Arse Elektronika 2008: Speakers
| Biographies |
Violet Blue
I'm Violet Blue -- pro blogger, podcaster, vlogger and femmebot at Metblogs SF, Geek Entertainment TV, and Gawker Media's Fleshbot. I'm the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and a Forbes Web Celeb. I am also the best-selling, award-winning author and editor of almost two dozen books; some translated into five languages. I lecture about online porn to cyberlaw classes at UC Berkeley and sex crisis counselors at community teaching institutions. My podcast is the notorious Open Source Sex, profiled everywhere from Wired and Newsweek (MSNBC) to the Wall Street Journal. My fun tech culture blog is techyum. I am not in porn. There's a Violet Blue Wikipedia page (but you'll learn more about me here). I am: violet at tinynibbles dot com.
Jason Brown
Jason Brown is an ambient noisemaker, constellation manipulator, and paranoid historiographer. He is consigliere of Machine Project, a Los Angeles based non-profit which encourages heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious. He is director of Superbunker, a framework for conducting and disseminating critical and creative research. He was a founding member of c-level, a collaborative group which focused on media, protest and play. He is acting janitor of Betalevel, an underground venue beneath Chinatown. He is an instructional technologist at Pomona College.
Reesa Brown
Reesa Brown's short story "Memory Box" will be published in fall of 2008 in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet from Dark Scribe Press. Her flash fiction, "The Reap Assessors" will appear in Triangulation: Taking Flight from PARSEC Ink.
Together with best-selling fantasy author Steven Brust, she blogs at Words Words Words (http://dreamcafe.com/words/).
M. Christian
M. Christian is an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 300 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and Web sites. He is the editor of 20 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, and many others. He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, and Filthy; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, and Painted Doll. His site is www.mchristian.com.
Simone Davalos
In addition to building and destroying robots, Simone Davalos also writes about them on SuicideBots.com and plays host to roughly 1,000 of them every year at the RoboGames (robogames.net), the world's biggest open robot competition (the Guinness Book thinks so, anyway). She enjoys competing at Roboexotica and does so while trying not to inflict any more severe injuries on herself than she already has. She can also be seen blogging at LaughingSquid.com and monochrom.at.
Daniel Fabry
Daniel Fabry is researcher, lecturer, and artist in the lofty fields of media and interaction design. He is member of monochrom and works at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria.
Karin Harrasser
Dr. Karin Harrasser, studied German Literature and History at the University of Vienna, 2001-2002 Juniorfellow at the IFK and Research Scholar at Duke University, 2005 Phd at the University of Vienna, thesis on the narratives of digital cultures of the 1980ies, 2005-2007 post-doc position at the Graduate Seminar "Codes of Violence in Changing Media" at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Since then employed at the Univ. of Vienna and the Humboldt-University as researcher. Recent research: a history of prosthetic knowledge (habil-project), research project on the production of gender and knowledge in museums. Recent publications (all 2007): with Thomas Macho, Burkhardt Wolf (Ed.): Folter. Politik und Technik des Schmerzes, with Roland Innerhofer (Ed.): Bauformen der Imagination. Ausschnitte einer Kulturgeschichte der architektonischen Phantasie, with Alan Scott, Sylvia Riedmann (Ed.): Cultural Studies der Politik / Politik der Cultural Studies.
Richard Kadrey
Richard Kadrey is a novelist, freelance writer, and photographer based in San Francisco.
Kadrey's novels are Metrophage, Kamikaze L'Amour, and Butcher Bird: A Novel Of The Dominion." Other works include collaborative graphic novels and over 50 published short stories.
Kadrey's short story Carbon Copy: Meet the First Human Clone was filmed as After Amy.
His non-fiction books as a writer and/or editor include The Catalog of Tomorrow (Que/TechTV Publishing, 2002), From Myst to Riven (Hyperion, 1997), The Covert Culture Sourcebook and its sequel (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993 and 1994); Kadrey also hosted a live interview show on Hotwired in the 1990s called Covert Culture. He was an editor at print magazines Shift and Future Sex, and at online magazines Signum and Stim. He has published articles about art, culture and technology in publications including Wired, Omni, Mondo 2000, the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, Ear, Artforum, ArtByte, Bookforum, World Art, Whole Earth Review, Reflex, Science Fiction Eye, and Interzone.
