Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2010
| Performers |
Charlie Anders
Charlie Anders is a writer, activist and perv in San Francisco.
Jason Brown
Jason Brown is a cultural tinker. He is Consigliere of Machine Project, Executive Janitor of Betalevel, Instructional Technologist at Pomona College, and Research Director ofSuperbunker. He has made books, websites, and radio shows. He has built laboratories, lounges, and art venues. He has organized literary battles, lightbulb cooking contests, and pirate karaoke parties. He has played drones for haircuts, theremin in gorilla gloves, and word games in a darth vader suit. He has written paranoid histories, conspiracy theories, and chatterbots. He has researched UFOs, Tron, and Los Angeles. Los Angeles, a hellscape of ash and banality, a metastasizing agglomeration of darkness and pain, a fungal architecture engulfing the earth in erasures and hyperrealities — Jason Brown enjoys living in Los Angeles.
Micha Cárdenas
Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist whose transreal work mixes physical and networked spaces in order to explore emerging forms of queer relationality, biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production. She is a lecturer in the Visual Arts department and Critical Gender Studies program at UCSD. She is an artist/researcher with UCSD Medical Education and the b.a.n.g. lab at Calit2. Her forthcoming publications include "I am Transreal", in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation from Seal Press. Recent publications include Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, with Barbara Fornssler, from Atropos Press and "Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study" in Code Drift from CTheory. Her collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, "Mixed Relations," was the recipient of the UCIRA Emerging Fields Award for 2009. She has exhibited and performed in Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Dublin, Ireland and many other places. Her work has been written about in publications including Art21, the Associated Press, the LA Times, CNN, BBC World, Rolling Stone Italy and .dpi magazine.
Günther Friesinger
Günther Friesinger lives in Vienna and Graz as a philosopher, artist, writer, curator and edu-hacker. He is head of Parafows Festival, member of monochrom, co-organizer of the Arse Elektronika Festival and the Roboexotica Festival. Publications: Urban Hacking: Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity, Public Fictions, Pr0nnovation?: Pornography and Technological Innovation. Tag cloud: contemorary art, activism, media theory, radical innovation, science fiction, free software and copyright.
Rich Gibson
Rich Gibson is a hacker artist spending his time between focusing on, and living within, various circles of confusion.
Johannes Grenzfurthner
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the "Arse Elektronika" festival in San Francisco, host of "Roboexotica" (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and co-curates the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna. He or his project were featured in New York Times, Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Reuters, Slashdot, Boing Boing, LA Times, NPR, ZDF, Gizmodo, Wired, Süddeutsche Zeitung, CNet or the Toronto Star. Recurring topics in Johannes' artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.
Heather Kelley
Heather Kelley - moboid - is a media artist and video game designer. She is co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, with whom she has produced and curated the renowned Gamma game event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context. In Autumn 2009, she was Artist in Residence for Subotron at Quartier21, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, where she created "SUGAR," a cross media collaborative event featuring an original game, scent-generating networked electronics, and couture fashion. Previously, Ms. Kelley was Creative Director on the UNFPA Electronic Game to End Gender Violence, at the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont.
Heather's twelve-year career in the games industry has included AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games, research games, and web communities for girls. In Spring 2008, she was Kraus Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, and Adjunct Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center, at Carnegie Mellon University, where she organized The Art of Play symposium and art game arcade. Her biographical sex game concept with Erin Robinson, entitled "Our First Times," won the 2009 GDC Game Design Challenge, and her game concept "Lapis" based on female orgasm won the 2006 MIGS Game Design Challenge. Her newest sex-related piece is the upcoming mobile application body heat.
As moboid, Heather has created interactive projections using game engines such as Quake and Unreal. Her experimental art game work with Lynn Hughes, "Fabulous/Fabuleux," was created at Montreal's Hexagram Institute and integrates gameplay into a full-body interactive installation using custom "squishy" interface hardware. For seven years, Heather served as co-chair of the IGDA's Women in Game Development Special Interest Group. She holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she is an alumna of the Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory.
www.kokoromi.org, rapport.moboid.com
Elle Mehrmand
Elle Mehrmand is a performance/new media artist and musician who uses the body, electronics, video, 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. Elle has received grants from UCIRA, the Russell Foundation and Fine Arts Affiliates. She is a researcher at CRCA and the b.a.n.g. lab at UCSD. Her performances have been shown in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Tijuana, Montreal, Dublin, San Diego and Bogotá, Colombia. Her work has been discussed in Art21, the LA Times, Furtherfield.org, Reno News and Review and the OC Weekly.
