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A unique conference that brings together scholars,
artists, critics, designers, screenwriters, producers, architects,
programmers, and business leaders to share their view of contemporary
entertainment and its future. Presented by the UC Santa Barbara
Public Humanities Initiative. Free admission to the public.
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| All sessions are free to the public and will be
held in the McCune Room, 6020 HSSB (Humanities and Social Sciences
Building), UCSB [directions]
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L. O. Aranye Fradenburg
Aranye Fradenburg is a Professor of English at UCSB
who specializes in medieval culture, psychoanalysis,
and the public humanities. She has written recently
on contemporary fascination with the "medieval"
in film, games, and Barbie fashion, and has recently
completed a book on Chaucer, psychoanalysis, and history.
Her books include: Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis,
Historicism, Chaucer (forthcoming, U. Minnesota
Press) and City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of
Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (U. Wisconsin Press,
1991). She is also editor of Women of Sovereignty
(U. Edinburgh Press, 1992) and (with Carla Freccero)
of Premodern Sexualities (Routledge, 1996).
(See her online
profile) |
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Harold Marcuse
Harold Marcuse is Associate Professor of History at
UCSB and works on memorial sites, historical monuments,
and the reception of the Nazi past in Germany from
1945 to the present. His recently published book is
titled Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses
of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2001). (See his online
c.v.) |
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Karin delaPeña
Karin delaPeña is the Artistic Director of
the "Speaking
of Stories" series, which features actors
reading short stories at the Lobero Theater in Santa
Barbara. Along with a long-term, international career
in the theater (as an actress, singer and dancer and,
more recently, as a director) she also received her
Masters degree and the California licensing to become
a Licensed Clinical Social Worker—a profession
to which she devoted herself exclusively for 10 years.
She has also had an interim career as a published
journalist and, since moving to Santa Barbara, has
become a published, short-story fiction writer. (See
fuller bio) |
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John Sacret Young
With a degree
in religion, John Sacret Young moved to Los Angeles
and applied to the L.A.P.D. Instead, he wound up writing
for the Emmy Award-winning drama, Police Story,
and since then has worked as a writer, director, and
producer.
Young co-created and
served as executive producer of the series China
Beach. For his work on the series Young received
a Golden Globe Award, a People’s Choice Award,
13 Viewers for Quality Television Awards, five Emmy
nominations and four nominations from the Writers
Guild of America. Young won the WGA Award for “Souvenirs”
and the Peabody Award for “Vets,” two episodes
of China Beach, both which he directed.
He also served
as the executive producer on the series VR-5,
Orleans, and Level 9.
The first Movie
of the Week Young wrote, Special Olympics,
received the Humanitas Prize. His first mini-series,
A Rumor of War, also about Vietnam, landed
him a second Writers Guild of America Award.
In feature films,
Young wrote the Oscar-nominated Testament (with
Jane Alexander, Kevin Costner and Rebecca DeMornay);
and Romero (with Raul Julia). Both received
Christopher Awards.
In 1999 Young
won another Humanitas Prize for the mini-series Thanks
of a Grateful Nation, about the Gulf War Syndrome,
which he also executive produced.
Since then, Young
has written, produced and directed for Showtime Sirens,
about a police-involved shooting, and for ABC, King
of the World, based on New Yorker editor-in-chief
David Remnick’s book about the young Muhammad
Ali.
Young currently
serves as Secretary for the Board of the Humanitas
Prize and Secretary for the Writers Guild Foundation.
Also a novelist
and author, Young’s first novel The Weather
Tomorrow was praised by Newsweek, The
Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The
Los Angeles Times. His next novel The Black
Rainbow, is scheduled to be published in the fall
of 2002. Most recently, he has finished a work of
non-fiction. |
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Respondent: Dick Hebdige
Dick Hebdige recently joined UCSB as the new Director
of its Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and a Professor
in the departments of Film Studies and Art Studio.
He was previously Dean of Critical Studies and Director
of the Writing Program at California Institute of
the Arts. A cultural critic and theorist, Hebdige
has published widely on popular culture (especially
youth "subculture"), contemporary art and
design, and consumer and media culture. His books
include: Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen,
1979); Cut 'n' Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean
Music (Methuen, 1987) and Hiding in the Light:
On Images and Things (Routledge, Methuen, 1988).
