CURATORS

Niranjan Rajah
Niranjan Rajah is a Vancouver-based independent theorist, curator and artist specializing in Sacred Art & Digital Technology, and contemporary Asian art. He is a research scholar at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, a member of the Planetary Collegium new media research group, University of Plymouth, on the Board of the Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), Vancouver, and an appointee to the Canada Council’s New Media and Audio peer assessment committee for 2004. He was an associate professor at the Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, visiting associate professor at the Department of Design|Media Arts, UCLA, and artist-in-residence at the Cyberarts Research Initiative (CRI), National University of Singapore. Niranjan served on the Board of Directors for the Inter Society for Electronic Art (ISEA), and curated and co-curated international exhibitions. He was Keynote Speaker at the 'Collapsing Geographies Forum' of the 2nd Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival (Brisbane, 1999). He co-founded E-ART ASEAN Online, a portal for Southeast Asian electronic art. He won an Asian Scholars Award at the 15th International Congress of Aesthetics (Tokyo, 2001). His writings on art, culture and technology have been published extensively.

Aleksandra Dulic
Aleksandra Dulic is a faculty member of the School for Interactive Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University. A media artist, researcher and experimental film director, her research centres on the algorithmic cinema and animation, artist software, ontology of the open work, and multi-modal scenography for theatre. Aleksandra has participated in solo and group exhibitions of mixed media installations and public art, and directed documentary films, short videos and animations for television broadcast and film festival screenings in Europe and Canada. Since 1996, she has received a number of awards in animation from Yugoslav Film Festival. She completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Simon Fraser University in 1998, and has since traveled in Bali, Indonesia to study the improvisatory system of traditional Shadow play as a source for modeling new media performance. She is currently teaching and working towards her PhD in media art at Simon Fraser University.

Camille Baker
Camille Baker is recent a Masters graduate in Applied Science, Interactive Arts, from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include responsive environments, performance and interactive media, conceptual installation, online communities, telematics, networked collaboration and new media curating. Her wide ranging background includes acting as curator/ producer at New Forms Festival and editor-in-chief of www.slackerbonding.com, an online pop-culture magazine, documentary and online video and animation, visual arts curating, new media and web design /development, music composition and performance (www.spiritualheroine.com), sculpture, and modern dance performance.

Camille is an artist/researcher in installation, experience design, video art, and web animation, as well as music and photography. Her thesis project was an immersive media installation that conceptually explored initiating a mind/body to computer communication or interaction via telepathy, using biosensors to trigger media as a mind-quieting technique.

Kenneth Newby
Kenneth Newby is a media artist, composer-performer, educator, software designer, and audio producer. His work is widely presented in concerts, festivals, and radio broadcasts throughout Canada, Asia, Europe, and the USA. These works include compositions of electro-acoustic and acoustic music, interactive computer systems for live performance and installation, software tools for composition, new composition for Javanese and Balinese gamelan ensembles, interdisciplinary collaborations with composers and artists in various disciplines, and participation in improvisational ensembles.

James K-M

James K-M is a New Media curator, artist, interface designer and educator. In 1994 he created Restless Machines: Noise and Industrial Culture, a CD-ROM tracing the history of noise and industrial music. With his Interactive Paintings created in Director, he was nominated Digital Artist of the Year in 1997 by Bravo TV. He co-produced the Mediaprobe series of interactive art modules inspired by quotes from Marshall McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis. His recent DVD-ROM, Electric Living in Canada explores digital media language through interviews with over 90 Canadian and international digital artists and media theorists. Recently he has curated three exhibitions of digital print (Digitalis 1, 2 and 3) and is a co-founder of the Digitalis Digital Art Society formed to promote digital print, contributing to the evolution of digital art language in Vancouver and worldwide. He has been exhibiting paintings, digital prints and interactive art internationally since 1978.

NomIg.
NomIg. (www.nomig.net) is influenced by collaborations with film artists and began applying compositional techniques usually reserved for music to digital video. The result was an awareness of a symbiotic relationship between sight and sound; not only a symbiosis in their unification, but also in editing, post-production and performance techniques. Their work has been recognized at festivals, galleries, exhibitions, clubs and universities around the world. They continue to perform live online every week on Ninjatune’s PirateTV.net. They are also members of the Toronto group Recorded Skies.


