Micha Cárdenas
Micha Cárdenas / dj lotu5 / Azdel Slade is a transgender artist, theorist and trouble maker. She will be a Lecturer in the Visual Arts
department at UCSD in Fall and Winter of 2009. She is an Artist/Researcher in the Experimental Game Lab at CRCA and the b.a.n.g.
lab at Calit2. Her interests include the interplay of technology, gender, sex and biopolitics. She blogs at Transreal.org. Micha holds an
MFA from the University of California San Diego, an MA in Media and Communications with distinction from the European Graduate School and a BS in Computer Science from Florida International University. Micha is a a curator and collective member at the Lui Velazquez space in Tijuana. She has exhibited and performed in Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, Colombia and many other places. Micha has received grants from UCIRA, calit2 and Ars Virtua and her work has been written about in publications including the LA Times, San Diego Union Tribune, .dpi magazine and Rolling Stone Italy.

Samuel Coniglio
Samuel Coniglio is a Jack-of-All-Trades: a trainer for Apple Inc, a photographer specializing in rockets and robots, a designer of space tourism products, and as Vice President of the Space Tourism Society, an advocate of the space tourism industry.  In the 1990's Samuel worked for McDonnell Douglas on the Space Shuttle, Space Station, and the innovative Delta Clipper Experimental reusable rocket. His photographs have been used by WIRED, CBS, California Space Authority, Space Frontier Foundation, Yuri's Night, X PRIZE Foundation, National Space Society, and the Robotics Society of America.  Sam's current projects include being an artist/performer with a Burning Man art car shaped like a Victorian House called the Neverwas Haul, building a rocket-shaped drink robot, and designing leisure-oriented products for use in future space hotels.

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

Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and writer. His exhibitions at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts have been documented by the BBC and PBS. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

Monika Kribusz
Is artist, writer, performer and tantric. She is working in the fields of gender, mystic, consciousness expanding techniques, she is a researcher in the ancient roots of Indian tantrism. Monika is working on the integration of body-mind-spirit developing techniques in postmodern reality. In her art projects she is hacking the male heterosexuality dominated common perception of spirituality. She encourages the individual to create their own identity in adventurous and exciting ways. She uses the laboratory of applied sexuality to discover new ways of interaction between human beings. She uses modern technologies to show the flow of energy in the body during sexual intercourse as proof of what the tantric tradition discovered thousands of years ago. Polyamory, bisexuality, sexuality used as a generator for human creative energy are her actual topics.

Kyle Machulis
Kyle Machulis, aka qDot, is a researcher of alternate input mechanisms and haptics, which is really a fancy way of saying he breaks sex toys. Through his Slashdong webpage (http://www.slashdong.org), he uses the topic of teledildonics (remotely actuated sexual experience) to teach the basic concepts of software, electrical and mechanical engineering. He also tracks the convergence of sex and technological advances in toys and interaction, building on the idea that paradigms for interfaces people would use for intimate encounters on computers can be extended to other usage experiences.

Jonathan Mann and the Rock Cookie Bottoms
Jonathan Mann and the Rock Cookie Bottoms are a six piece from Berkeley and Oakland. Whimsical, upbeat, and catchy as hell,
you'll be humming their songs for days (whether you want to or not). For their Arse Electronika appearance, expect to hear lots
of songs about robots, sex and Star Trek, and expect to see more than a small amount of nudity. Rock!

Elle Mehrmand
Elle Mehrmand is a performance/new media artist and musician who uses the body, electronics, video, photography, sound and installation within her work. She is the singer and trombone player of Assembly of Mazes, a music collective who create dark, electronic, middle eastern, rhythmic jazz rock. Elle is currently an MFA candidate at UCSD, and received her BFA in art photography with a minor in music at CSULB. She has received grants from UCIRA and Fine Arts Affiliates. She is a researcher at CRCA and the b.a.n.g. lab at UCSD. Elle is a member of the Lui Velazquez gallery collective in Tijuana. Her performances have been shown in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Colombia, Tijuana, Montreal, Dublin and San Diego.

