Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2012
| Speakers and Game Presenters |
Michael Annetta and Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
Team Elephant consists of Andy Uehara, Casey China, Michael Annetta, and Joshua McVeigh-Schultz. They came together as a design collective working on games and other interactive projects at the Interactive Media Department of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. In addition to game design, their collective background spans the fields of anthropology, psychology, public interactives, performance art, filmmaking, database design, conflict resolution, and public health. This eclectic mix gives the team a broad perspective which informs their approach to interaction design. More detailed information about the game and the team can be found at www.elephantintherelationship.com
Anna Anthropy
Anna Anthropy is a dot-matrix dominatrix living and working in the East Bay. She enjoys long walks on bad girls and making videogames on the subject. Her body of work includes Mighty Jill Off, Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, and Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree.
Mattie Brice
Mattie Brice is a game critic, social justice activist, budding game developer, and Creative Writing MA at San Francisco State University. She focuses her writing on diversity initiatives in the video game community, often bringing in the perspective of marginalized voices like transgender and multi-racial women. Her studies have led her to explore narrative design of games and gastronomy, in which she hopes to one day create food and video game pairings.
Dr. X Treme
Dr. X. Treme very recently left a 12 year career in low temperature physics to start X. Treme Orgasmatronics, a company based on application of applied physics ideas to sex machines design. He received his Ph.D. in applied physics in 2005, and then worked at a government precision measurement lab in Colorado until May of 2012.
David Fine
David Fine is a San Francisco based artist and context hacker. His aim is to create experiences beyond the mainstream without attribution or explanation. With a focus on public performances and guerilla installations, he invites his unwitting audience to participate in an alternate version of reality, if only for a moment. His favorite art is most often comprised of electronics, industrial materials, epoxy, and large groups of people.
Lindsay Grace
Lindsay Grace is a professor, game designer, programmer and artist. Lindsay is the Armstrong Professor of Creative Arts within Miami University's Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. He directs the Persuasive Play Lab and is co-director of the Games Center within the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media. His research areas include game design, human-computer interaction, critical gameplay, and web design. He also writes about design and education. Lindsay has served industry as an independent consultant, web designer, software developer, entrepreneur, business analyst and writer. Lindsay's creative practice is focused on uses of interactive media to explore cultural standards. Extending the foundations of human computer interaction, play design and design anthropology, the work explores the ignored. This work is computer game, gallery art, animation, sculpture or some interdisciplinary amalgamation. Lindsay's work primarily pursues educational experiences and editorial critique of the social relationship between computers, humans and each other. The medium is typically screen based, software informed and aesthetic. The work demonstrates patterns through their amplification or the exposition of their absence in common awareness. The Critical Gameplay project is the current focus of this work, turning pattern into rhetoric.
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.
Gopinaath Kannabiran
Gopinaath Kannabiran is currently pursuing his PhD in Informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington with Human Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d) as his specialization. He received his MS in HCI/d from the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington in 2010, and has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering. His research work focuses on the experiential aspects of the design and use of interactive technologies. Issues of gender and sexuality are central to his research and are informed by critical theory. He is a part of the Cultural Research in Technology (CRIT) group at Indiana University, Bloomington lead by Dr. Shaowen Bardzell and Dr. Jeffrey Bardzell.
Heather Kelley
Heather Kelley, also known as moboid, is a media artist, curator, and game designer. Currently Ms. Kelley heads her interaction and experience design studio Perfect Plum. Perfect Plum's originating product was the OhMiBod Remote, an abstract iPhone interface to control a connected vibrator. 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. Heather is co-founder of Kokoromi, an experimental game collective, with whom she has produced and curated the renowned GAMMA event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context, and the stereoscopic motion-controlled game superHYPERCUBE.
Dan Massey and Alison Gardner
Dan Massey and Alison Gardner are independent activists in Washington, DC, committed to the creation of a New Age of liberty, freedom, justice, and equality for all people. They seek to inform & uplift our social system, through education, training, advocacy, and communications to support and accelerate the New Age. Dan provides a vision of the values of the New Age from varied perspectives. Alison applies her background as a publicist and teacher to the struggle for universal equality rights and the sexual liberation of all humankind. Together they are dedicated to the realization of a spiritualized future for human society consistent with broad transhumanist principles. Dan and Alison operate a website for education, advocacy, and grassroots organizing leading to a future free from discrimination based on race, sex, gender, or sexual practice between consenting adults. This past Spring, they created a second website to provide similar content in Spanish for the international Latin American community. Dan and Alison are members of the Advisory Council of Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance, the Policy Advisory Board of Gender Rights Maryland, and the Sexual Rights and Gender Justice Working Group of the US Human Rights Network. Alison and Dan work with local & national organizations as advocates for global sexual freedom; employment non-discrimination; exposure of religious bigots; ending police bias against sexual minorities; &, establishing a sexual healing industry.