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David Koenig
David Koenig is co-founder and chief games programmer
of Hollywood-based Gigawatt Studios, a digital production
company working on interactive game entertainment,
multimedia, and Web sites. (See Gigawatt
Studios site) |
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Robert Nideffer
Robert Nideffer researches, teaches, and publishes
in the areas of virtual environments and behavior,
interface theory and design, technology and culture,
and contemporary social theory. He holds an MFA in
Computer Arts, and a Ph.D. in Sociology, and is an
Assistant Professor in Studio Art and Information
and Computer Science at UC Irvine, where he also serves
as an Associate Director of the Center for Virtual
Reality, and as an Affiliated Faculty in the Visual
Studies Program. He is currently in the process of
starting an Interdisciplinary Gaming Studies Program
at UCI. (See his online
c.v. and project descriptions) |
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Anna Everett
Anna Everett is Assoc. Professor of Film Studies
Dept. at UCSB, where she works in the fields of
film and media history/theory, African-American
film and culture, and Internet and digital media
analysis. She is the author of Returning the
Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949
(Duke Univ. Press, 2001) and is currently at work
on books titled Digital Diasporas: A Race for
Cyberspace and Inside the Dark Museum: An
Anthology of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1959.
Recent articles include: "Lester Walton's Ecriture
Noir: Transcoding Cinematic Excess" (Cinema
Journal, 2000), "'I Want the Same Things
Other People Enjoy’: The Black Press and the
Classic Hollywood Studio System" (Spectator,
1997), and "The Other Pleasures: The Narrative
Function of Race in the Cinema" (Film Criticism,1995-96).
She is founder and managing editor of the Internet
journal, Screening
Noir Online; and she is currently organizing
the conference titled "Race in Digital Space
2.0."
Everett is the recent winner of the prestigious
UCSB Plous Award, the top recognition for younger
faculty at UCSB. (See her online
c.v.)
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Marsha Kinder
Marsha Kinder is Chair of the Division
of Critical Studies at the USC
School of Cinema/Television and specializes in
new media, narrative theory, national media culture,
and children's media. She is author of over one hundred
essays and ten books, including Playing with Power
in Movies, Television and Video Games, Blood
Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in
Spain, and several anthologies: Refiguring
Spain, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,
and Kids's Media Culture. Also a multimedia
producer, Kinder's CD-ROMs include Blood Cinema
(the first scholarly hypertext in film); Runaways
(a computer game for teens, co-written and produced
with documentary filmmaker Mark Harris); and three
electronic fictions, made in collaboration with independent
filmmakers Nina Menkes and Pat O'Neill and novelist
John Rechy. (For more info, see her entry on this
page.) |
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Bruce Lyon
Bruce Lyon is General Manager, Global Media and Entertainment
Markets Group, Sun Microsystems,
Inc. |
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Jane Espenson
Jane Espenson is a television writer/producer who
is best known for her work on the Buffy and the
Vampire Slayer series. (Her Buffy episodes
include "Band Candy," "Earshot,"
"Superstar," "A New Man," and
"Rm w/a Vu." ) Her other credits include
Star Trek: DS9, Ellen, Angel,
and Buffy: The Animated Series. Previously,
she was a graduate student in Linguistics at UC
Berkeley. She initially entered the world of TV
writing by interesting producers of the Star
Trek: The Next Generation series in a script
idea.
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Lisa Parks
Lisa Parks is an Assistant Professor in the Department
of Film Studies at UC Santa Barbara who works in
the fields of television history, global media,
video art and activism, cultural studies, law and
media culture, and feminist media theory. A special
focus in her research is the cultural meaning of
satellite, imaging, and GPS (Global Positioning
System) technologies.
Parks recently completed a book titled Cultures
in Orbit: Satellite Technologies and Visual Media
(forthcoming Duke University Press). She is also
co-editing a collection of essays called Planet
TV: A Global Television Studies Reader, and
she has published several articles in book collections
and journals. She is a former editor of The Velvet
Light Trap; she serves on the CULTSTUD-L
advisory board; and she has produced programs for
Paper Tiger
TV, a video activism collective.
Recent courses that Parks has taught include, "Television
History," "Video Art and Activism,"
"Global Media," "Women and Film",
"Law and Media Culture," and "iWrite.edu
: Writing for the New Media."