Isaac Leung
Isaac Leung, who was born in Hong Kong, is an artist, curator and researcher, based in Hong Kong and the United States, whose work focuses on art, technology and sexuality. He is currently a Mphil student at the Cultural Studies Department of Lingnan University and is on the board of directors of the Hong Kong Sex Education Association and the Videotage Media Arts Organization. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the New Media Art Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and a Honorary Fellowship from the Art Institute of Chicago. He has given lectures about this project at the University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong), City University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA).
Mela Mikes
Mela Mikes is currently living and working in Vienna. Software Test Engineer and university drop out after studying Philosophy for a while. Hobby DJ and creator of the melafesto podcasts.
Susan Mernit
Susan Mernit (http://www.susanmernit.com) is the co-founder of People's Software Company, a start-up building interactive local community platforms, a BlogHer contributing editor on Sex & Relationships (http://www.blogher.com/topic/sex-relationships), a former exec at Yahoo, AOL, Netscape and Advance Internet, and a sex positive and feminist-identified person, writer, and troublemaker. She is also an evangelist for the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge (http://www.newschallenge.org/); talk to her about applying for grants to build open source community projects that support news, discourse and the commons.
Aaron Muszalski
Aaron Muszalski is a professional visual effects artist and educator with over twenty years of experience. A veteran of George Lucas' Academy Award-winning visual effects facility, Industrial Light + Magic, he has worked on such films as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Sleepy Hollow, Galaxy Quest, The Mummy Returns and Star Wars: Attack of The Clones. As a Visual Effects Supervisor he has overseen shots on The Last Mimzy, Grindhouse and Synecdoche, New York. He teaches visual effects at the San Francisco Academy of Art University and is a regular contributor to the art and culture blog, Laughing Squid. A passionate futurist, he frequently consults with companies on visual effects, media and technology.
Chris Noessel
Chris Noessel is a consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group. He was Director of Information Architecture at USWeb/CKS (through the marchFirst and SBI acquisitions), developing their user interface practice from scratch, developing training curricula for designers and developers, and consulting to clients. He's been an entrepreneur (founding his own firm in 1995) as well as a researcher. He was a founding student at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in 2001 and graduated with a Masters in Interaction Design in 2003.
Kit O'Connell
Kit O’Connell is a author of science fiction and erotica, as well as works which
combine the two. His poem, "a 24th-century reflection on emptiness" was recently published by Aberrant Dreams.
Together with best-selling fantasy author Steven Brust, he blogs at Words Words Words (http://dreamcafe.com/words/).
Jens Ohlig
Jens Ohlig is a long-time activist at the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. His major fields of interest are the intersections of linguistics, literature, and computer sciences. According to Wikipedia criteria he is irrelevant, but thinks he is in good company. The presentation is the result of an ongoing research together with Svenja Schröder, Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
Constance Penley
Professor Penley's major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies. Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender (ed. with Treichler and Cartwright). Her collaborative art projects include "MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee" (www.arts.ucsb.edu/mpart) and "Biospheria: An Environmental Opera," on which she was co-librettist (http://www.crca.ucsb.edu/biospheria).
Carol Queen
Carol Queen, Ph.D. curates the antique vibrator museum at Good Vibrations, where she also serves as Staff Sexologist and Chief Cultural Officer. She is the founding director of the Center for Sex & Culture, a sex education, library, archive, and cultural center in San Francisco. She has written three books (Exhibitionism for the Shy, Real Live Nude Girl, and Firecracker Alternative Book Award winner The Leather Daddy and the Femme) and edited (or co-edited) eight collections of erotica and personal essays, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning PoMoSexuals. She's a frequent commentator on television and in documentary films about sex, and has appeared in several sex ed videos, including explicit cult classic Bend Over Boyfriend: a Couple's Guide to Male Anal Pleasure. She uses her
academic perspective as a sociologist and cultural sexologist to view contemporary and historical society and understand the roles sexuality plays and has played.
Bonni Rambatan
Bonni Rambatan is an independent cultural researcher, theorist, and blogger. His primary field of research is the role of technology in shaping contemporary human subjectivity, sexuality, and society. Rambatan aims to develop a critical approach to society and politics with his unique blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and informatics and new media studies, interrogating our experience with the computer monitor and how it alters our notion of subjectivity and our relations to local and global politics and the market. Rambatan's blog can be found at http://posthumanmarxist.wordpress.com.