Jim Bizzocchi
Jim Bizzocchi is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Arts and technology at Simon Fraser University. He is a filmmaker, and has taught media production and analysis for over 30 years. His current research interests include the emergent production poetics privileged by large-scale, high-resolution video display technology, aesthetics of interactive multimedia experience design and New Media’s role in innovative teaching and learning environments. He is active in educational technology and past president of the Canadian Association for Distance Education. Jim completed his graduate work in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT.


Daina Warren
Daina Warren is a visual artist, curator and Native youth outreach worker for the City of Vancouver. She is from the Montana Slavey nation located in Hobbema, Alberta, between Edmonton and Calgary. Daina graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with a Bachelors degree, majoring in both painting and sculpture. She has worked as a contemporary Native curator at the grunt gallery in Vancouver for the last four years. While at grunt, she has curated numerous exhibitions, traveled to Australia for curatorial research, and assisted in coordinating the first-ever First Nations Contemporary Performance art conference, “INDIANacts”, in November, 2002. Daina is now preparing her artistic interests for National Aboriginal Day on June 21st, a visual arts exhibition at the Roundhouse Community Centre.


Victoria Singh
Victoria Singh is currently the curator of performance art at the Western Front. She is a founding member of PATA (Pacific Art and Technology Alliance), which is collaborating with Open Space, Victoria University and Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival to present artists working with new technologies. Artists presented so far include Stelarc, Perry Hoberman and Don Ritter.She was a guest co-curator at NFF03 for the performance art evening "Sentientechnics".

Malcolm Levy

Malcolm Levy holds an honours degree in Cultural Studies from McGill University. As co-founder of the New Forms Festival, Malcolm has been immersed in new media, film, arts and cultural mediums for numerous years, and he has extensive production experience in video, film, TV, web and print magazines, and event coordination. His works focus on incorporating visual, musical and stylistic constructs from many different cultural influences. The mandate for many of Malcolm's video projects is to blend and break conventional mediums and create community-based projects that focus on arts and culture. For the past three years, he has been executive producer of Capital Media, a company dedicated to the production, promotion and dissemination of media arts and cultural forms. In the past, he has done work for such companies as CBC, Twentieth Century Fox and a number of independent filmmakers.

Ben Nevile

Ben Nevile has released music on labels such as San Francisco's Context, Paris's Telegraph, London's Mosaic, Montreal's Mutek, and Nordic Trax here in Vancouver. Ben works as a programmer for Cycling '74, the makers of Max/MSP/Jitter. Currently he is finishing an interdisciplinary master's degree in Music and Electrical Engineering.

Robert Willis

Apart from being the music editor for Capital Magazine, both online and in print, Robert Robot is a freelance writer and a curator of the Sonic Mavericks night for this year's New Forms Festival. He can be heard every Thursday from 10 -11:30 a.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM Vancouver as the host of the experimental, electronic Planet Lovetron show. Having graduated with a BA in Cultural Anthropology, he is nearing completion of his doctorate in rockin' it. After having lived in Japan, Suriname, the USA, and traveling until his money ran out, Robert has made Vancouver his home for over three years. When not looking for more projects, Robert rearranges his numerous Japanese toys and dreams of early retirement.

Owen Milburn

Owen Milburn was music curator for NFF 03, and a Vancouver-based interactive artist, digital music composer, vocalist, DJ, musician, and performer. Milburn uses computers, sensors, various peripherals and mixed media to create interactive performances and installations. His work primarily addresses the post-human, drawing attention to and challenging typical definitions of what is human and what is machine. His work has been displayed at the Western Front in “Datalyst” (2001) and at various other events (visit www.owenmilburn.com). Owen has a BSc in Interactive Arts with a focus in Performance and Media Art from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Sylvia Borda
Sylvia Grace Borda is an associate researcher and lecturer in Digital Arts in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. She is currently teaching at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and examining how cognitive responses evolve over time in relation to media stimuli in the arts. Her research interests lie in the examination of popular culture and in the emergence of convergent graphical user interface systems. She manages ontherundesign.com, a partnership of new media curators and international artists addressing the definition of Net Art. Sylvia is an active media artist with upcoming exhibitions in Taipei, Shanghai and Montreal.