(See her home
page)
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Constance Penley
Constance Penley is Professor of Film
Studies at UCSB; Director of the Center for
Film, Television, and New Media; co-editor of Camera
Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory,
and a member of the GALA
Committee. She has written and lectured widely
on feminist media and cultural studies and on science
and technology studies. Her most recent work includes
NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America
(Verso, 1997) and The Visible Woman: Imaging
Technologies, Science, and Gender (ed. with
Treichler and Cartwright; New York Univ. Press,
1998). She is co-librettist of Biospheria: An
Environmental Opera, which premiered at UC San
Diego in March 2001. (See her c.v.)
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Christian Möller
Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1959, Christian Möller
just moved to Los Angeles this fall. A highly regarded
architect, he is also an artist in his own right.
His light installations, light and audio sculptures,
and his interactive works have been extensively shown
in Europe and Japan. Möller studied architecture
at the College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and
at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After working
for the Behnisch and Partner Architects in Stuttgart,
he was a guest artist for Peter Weibel's Institute
for New Media at the Städel School in Frankfurt.
In 1990, he founded his own studio and media laboratory
in Frankfurt. From 1995 to 1997 he headed the ARCHIMEDIA
Research Institute at the College of Design in Linz,
Austria; from 1998 to 2000 he was a professor at the
State College of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany; and
since September 2001, he has joined the Department
of Design | Media Arts at UCLA, Los Angeles, as a
senior faculty. (See his web sites: www.arc.de/cm,
www.canon.co.jp/cast/artlab/pros2/pers-01.html) |
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Lynn Spigel
Lynn Spigel is a Professor at the USC School of Cinema/Television
who has written extensively on film, television, and
popular culture. She co-edits Camera Obscura: A
Journal of Feminism and Film Theory. Her recent
works include: Make Room for TV: Television and
the Family Ideal in Postwar America (U. Chicago
Press, 1992) and Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular
Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke Univ. Press, 2001).
Particularly relevant to her panel in the "Entertainment
Value" conference is her interest in the role
of entertainment in domestic spaces. |
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Helmut Draxler
Helmut Draxler is a Professor of Cultural and Media
Studies at the Merz-Akademie, Stuttgart. He is on
the faculty of the Merz Academy's School of Visual
Communication. His books include, The Arena of
Private Space (Munich, 1993) and Utopias of
Design (Munich, 1994). Recent articles include:
"The Author as Slasher: Breaking the Narration
in Horrorfilms," Texte zur Kunst 43: 93-
106; "Before and after Science: The Cultural
Turn in the Debate on Biotechnologies" (in press);
"Similarities That Make Distinctions Necessary:
Culture and Media Studies in Social Context,"
in Ute Meta Bauer, ed., Education, Information,
Entertainment: Current Approaches on Higher Artistic
Education (Vienna, 2001). |
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Respondent: Victoria Vesna
Victoria Vesna is a digital and network artist,
Professor, and Chair of the Department
of Design/Media Arts at the UCLA School of the
Arts. Previously, she taught in the Art Studio Department
at UCSB.
Vesna’s work can be defined as experimental
research that creatively connects networked environments
to physical public spaces. She explores how communication
technologies affect collective behavior and shift
perceptions of identity in relation to scientific
innovation. She completed her Ph.D. at the Center
for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CaiiA),
University of Wales. Her thesis was entitled Networked
Public Spaces: An Investigation into Virtual Embodiment.
Currently she is developing a large collaborative
project titled"notime".
"Building a Community of People with No Time"
is a series of projects taking place on the net
and in physical public spaces. It is designed to
raise questions about perceptions of time and identity
as we overextend our personal networks through communication
technologies. There are three manifestations of
notime, all interconnected and networked:
a net project, a physical installation, and a performance
involving cell phones. notime is part of
the traveling exhibit, telematic connections:
the virtual embrace. Other recent works by Vesna
include Bodies
INCorporated, a large networked collaborative
project installed as a solo exhibition at the San
Francisco Art Institute and the ArtHouse in Dublin;
and Datamining
Bodies, exhibited at an old mine in Dortmund,
Germany.