Thomas Roche
Thomas Roche is a writer of fiction -- particularly erotic fiction, crime and speculative fiction -- and nonfiction -- particularly interviews and commentary on erotic expression and other aspects of human sexuality. His more than 400 professionally published short stories have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, anthologies and websites; 2008 will mark his fourth inclusion in Susie Bright's Best American Erotica series. He has been a staff educator for nearly a decade with the nonprofit educational service San Francisco Sex Information (www.sfsi.org), and is currently the Managing Editor of Eros Zine (www.eros-zine.com).
His previous work has included staff writing positions at www.gettingit.com, www.gothic.net.com, www.libida.com, www.13thstreet.com, and www.goodvibes.com; he served as Marketing Manager of Good Vibrations from 2001-2004.
He is the author or editor of eleven published books and coordinates the San Francisco edition of the international burlesque figure drawing salon, Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School (www.drsketchy.com). His homepage is www.skidroche.com.
Bonnie Ruberg
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex and games journalist. She writes for a number of publications, including The Village Voice and Forbes.com.
Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is computer scientist and science fiction author, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.
Mae Saslaw
Mae Saslaw is a writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her body of work includes short contemporary fiction as well as literary and cultural criticism. Last year she began an extensive hypertext called The Machine-Space Project, which examines the Internet as space of opposition between revolutionary and capitalist-hegemonic forces. Her other academic interests include Baroque history and pop-politics. She spends time assisting and collaborating with writers and artists in New York, and she studies at the Pratt Institute.
Nathan Shedroff
Nathan Shedroff is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and requirements as well as related fields, Interaction Design and Information Design. His speaking, books, teaching, and projects all support this new direction of design. Part designer, part entrepreneur, his skills lend themselves to strategic thinking and design for companies who want to exploit the strengths of experience media in order to build better experiences for their customers and themselves in a variety of media, including: print, digital, online, and product design. Growing-up in Silicon Valley has given him an entrepreneurial outlook. He currently lives in San Francisco where the climate, culture, and industry make it easy to have an esoteric and amorphous title like Experience Strategist and actually make a living.
Allen Stein
Allen Stein is co-founder of www.sexmachinecams.com and a teledildonics
pioneer. Inventor of the first-to-market
teledildonics sex machine-thethrillhammer-he has been involved in the
science for 8 years. The initial popularity of thethrillhammer propelled the
company into the adult industry designing various luxury pleasure devices
and producing content for the adult industry for consumer consumption. The
company offers retail and web based entertainment products for income thus providing a means to continue his research into female
sexual response. He has designed and prototyped various immersive interfaces
and VR simulations to advance the way humans interact sexually with
machines.
Viviane
Viviane (http://www.thesexcarnival.com) is an NYC based librarian, sex nerd, and blog mentor. She started the sex positive group blog Viviane's Sex Carnival in 2005. She was the editor of TGP.com. As a Fleshbot contributor she contributor a weekly sex blog roundup. In 2006 she organized the regular gathering of sex bloggers in NY aka the Perverts Saloon. She has presented at Dark Odyssey and Sex 2.0 about blog setup and promotion.
Rose White
Rose White is a sociology PhD student at Graduate CenterCUNY, in Manhattan, but lives in Brooklyn because that's where all the action is. Her doctoral work is on how bright people break rules (in other words, deviance and technology!)—tell her what you want studied and maybe she'll get on that. In 1997 she had a story anthologized in Best American Erotica, which means it's about time for her to write some new porn.
Sharing is Sexy (Scruffy Eudora, DJ Lotu5, J Bird)
In looking at most mainstream porn, we don't see ourselves and our friends. In response, we are creating the porn that we want to see. In our project, we are sharing our bodies with you willingly. We're in control, do not change the channel. Our collective practices consensus. Everyone has an equal voice in what we do and how we do it. We are examining the question of open source porn while respecting the work of sex workers. We're in this to create change. Beyond the website, we are also organizing events that advocate sex-positive ideas, having porn watching nights, hosting burlesque shows and making zines.
SiS is a collaborative open source porn laboratory. We are a group of queer people, transgender people and people with othered bodies coming together to create a site for free porn that is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. We are creating our own porn using photos, video, and writing. SiS is polyamorous so, we are open to new members and looking to collaborate.