CONFERENCE PRESENTERS

Ranjit Makkuni
Ranjit Makkuni joined the System Concepts Lab of Xerox PARC in 1985 and became part of the group that developed the Smalltalk-80 Object Oriented programming language and the world's first graphic user interface. In 1989, his “Electronic Sketchbook of Tibetan Thangka Painting” project was displayed at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. It was one of the first multimedia applications of any kind and a pioneering example of a computer-based cultural learning tool. In 1993, Ranjit was part of the PARC team that invented Hyperpaper, using paper as an interface to multimedia imagery. In 1998, he led the PARC collaboration with the Indira Gandhi Center for the Arts in New Delhi to develop the “Gita-Govinda Multimedia Experience”, a pioneering demonstration of a complex physical-virtual multimedia document. His most recent work, “The Crossing Project”, (www.crossingproject.net/) focuses on developing futuristic mobile, multimedia and wearable technology for an in-depth presentation of India's intellectual and spiritual tradition. Ranjit heads The Sacred World Foundation (www.sacredworld.com), an interaction design research laboratory in New Delhi with an interdisciplinary team of researchers, scientists, designers, artists and scholars. Ranjit is also director of the Gandhi Multimedia Museum in New Delhi, a founding member of the explorers club of the Ivrea Interaction Design Institute, Italy, a consultant to HP Labs Palo Alto and India, an adjunct professor at IIT Kanpur, and a principal designer at National Institute of Design, Ahemdabad.

Michael Punt
Michael Punt is Editor-in-Chief of Leonardo Reviews, a member of the Leonardo/ISATS Advisory Board, and the MIT/Leonardo Book Series Committee. He gained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam and is now a reader at the University of Wales, Newport. He who leads the Metatechnology Research Center in the School of Art Media and Design, as well as vLEC (Virtual Laboratory for Envisioning Connectivity), a consortium of laboratories under the intellectual management of artists, and the Wireless Obscura Laboratory. In the last decade, he has made 15 films, and published over 50 articles on cinema and digital media in The Velvet Light Trap, Leonardo, Design Issues, and Convergence, among other publications. Between 1996 and 2000, he wrote a monthly column on cinema, art and the Internet for Skrien, a Dutch journal of film and television criticism. His recent publications include Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary, a book-length study on early cinema, The Post-Digital Membrane: imagination, technology and desire (www.postdigital.org) in collaboration with Robert Pepperell, and “More Sign than Star: Diana, Death and the Internet”, an essay published in Stars in Our Eyes - the Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era. Information about his ongoing project, the transdisciplinary wunderkammer, can be found at www.extraordinaryconnections.org . A full list of Michael’s publications and exhibitions is available at www.people.i-dat.org.



ARTISTS – section incomplete
Diana Burgoyne
Diana Burgoyne is a Vancouver-based artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. She completed her MFA at UCLA in 1985, and is currently working on her PhD in Interactive Arts at Simon Fraser University. She teaches at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

Susan Kozel
Susan Kozel is a dancer, writer and lecturer. In 1998, she co-founded Mesh Performance Partnerships, a cross-disciplinary group of artists working with digital technologies in diverse art contexts. Her work occurs at the interface between bodies and computers, resulting in live performance, installation, and computer-mediated pedagogy.

Thecla Schiphorst
Thecla Schiphorst is a Vancouver-based computer media artist whose interactive artwork has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, Canada and the USA. Thecla’s formal education in computing science and dance is revealed in her art through the integration of models of scientific representation with the physical and technical body. Her interactive media work focuses on interface design expressed within methodologies, processes and practices of disciplines that incorporate body practice. She designed, directed and produced the multi-media interactive Project ”immerce”, which won First Place festival awards at the International Digital Media Awards Festival (Canada), Graphex (Canada), and the ARC (Los Angeles).