Vesna has initiated and produced a number of projects
that address issues of art, science, and technology—e.g.,
the special issue of Artificial Intelligence
& Society titled "Database
Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and Category
in Art"; a CD-ROM, Life
in the Universe with Steven Hawking (a UCSB/MetaTools
co-production), and a book/CD-ROM for Terminals
(co-edited and curated with Connie Samaras, UC Irvine)
that deals with the cultural production of death.
Forthcoming is a book she is co-editing with Christiane
Paul and Margot Lovejoy titled Context Providers.
Vesna's work has received notice in such prominent
publications as Art in America, Artweek,
the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco
Bay Guardian, Newsweek, and the Los
Angeles Times, as well as Der Spiegel
(Germany), the Irish Times (Ireland), Tema
Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil).
She has received numerous grants and sponsorships
from various industries and educational foundations,
including Alias/Wavefront, MetaCreations, GTE Outreach,
the UC Santa Barbara Office of Research, the Getty
Senior Research grant, Intercampus Arts, and the
Ahmanson Foundation. Recent commissions are from
the Walker Arts New Media Initiatives. (See Vesna's
homepage
for further information.)
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Robert Venturi
| Robert Venturi is a world-renowned architect
and architectural theorist. He is the founding
principal of the firm, Venturi,
Scott Brown and Associates, Inc., its chief
of design, and principal-in-charge of all architectural
projects. His current projects include Dartmouth
College's Baker/Berry Library; the Yale School
of Medicine's Congress Avenue Building; the
University of Michigan's Life Sciences Institute
and Commons building complex; Philadelphia's
Woodmere Art Museum; a new biomedical research
building at the University of Kentucky; and
the California NanoSystems Institute at the
University of California at Santa Barbara. |
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Venturi
design for Whitehall Ferry Building,
Staten Island, NY, with "electronic
LED images" that "change and
move, and can include ornament, pattern,
information and color, through the predominant
image of a waving fragment of a flag,
perceived from far across the bay"
(more
info)
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Although Mr. Venturi derives his major reputation
from his completed buildings, he is also respected
as a theorist and artist who communicates his architectural
ideas, formal and verbal, with grace and wit via
his extensive writing, teaching and lecturing. His
book, Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture, is a
recognized milestone in architectural theory. First
published in 1966, it has since been translated
and published in 18 languages. Other publications
include Iconography
and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture, A View
from the Drafting Room (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996) and his famous Learning
from Las Vegas, with Denise Scott Brown
and Steven Izenour (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1972;
revised edition 1977).
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George Legrady
George Legrady is Professor of Interactive Media
with a joint appointment in the UC Santa Barbara
Art Department
and Media Arts
& Technology Program. He has previously
held fulltime appointments at the Merz Akademie,
Stuttgart, San Francisco State University, University
of Southern California, and the University of Western
Ontario. His current research is at once interdisciplinary,
theoretical, and practical. In both his interactive
digital art installations and his teaching, he is
exploring the use of visualization technologies
to interface with dynamically organized data (e.g.,
"self-organizing maps" of datasets).
Recent interactive installation exhibitions have
taken place at the Centre Pompidou, Paris [Pockets
full of Memories], 2001; the new Richard Meier
designed Siemens World Headquarters in Munich, 1999/2000;
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Sept-Nov
98; the Kunst und AustellungHalle der Bundes Republik
in Bonn, [Tracing],
97-98; the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian
Museum of Contemporary Photography, 97-98; the Palais
des beaux-arts, Brussels, fall 97. His project "Slippery
Traces" was presented in the Siemens¹
curated "Deep Storage" exhibition at the
Haus der Kunst, Munich, Aug 97; the Kunstforum,
Berlin, Fall 1997; the kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf,
Spring 98; Projects Studios One, New York, summer
98, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Fall 98.
Awards include a National Endowment of the Arts
Visual Fellowship, a Canada Council Computer Integrated
Media Award in 1997 and 1994, the "New Voices,
New Visions" prize from Voyager Co, and Honorable
Mentions at Ars Electronica, Austria in 1994 and
1989. CD-ROM publications include the National Gallery
of Canada catalog "George Legrady: From Analogue
to Digital", (1998); "Slippery
Traces", in "Artintact 3", ZKM,
Karlsruhe, Germany (1996); and "An Anecdoted
Archive from the Cold War, HyperReal Media Production
(1994).