Ned and Maggie Mayhem
Ned Mayhem is a physics graduate student who has been a performer in straight, gay, and queer pornography since 2010. He has appeared in films that have been recognized at Cinekink, AVN, and Feminist Porn Awards. With his partner Maggie Mayhem, Ned runs the independent 'DIY' porn site MeetTheMayhems.com showcasing the couple's own brand of perversely heartwarming queer sexuality. Ned also uses the software he has developed for MeetTheMayhems to empower other adult performers and independent studios to control their own web presence and monetize their own content. Ned loves to share his pornographics enthusiasm with crowds, and he's spoken at MomentumCon 2012, Sex Week at Harvard, Arse Elektronika, Hackmeet, Nerd Nite SF, and OpenSF.
Maggie Mayhem is an HIV Specialist turned rogue. After spending eight years working across the continental United States and abroad focusing on HIV Prevention and secondary-prevention among HIV+ homeless youth, Maggie directed her wealth of knowledge in harm reduction and sex positive education into building a world that was pleasure positive. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007 and puts her degree in modern literature to use writing, speaking, and performing about her politics both in and outside of sexuality. She has been seen everywhere from Yale and Princeton Universities to underground sex clubs and has even provided private performances for the Oakland Hells Angels.
Aaron 'SFslim' Muszalski
Aaron Muszalski is an artist, storyteller and tireless proponent of collaborative culture. He is a frequent contributor to some of the Web's most popular blogs, like Boing Boing (for whom he guest hosted BB Video) and Laughing Squid (former Associate Editor). Before emigrating to the Internet, he spent a decade creating groundbreaking visual effects for George Lucas at both Industrial Light + Magic and LucasArts, earning screen credits on such diverse productions as Star Wars: Episode I and the videogame classic, The Secret of Monkey Island. An accomplished maker with a volunteering problem, he is perpetually involved in a variety of large and often improbable industrial arts projects. Recent collaborations in this area include SYZYGRYD (a 2.5 ton musical instrument and interactive fire sculpture) and the Burning Man (the massive central effigy of the eponymously named Burning Man festival, which he has built since 2007). He currently works as a Storyteller for the Wikimedia Foundation, showcasing the unique stories of Wikipedia users around the world.
Paolo Pedercini
Molleindustria [soft industry/soft factory] is a project of reappropriation of video games, a call for the radicalization of popular culture, an independent game developer. Since 2003 we produced homeopathic remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of free, short-form, online games. Our products range from satirical business simulations (McDonald's Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every day the same dream, Tuboflex), from playable theories (the Free Culture Game, Leaky World) to politically incorrect pseudo-games (Orgasm Simulator, Operation: Pedopriest). Molleindustria obtained extensive media coverage and critical acclaim while hopping between digital art, academia, game design, media activism and internet folk art. Paolo Pedercini is an Italian game developer, artist and educator. He teaches digital media production and experimental game design at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2003 he works under the project name 'Molleindustria' producing provocative games addressing issues of social and environmental justice (McDonald's videogame, Oiligarchy, Phone Story), religion (Faith Fighter) and labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned).
Dani Ploeger
Dani Ploeger is a Dutch artist and theorist, currently living and working in Berlin and London. Heralded in the press as the "Jimi Hendrix of the sphincter", his performance installations frequently involve medical consumer technologies and explore themes around the technologized body, sexuality and vanity. Dani's artwork has been featured in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Basel, Experimental Intermedia in New York, para/site art space in Hong Kong and Revolution 1.000.000.000etc Gallery in his hometown Middelburg in the Netherlands. Dani's writing in the field of digital art and cultural studies has been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and the Body, Space and Technology Journal, among others. He is a permanent contributor to Oxford University Press" The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. Dani is Lecturer in Theatre and Digital Arts at Brunel University. He previously held a position as Lecturer in Performing Arts at De Montfort University in Leicester.
Pietro Righi Riva
Pietro Righi Riva is studio director at indie game company Santa Ragione and PhD student in Interaction Design at the Politecnico di Milano. His research is about applying cognitive science as inspiration for game design. His first game, Fotonica, has been shown at the 54th International Exhibition of Art, Venice Biennale and Eurogamer Expo 2011 Indie Games Arcade. Pietro believes in accessible game design and has been working with the Milan Institute for the Blind to develop accessible game design patterns for the visually impaired.
