mainspeakers

Mark Amerika
Expanding the Concept of Writing: A Personal Narrative
www.markamerika.com
In this artist presentation, Mark Amerika starts off by reading from his print novels and then discusses how these works informed his move into hypertext, net art, improvisational VJ performance, and DVD installation. Pointing to his primary occupation as creative writer, Amerika will use whatever poetic and theoretical language at his disposal to better expand the concept of writing.

Mark Amerika is a novelist, net artist, theorist, and VJ performer who directs the TECHNE practice-based research initiative at the University of Colorado where he is a professor of art and art history.

Paul Brown
Origins - the early computer arts in the UK
http://www.paul-brown.com
CACHe - Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc... - is an AHRB-funded three year research project based in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College. In addition to archiving and documenting the first two decades of the computer arts (1960-80) the project intends to re-examine this long neglected period of British art history, recontextualise it and provide it with a renewed historical legitimacy.

Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has been specialising in art, science and technology since the 1960's. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck where he is working on their CACHe - Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc... project.

Alan Sondheim
Past and Present Work
http://www.asondheim.org
Alan will present a trajectory through old and new technologies, including work created from a number of different online programs. Emphasis will be on the body and language in relation to code and codework. Alan will describe a pattern of progress which continually returns to a non-existent source, that of an "absolute" which would explain the world. Heavily illustrated with video, image, audio, executables, websites, etc.

Independent writer / theorist /artist : Most recent book: .echo (Alt-X) Trilby shown at Rotterdam Int'l Film Festival, 2002 Works in new media, video, sound 2nd virtual writer-in-residence, trAce writing ongoing meditation on cyberspace, Internet Text, since beginning 1994 has worked on multimedia dance materials with Azure Carter, Foofwa d'Imobilite

Tim Wright
In Search Of Oldton
http://www.writersforthefuture.com
How does a town just disappear? What does it feel like to be cut off from your roots in a digital age where people have so many tools for recording and documenting their lives? How do those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age recover and maintain a sense of belonging that is becoming increasingly so hard to hold on to? 'In Search of Oldton' is an attempt to use other people's digital documentary in order to recapture and re-invent my own personal history. I'll will be touring the UK during 2004 in search of Oldton – my lost place of birth - and uncovering along the way the possible causes of its demise and the subsequent loss of my past. Working with groups and individuals I want to build up a substantial online archive showing people taking their leave of a place or a person - a range of personal stories about ‘saying goodbye’ and ‘moving on’. Through texts, pictures, videos and oral testimony, I will build up a digital archive of fictional remembrances, tributes to numerous places and situations left behind. And ultimately (I hope!) my own digital story of memory and loss will emerge.

Tim Wright trained as a journalist and editor on various magazines (Which Computer?, LAN Magazine) and newspapers (The Independent, Sunday Times). In 1995 Tim left print publishing to become one of the three Managing Partners of NoHo Digital, one the UK's most successful independent new media agencies. In 1999, Tim and his creative collaborator Rob Bevan left NoHo to form XPT, with a view to finding markets and audiences for their own original digital works. In that time he has been the lead writer of two BAFTA-winning interactive projects - the comedy self help disk 'MindGym' and Web & email drama 'Online Caroline', as well as scripting the lunatic Web 'holiday' 'Mount Kristos'.
www.xpt.co.uk/timwright

Kate Pullinger
The Breathing Wall
During a year-long research project with trAce, Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen, Kate Pullinger collaborated with the American web artist Talan Memmott and created ‘Branded’, an introductory fragment of a longer piece. During that year she also met and worked with Stefan Schemat, a Berlin-based software artist. One of Stefan's innovations is HTF, or Hyper Trance Fiction, a story-telling software that can respond to human breathing. Kate Pullinger was fascinated by the potential of this software and, subsequently, received funding from Arts Council England to collaborate with Stefan Schemat to create 'The Breathing Wall', a full-length piece based on ‘Branded’. Web artist and designer babel is the third partner in this collaboration.

The piece tells the story of a girl, Lana, communicating with her boyfriend, Michael, through the wall of his prison cell. She is dead; he's been falsely convicted of her murder. The story will be told through a series of webpages and dreams. Using audio and text, each unit of hypertext will lead to its corresponding ‘dream’ unit of HTF. In order to experience the dream sections (which reside on CD-Rom) the reader needs a headset that includes earphones and a microphone. By positioning the microphone under his or her nose, the HTF sections will respond to the reader's breathing. The goal of these sections is to induce a hypnotic or meditative state in the reader, allowing them to enter the dream. Incubation will see the world premiere of this work.

Kate Pullinger’s books include the novels Weird Sister, The Last Time I Saw Jane and, forthcoming in 2004, A Little Stranger, as well as the short story collections, My Life as a Girl in a Men’s Prison and Tiny Lies. Kate Pullinger also writes for film. In 2001/03 she was Visiting Writing Fellow at The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University and she is currently the Royal Literary Fund’s first ever Virtual Fellow. Her work for the web includes ‘Branded’ as well as her current project, ‘The Breathing Wall’. Find her at www.katepullinger.com

Steve Gibson
Virtual DJ
Steve Gibson is a Canadian multimedia artist, composer, and theorist. Simultaneously deeply involved with technology and deeply suspicious of it’s effects, Gibson’s musical, multimedia and virtual reality work celebrates both the liberation and paranoia of techno-fetishism. His works have been performed in such venues as Ars Electronica, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Banff Centre for the Arts, Festival International Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, European Media Arts Festival, San Francisco Art Institute, 4 & 6CyberConf.
http://www.telebody.ws/VirtualDJ/

Ted Nelson
http://ted.hyperland.com/
Ted Nelson is a designer, generalist and contrarian. He is best known for: coining terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia," 1963 (first published 1965), and as founder and pursuer of Project Xanadu®, which has been widely misunuderstood.
**Current positions: Visiting Professor of Environmental Information, Keio University SFC campus, Fujisawa, Japan • Visiting Professor of Multimedia, University of Southampton, Southampton, England.
** Mentors (aside from my family): Leo Rosten • Michael Scriven • Thomas C. Schelling • John Walker
** Degrees: B.A., Philosophy, Swarthmore. 1959 • M.A., Sociology, Harvard, 1963 (from the late lamented Dept. of Social Relations)
** Books: Life, Love, College, etc.• Media 72 • Computer Lib / Dream Machines • The Home Computer Revolution • Literary Machines • Biostrategy and Polymind • The Checkmate Proposal • The Future of Information
** Articles: a large listing of my articles has been kept by Andrew Pam at the Xanadu Australia site. (Some may not be in correct academic form, but it's the most complete listing. There is regrettably no full listing of my magazine articles for ROM, Creative Computing or NewMedia, since I don't know which ones they published or when.)
** Coined these words in some degrees of general use: "hypertext" and" "hypermedia" (1965) • "zipper lists" (1965) • "softcopy" (ca. 1967) • "cybercrud" (ca. 1967) • "compound document" (date unclear) • "image synthesis" (1970); "electronic visualization" (1972 -- and thus the later "computer visualization", "scientific visualization") • "dildonics" (1974) • "virtuality" in its computer sense (1975) • "technoid" (1981) • "docuverse" (1981) • "transclusion" (1987) • "micropayment" (1992)
** Awards etc: Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 1998, presented at WWW7, Brisbane, Australia • There is an eponymous "Nelson award" given at the annual ACM hypertext conference for the best paper by a newcomer (sponsored by Microcosm, Ltd.)