-King has many years as a composer and producer of electronic music behind him, and continues to perform and release records. An expert user and teacher of SuperCollider (a programming language for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition), he also contributes to the Linux open source community.

In 2005 he started Generator.x as a curatorial platform for generative art and design which has since resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. Watz practices out of New York City and Oslo, where he is a lecturer at the Oslo School of Architecture and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

He is the founder of Transmute, the interdisciplinary collective behind Intimate Transactions, an interactive installation that has been exhibited all over the world, where two people in geographically separate spaces inhabit and interact in a shared virtual space.

Originally from the USA, fields received a Ph.D. in Media Arts from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 before moving to Beijing to assist with the establishment and development of media arts programs and curriculum in some of the country’s top institutions including China’s Central Conservatory of Music and Peking University.

An advocate for research-creation, Field’s own domain of practice lies within the area of telematic arts, specifically digital music, while focusing theoretically on issues related to ontology and the technology of inquiry. As well as write and perform his own electroacoustic compositions, Fields has been involved in several sound installations and networked performances internationally, has developed collaborative online work environments for students, and has published widely. He is also co-organiser of the Musicacoustica Festival, Beijing.

Perceiving the Internet to be more than a conduit of communication, but also a medium for artistic creation, performance, exploration and experimentation, at the University of Calgary Fields focuses on building high-speed networks that facilitate live, real-time interaction between participants operating within various media (be they musical, visual, physical, etc), thus establishing dynamic collaborative environments that are not tied to one location, but exist in multiple places at once.

Pactac Video

Courchesne earned a BA in Communication Design from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974) and a MA of Science in Visual Studies from MIT (1984). In the early 1980s he helped pioneer the field of interactive video when he co-authored Elastic Movies (1984) with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman et al. Throughout recent decades he has continued to produce several interactive installations that combine light, photography, design, sound, film and video.

Courshesne’s installations characteristically encourage participants to enter into an immersion of images and sounds that is triggered and guided by use of their own voice and physical movement; the works attempt to remove all spatial reference to plunge the viewer into an interactive, virtual world within which they are able to transverse landscapes and communicate with real or fictional people. Courchesne’s ongoing interest in socialisation has grown more pronounced from each work to the next as his installations have themselves become more increasingly complex and advanced in their development and presentation mode. In Where Are You? (2005) visitors are invited to operate a joystick to control their flight through a world of several dimensions that are defined by an X,Y and Z scale – the higher the visitor travels to the ‘+’ end of each axis, the more detailed the world they experience is. Here existence is paramount, for the work is dependent upon the visitor’s whims and choices to define itself and reach its full potential.

Courchesne is based in Montreal where he is professor of information design at Université de Montréal. Courchesne is also a founding member of the Society for Arts and Technology.

Erin Manning is an artist and philosopher who currently holds office as assistant professor of film studies and studio art at Concordia University, Canada. Her multidisciplinary activity encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, textiles and writing.

Manning is founder and director of The SenseLab, a laboratory and international network that explores intersections between art practice and philosophy in relation to the sensing body in movement.

As well as serve as a member of the editorial board for the journal Inflexions, Manning is also the author of several books on ephemerality and movement. Her most recent publication Relationscapes (2009) is the latest to be printed in a series titled Technologies of Lived Abstraction, which is co-edited for MIT Press by herself and Brian Massumi.

To view Relationscapes at MIT Press, please click here.

Edmonds is currently Professor of Computation and Creative Media in the Faculty of IT at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS). The origins of CCS derived from his unique research, which spawned a conference series under the similar title of Creativity and Cognitions. A regular headliner from 1993 onwards on the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCHI calendar, concepts explored in these meetings developed into an artist-in-residency program (COSTART) at Loughborough University (UK) from 1996 before CCS was established in its present location at UTS in 2003.

Toni Robertson established the Interaction Design and Work Practice Lab at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 2002. Robertson’s interest in technology design was born out of her earlier career as an artist, printmaker and graphic designer. Today her research interests include understanding how actual work practices can be developed and then used to design information systems that appropriately service their situation of use, and exploring how different metaphors for human cognition and work can affect the design of technology.

Robertson is presently chief investigator in an Australian Research Council funded project that is seeking to establish an empirical framework for designing usable and useful wireless mobile computing applications. Based on the premise that the technological challenges presented in the development of mobile computing devices have overshadowed attention to issues of use and usability that ultimately determine technologies’ success in real environments, the project aims to shape the findings of its ethnographic studies into a reliable conceptual framework that will increase the successful utilization of mobile technology by Australian industries.

Under Robertson’s directorship the Interaction Design and Work Practice Lab is currently committed to two other main projects. The Bystander Field aims to stimulate unprecedented understanding of narrative and affective patterns in our past through investigating new systems for interactive and immersive display of contentious stories found in imagery from heritage collections.  Understanding Quality of Experience in Experience Enrich (Next Generation) aims to provide an approximation of what the phrase ‘quality of experience’ could imply for future networked environments, and how its criteria could be utilised to assist with the beneficial design of network related technology, as well facilitate a decrease of the risks in developing inappropriate products and services.

Screenshot from ‘Assemblage for Collective Thought’ VJ and networked remix project. Performed at International Symposium for Electronic Arts and ZeroOne, San Jose, USA, August 12 2006.

Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990 is an international, ARC funded project that provides information for Australians to more extensively implement dynamic media within a social context. Based at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, the project is a collaboration between Anna Munster (CoFA/CCAP), Andrew Murphie (Media, Film & Theatre, UNSW), Brian Massumi (University of Montreal) and Adrian MacKenzie (Lancaster University).The project focuses on the international strategies for social use of dynamic media, and will form the basis of an online database that will profile and be accessible to Australian artists, arts organisations, new media researchers and social innovators. This study highlights the innovation of Australian artists and researchers in the development of dynamic media and positions these internationally.

Centre for Contemporary Arts and Politics, College of Fine Arts, UNSW