Tad Rollow and Kurt Bollacker
Dr. Douglas (Tad) Rollow is a researcher in acoustics and signal processing for a manufacturer of professional and consumer audio products. His academic background is in electrical engineering and acoustics, and he typically writes software and designs circuits for the semiconductor industry, professional audio, and acoustics and vibration research applications. He enjoys recording music and fabrication of kinetic and flame-based art. Dr. Kurt Bollacker is a data scientist and software creator with a range of backgrounds, including data mining/understanding, collaborative database creation, search engines, long term digital archiving, and electrocardiology. He has helped build freebase.com, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the CiteSeer search engine, and the Rosetta Project linguistic database. He is currently the Digital Research Director of the Long Now Foundation, and is creating collaborative data models for traditional educational systems and designing long term survivable collaborative networks.
Adam and Rosalynn Rothstein
Rosalynn is a folklorist and artist. She studies workplace and online communication, most recently tracking the networked relationship of alternative scientific theories. Adam is a writer and artist. He researches media, politics, and technology, especially future-leaning temporal theory objects.
Eleanor Saitta
Eleanor Saitta is a designer, artist, hacker, and researcher working at the intersections between mediums ranging from interaction design and architecture through jewelry and fashion, with an emphasis on the seamless integration of technology into lived experience and the humanity of objects and the built environment. She has previously worked at the NASA Ames Research Center and the IBM Almaden Research Center, and divides her time between Seattle and New York, as life allows.
Adam van Sertima
Adam van Sertima thinks a lot about play, and how we experience our own experience. He is a Ph.D student active with Concordia University's Technoculture Art and Games Research Center. He is also Chief Domestic Officer for his wife and small son.
Jaakko Stenros
Jaakko Stenros (M.Soc.Sc.) is an Associate Professor, a game researcher and a doctoral candidate at Game Research Lab (University of Tampere). He is an author of Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (2009), as well as an editor of three books on role-playing games, Nordic Larp (2010), Playground Worlds (2008) and Beyond Role and Play (2004). He lives in Helsinki, Finland.
Kitty Stryker
Kitty Stryker is a geeky sex worker, Burner, rabid writer and feminist activist with one high-heeled boot in San Francisco, California and one in London, England. In London, Stryker worked with the TLC Trust, an online organization connecting people with disabilities with sex workers experienced with emotional or physical limitations. She is the founder of the award-winning Ladies High Tea and Pornography Society, and was nominated by the Erotic Awards as Sex Worker of the Year for her charity and activism work. Now back in the States, Stryker has been presenting Safe/Ward, a workshop on combating entitlement culture within alternative sexual communities. She has written for Huffington Post, Good Vibrations, and Filament, presented at SXSW on sex work and social media, and works as a social media manager. An RPG and board game nerd, Stryker has a lot of experience using geek competitiveness to get her sex life lubricated!
Kristen Stubbs
Dr. Kristen Stubbs is a queer/pansexual/rolequeer roboticist who's more interested in people than in technology. Kristen earned her Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Her goal for 2012 is to build a sex toy or piece of BDSM equipment using every workshop in her local makerspace. One of Kristen's most popular toys is the TARDIS Tickler, a dildo with a miniature TARDIS inside. Kristen blogs about technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure, including her own experiences and creations, at www.toymakerproject.com.
Khannea Suntzu
Khannea Suntzu is a 'Nymian' activist, social critic & blogger. Her biohost is pursuing a formal legal name change. She considers 'personal reinvention' to summarize her approach to identity. A Transhumanist and critical Singularitarian, she is a severe cynic of current 2012 geopolitics and feels the western world is deteriorating into a 'banana republic.' She feels IT offers the most promising long term solutions to societal problems and is a strongly outspoken advocate for advanced IT. Long an evangelist for Second Life (SL), she sees VR & gaming as technologies that will enable liberation of the human spirit from the bounds of necessity and the limitations of mortal existence through a psychosexual process of self-reinvention. Khannea is noted for fully exploring virtual prostitution in SL, cited in Le Monde, CGW & Forbes.com. She feels a deep affinity for the iconic Succubus and her own 'techno-shamanism.' Khannea consults to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, VenusPlusX & VR companies Metafuturing, E-spaces & TeleXLR8. She has spoken at TransVision2010, Creating Change 2011, SHARE2, & the Club of Amsterdam. She is a fan of the Terasem Transreligion & has been an active member of several other groups exploring radical transhuman vitology, including the Order of Cosmic Engineers. For Khannea, radical transhumanism promotes a future vision where breathtakingly beautiful and sexual and free beings have vastly amplified power over a vastly expanded reality.