His newest project is "Sensing
Speaking Space" at the San Francisco MOMA
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(See his homepage
for more information and links to his projects)
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Cue P. Doll
Cue P. Doll is an open source alternativeware programmer.
Her parodyware project "CueJack," distributed
throught RTMark,
made the in-home marketing barcode scanner "CueCat"
more user-friendly by enabling consumers to learn
about corporate abuses instead of viewing ads. More
recently, she has been part of a software collective
developing "Reamweaver," automatic web-parody
software released by The Yes Men. Reamweaver enables
the public to repair lies in corporate websites
by substituting key words and phrases of their choice
to create real-time "funhouse-mirror"
sites. Cue P. is currently doing R&D on the
user-friendly utilities of the future. Her soft/art
has appeared in Kunstraum "Female Takeover"
at Ars Electronica 2001, New Museum's Open_Source_Art_Hack,
Slashdot, Wired, Linux Gazette,
The Net Economy, Viridian Notes and
other places.
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Margaret Morgan
Margaret Morgan is an artist living in Los Angeles
whose work draws upon feminism, structuralism, and
theories of postmodernism to address issues concerning
modernity, hygiene, and plumbing. Her work takes
the form of installations made of plumbing systems;
drawings in urine and builder's chalk; and photography.
Her art uses plumbing as a motif to address histories
of twentieth century art and life. Her thesis: in
America's twentieth century, hygiene was god and
the toilet its ambiguous icon. Shiny-bright and
promising unparalleled cleanliness, the porcelain
fixture was fetishized for its gleaming surface.
It was also vilified for its inevitable failure
to live up to that image. Worshipped and reviled,
the bathroom has been a cipher for the many discomforts
of modernity. As a figure equally prevalent in popular
movies and the annals of art history, in television
and in quotidian exchanges over the household chores,
the toilet in the twentieth century has been a catch-all
for symbolic—as much as bodily—effluvia.
Her practice includes drawing, photography, video,
installation and writing. Recent writings have appeared
in the Journal of Post Colonial Studies,
Women and Dada (MIT Press), and Plumbing:
Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton Architectural
Press). Forthcoming exhibitions of her "shit
drawings" will be held at Susanne Vielmetter
L.A. Projects and Galerie Patrik Schedler, Zurich.
(For more info, see her home
page).
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Sandy Rodriguez
Sandy Rodriguez is an emerging Chicana artist raised
en la frontera: San Diego, Tijuana, and Los Angeles.
She currently resides in Los Angeles. Her installations,
paintings, and performance pieces are strongly influenced
by issues of gender, culture, political activism,
juvenile justice and super heroes. Exhibited nationally
and internationally, Rodriguez has recently been
awarded the Artist in Communities grant from Side
Street Projects in Los Angeles and the California
Arts Council.
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Graham Budgett
Graham Budgett is currently a Lecturer in Digital
Media for the Art
Department at UC Santa Barbara and a degree
candidate in the UC Santa Barbara Media
Arts & Technology Program. He is also Design
Consultant to the Digital
World Research Centre (DWRC) University of Surrey,
England. Previously he studied at Trent Polytechnic
University; Nottingham University; Saint Martin's
School of Art, Central London; and Stanford University
(receiving the Master of Fine Art Degree in 1982).
He was Lecturer in Sculpture at the UC Santa Barbara
from 1982-85 and Resident Artist at the Künstlerhaus
Bethanien in Berlin from 1986-87. Budgett has also
taught at the University of Westminster, London
(formerly the Polytechnic of Central London) and
Middlesex University, London.
For GALAWeb, he has served as Video Editor and
Faculty Advisor.
(See his home
page for more info and links to his many online
projects)
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Laura Funkhouser
Laura Funkhouser has a B.A. in Art History from
UC Santa Barbara and ten years of professional corporate
and nonprofit marketing experience. Prior to entering
the corporate marketing field, Ms. Funkhouser marketed
visual and performing art organizations, including
the Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Lobero Stage
Company, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., and was an art critic for the Seattle Weekly
and L.A.-based Visions Art Quarterly. She
currently sits on the Santa Barbara County Arts
Commission.
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(Web site creator & contact person:
Alan Liu)
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