Ani Niow
Pink, sexy and occasionally averse to pants, San Francisco based Ani Niow has decided in lieu of a proper bio, you should grab the nearest dictionary and look up "awesome". In summary... Ani Niow spends her time hacking sex toys, volunteering for sex-positive feminist minded art galleries such as Femina Potens, and helping to put on the monthly 5ive Minutes of Fame at SF's Noisebridge hackerspace. Rising to infamy in 2009 by creating the steampunk vibrator, Ani hopes to create an entire line of mechanically interesting sex toys in the near future.

Rainer Prohaska
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
Experiments with modular temporary sculptures as architectonic interventions in public space and with mobile objects. In this experiments the "Performative Act of Constructing" and the "Effects of the Public Space" on this process play a crucial role. The construction methods of these sculptures and objects are inspired by toy kits like Lego and Matador. [E.g.: Toy-Kit Architectures , "The 'Z'-Boats", "Enter Beijing"] // Cross-Media works that deal with entanglements of real space and virtual space. The orchestration of these projects works with methods of contemporary performing art. These methods are described in Rainer Prohaska's "C.O.H.R.-Theory" as the "Construction of Hybrid Realities". [E.g.: Operation Cntrcpy, KRFTWRK] // Artistic concepts, which take on common processes, transform and present them as a modified reality in performances and fine art projects. One focus is "Cooking as a basis for Fine Art and Performing Art Works". [E.g.: Restaurant Transformable].

Uncle Abdul
Uncle Abdul a Professional Electrical Engineer with nearly 50 years of experience and comes with a proven expertise in the electrical sexual stimulation field.  In 1998 under the nom de plume, Uncle Abdul, "JuiceElectricity for Pleasure and Pain" was written.  It has subsequently has become the premier primer on the subject of electrical stimulation for sexual purposes (otherwise known as E-Stim).  Unc' has also presented on this very topic around the US and in Canada on numerous occassionsincluding being an invited guest lecturer for the Wardell B. Pomeroy Lecture Series to health care professionals at San Francisco's Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Unc' also have a website on the subject (see http://www.UncleAbdul.com) providing supplemental information on E-Stim.  He is the world acknowledged expert in this field.

Randy Sarafan
Randy Sarafan is a new-media artist who is currently the Director of Imagineering for SF Media Labs, a Virtual Fellow with F.A.T. (Free Art and Technology) Lab, and a top project contributor at Instructables.com, the leading user-generated how-to website. Randy's work has a unique personal style and inherent ingenuity that can only be described as "troubling" by any reasonably sound individual. He has graduated with honors in the Design Technology program at Parsons School of Design and lives in San Francisco.

Allen Stein
Allen Stein is a co-founder of Seattle based ‘RandD’ firm SenseTrak which is focused on technology innovations applied to sensuality training. His insatiable curiosity in emerging technologies and his expertise in business development lead him to invent the world’s first Internet-controlled commercial sex machine, thethrillhammer, and the underlying technology infrastructure for mass consumer deployment.
The initial popularity of thethrillhammer propelled his work into designing various luxury pleasure crafts and sex devices for a very discrete private clientele and adult industry clients. The machines feature the latest in sexual technology and everything from back massagers, auto lube, or the often requested vaporizers, all under Internet control. To fund his research in human computer interaction sexual with machines, Allen began producing AVN Award-nominated scenes for the adult industry leaders, including Homegrown Video and Pink Visual. Twice nominated he was crushed when he lost Best Solo Scene to I Love Big Toys Volume 2. He is forever worried that he will be a Susan Lucci of porn.

Noah Weinstein
Noah Weinstein is a traveler, pig roaster, pizza enthusiast, dreamer and general doer of things.  He is currently the Research Director at SF Media Labs, a whitewater raft guide with ARTA (American River Touring Association), and Head of Production at Instructables.com.  His previous work includes, social research, custom speaker building, exhibit creation and taxidermy.  Noah graduated with honors from the Environmental Studies and Visual Art departments at Brown University and currently lives in Oakland, CA.  He has helped teach 1.2 million people how to kiss.