monochrom
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
www.monochrom.at/en
starPause / Jordan White
Jordan makes electronic music for grinding booties and dancing brains. He also writes code to pay bills, pedals a bike to stay grounded and crystallizes his consciousness in haiku. Check starPause.com
Thomas S. Roche
Thomas S. Roche writes about sex, technology, writing, science and weird culture at Techyum.com and WriteSex.net. He has also been a professional writer of fiction since 1986, known both as a widely published author of erotic short stories and as a writer of crime-noir and horror. His work has appeared four times in Susie Bright's Best American Erotica series more than four times in Maxim Jakubowski's Best New Erotica series, and in The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction. The editor of the Noirotica series of erotic crime-noir anthologies and of four anthologies of horror and fantasy fiction, Roche is also the author of the short story collections Dark Matter and Parts of Heaven, as well as the collaborations His and Hers with Alison Tyler.
Roche served in an editorial and staff-writing capacity at Gothic.Net, GettingIt.com, Universal Studios' 13thStreet.com, GoodVibes.com, Libida.com, Eros-Zine.com, and as a columnist at Blowfish.com. He was the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com from 2008-2009 and the Marketing Manager at Good Vibrations from 2001-2004.
He co-teaches a twice-yearly training on sexual health and sex education at San Francisco Sex Information (www.sfsi.org), a nonprofit
educational organization. In 2010 he celebrated his seventeenth year with that organization.
His fiction has been translated into German, French, Italian, Turkish, Russian, Greek, Dutch, and Danish.
www.thomasroche.com
Rose White
Rose White is a performance artist specializing in dressing cats up in velvet paintings of dogs playing poker. The situational absurdity of dogs and cats sharing representational space and black velvet is mediated by the trans-species tension between cat-safe and dog-safe spaces.
ZCDC
In 2004, Zackary Canepari met Drea Cooper. At the time, while both were pursuing Masters degrees, Zack was a rookie production assistant. Drea was a veteran production assistant. Thankfully, Drea showed Zack where to park on set. Since then, Drea got his Master's in filmmaking. He's been a school teacher, he almost was a Bar owner and he's taken his tennis game a bit too seriously. He's also directed commercials and documentaries for the likes of EA Sports, Google, Nokia, Milk-Bone, K-Swiss and Adidas. His subject matter has ranged from educational reform to mixed martial arts. In the meantime, Zack did not get his masters in Photography. He's been a waiter, his basketball skill set has declined and he produced a feature horror film that he won't tell you the name of. He also has taken photos for the likes of the NYTimes, WSJournal, TIME, The Financial Times, The LA Times and Le Monde. His subject matter has ranged from Afghani dog-fighting to Indian circus performers to Mexican drug-wars.
Since then, Drea has worked in Kosovo, India, Taiwan, and Colombia. Zack has worked in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Mexico. In the summer of 2009, Zack said to Drea, "let's work together." Drea responded,"yes, Zack, let's." In June 2009, they drove down to Fresno and spent four days sweating and shooting in empty foreclosed swimming pools. In July 2009, Drea finished editing that film, titled Cannonball. One week later they were sweating and shooting all along the California-Mexico border for the next film, titled Bordertown. Once the ball got rolling, it wasn't long before the project evolved.
In spring of 2010, Zack and Drea launched an online short film series called California is a place. The series has been featured by the NYTimes, The Atlantic magazine, and it will be part of the Truly California series on PBS this fall. It has also lead to new work for Adidas, K-Swiss and Ray Bans.
Since then, they've diversified. Together they've shot stories about elderly synchronized swimmers, young ping pong phenoms, a unicycle basketball team, an underground fight club of software developers, and Mariachi musicians in Los Angeles. Their stories deal with issues like immigration, medical marijuana use, foreclosure, deviant sex culture, and youth movements in the hood. On their own, Drea is currently developing a feature documentary about aging athletes for PBS. Meanwhile, Zack spends his time photographing gangster rappers in Watts. Apart, they remain, Zack and Drea. Together, they have become ZCDC.