Michael Naimark, Media Artist
Naimark has over two decades of experience investigating "place representation" and has worked extensively with field cinematography, interactive systems, and immersive projection. He was instrumental in the founding of several research labs and his art projects exhibit internationally. This term he is teaching a special studio at Art Center called "(Re)Presenting Place." He has worked at MIT, Atari, LucasArts, Apple and Interval Research. was on the original design team for the MIT Media Lab in 1980 and was a founding member of the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), and Lucasfilm Interactive (now LucasArts, 1989). His's art projects are in the permanent collections of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. His 3D interactive installation "Be Now Here," produced by Interval with the cooperation of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, toured in the ZKM's "Future Cinema" exhibition in 2002 and 2003. He is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC Film School. naimark.net

Martin Venezky, Appetite Engineers
Venezky is the director of Appetite Engineers, a design company whose clients include the Sundance Film Festival, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Blue Note records. He has just relocated to Los Angeles from Rhode Island. He not your typical point-and-click designer. While he is adept at operating a mouse, he is just as comfortable cutting and pasting type from old books or collaging found signs or making his own photographs. What results are the unique creations of a unique eye. The new monograph, It Is Beautiful...Then Gone, presents Venzky's commercial design work as well as new graphic work created for the book; details of the wall collage that define his office and his aesthetic; the singular photography,collections, and notebooks that define his personality; and text that explains -- or at least questions -- it all. Venezky's philosophy that life and design are a continuation of each other permeates this elegant book filled with hundreds of idiosyncratic, deeply wrought examples. www.appetiteengineers.com

Jane McGonigal, Avantgame
McGonigal is an active game designer (high-tech, low-tech, and no-tech), currently with 42 Entertainment.  She specializes in massively-collaborative game models and games that are played in everyday public spaces (ex: I Love Bees and the Go Game). She's a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies with a designated emphasis in New Media Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  I'm also a member of UC Berkeley's Alpha Lab in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and a resident game designer for the Berkeley Institute of Design. Research interests include network-enabled gaming; play and performance in everyday spaces; collective intelligence; technologies for massively-scaled collaboration; play as design research; and viral art and marketing. Most importantly: she is the Node Runner World Champion of 2003. www.avantgame.com

Somi Kim, Brand Integration Group, Ogilvy & Mather
Kim is Senior Partner and Creative Director of Ogilvy’s Brand Integration Group (BIG), which consists of designers, writers, artists, architects and strategists who work with companies to transform the way they bring their brands to life. BIG’s clients include Motorola, Cisco, Lions Gate Entertainment, The Coca-Cola Company, Kodak, Hershey and American Express. Kim is a designer and design researcher who works in many visual media, including print, web, user interface, and broadcast and retail packaging. She was a founder and principal of ReVerb Studio, a renowned Los Angeles-based firm which which evolved from an experimental design collective to a hybrid team that provided an integrated approach to the design, messaging, and execution of communications in diverse media. Kim and ReVerb received a Chrysler Design Award. Kim's work has been featured in Radical Graphics, New Typographics 3: Global Vision, and Typography Now Two. www.ogilvy.com

kozyndan, Los Angeles
Physically residing in LA, and mentally in one another's subconscious, kozyndan are husband-and-wife illustrators / artists who work collaboratively on nearly every project they do. They create CD covers ( for Weezer, The Postal Service, Daedelus, etc.) and magazine illustrations (Official Playstation magazine, Mass Appeal, "Giant Robot, and Metro.pop), as well doing work for the likes of Wieden and Kennedy and Idn. They spend much of their time though on their own projects, selling prints of their personal pieces online and in (very) select stores around the country. They just released their first book, Urban Myths - a collection of their work from the past year and a half, published by Giant Robot. Their most recent show was at GR2 and featured originally drawings and paintings, as well as large scale canvas prints. www.kozyndan.com

Anne Pascual & Marcus Hauer, Schoenerwissen/OfCD
Schoenerwissen/Office or Computational Design conducts research and development in computational design. This includes original interdisciplinary research in information technology, human-computer interaction and social sciences. Their projects oscillate between web applications, visual software and communication design - for a broad range of public institutions and private clients. The award-winning nomad design office is led by Anne Pascual and Marcus Hauer and is currently based in California, where both pursue research in the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara. Furthermore they are regular contributors to the design section of De:Bug Magazine in Berlin. www.sw.ofcd.com

Paul Dourish, Department of Informatics UC Irvine
Dourish is an Associate Professor of Interactive and Collaborative Technologies (ICT) at the School of Information and Computer Science. His principal research interests are in Ubiquitous Computing, Human Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and social studies of science and technology. This means that he cares not only about cool technology, but also about how ordinary mortals can use it and the consequences for how they live and work. He is the author of Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. He has worked at Xerox PARC, Apple Research Labs , and Rank Xerox EuroPARC. At UCI he works with and the new interdisciplinary program in Arts, Computation, and Engineering and the UC Game Culture and Technology Lab. www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/

Matthew Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
CLUI is ‘dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the world’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived’. The Center investigates and describes the built landscape that surrounds us, drawing the information for their research from a network of sources including institutions, scientists, geographers and artists. The dissemination of this information takes various forms: exhibitions of photographs and data; lectures; and bus tours to specific locations featured in their research. The Center is an educational, non-profit organization that does not present its research as an artistic project, although they have been included in exhibitions at art institutions such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Seattle Art Museum.