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Career Narrative Afterimage referred to The Digital Dialectic as "the first printed book you read about the virtual world that does not merely describe it, but puts you there." Snap to Grid has been covered everywhere from Italy’s Flash Art to Britain’s New Scientist, and the latter concluded its featured review by saying that artists working with digital technologies "now have their bible, their Stones of Venice, their Ways of Seeing." Mediawork Pamphlets, a series I inaugurated for the MIT Press which pairs major writers with contemporary graphic designers to produce 100 page "mind bombs" in the tradition of McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage, was lauded on its release as a new operating system for the book. The first Mediawork Pamphlet -- Utopian Entrepreneur, by Brenda Laurel and designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp – was released in 2001, the next pamphlet will be Literature for Posthumans, by N. Katherine Hayles and designed by Anne Burdick. I have a Ph.D. from UCLA in Film & Television, an MA in Media
Studies from SUNY Buffalo and a B.A. in history from Columbia University.
My thesis, Film Rouge: Genre, Postmodern Theory, and the American
Cinema of the 1980s, was supervised by Dr. Stephen Mamber, who is
now at the Laboratory for Advanced Computing Initiatives, School
of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. While I was writing my doctoral thesis on film, I
was concentrating on digital media as well. From 1991 to 1992, I
took a position as Applications Coordinator at the Academy Award
winning hardware and software company Lyon Lamb Video Animation
Systems in order to gain professional experience in the field. My
responsibilities included managing software developers, evaluating
3D computer graphics systems, doing demonstrations, and coordinating
development and marketing of Macintosh, Windows, and UNIX based
graphical user interface software systems for animation controllers.
At the same time, I was also working as a consultant for new technologies
with Creative Intelligence Associates, Inc., an architectural and
design consortium based in Tokyo, Japan. In 1992 I was asked to
join the Advisory Committee for the American Film Institute-Apple
Computer Center for Film and Videomakers. The following year, 1993,
I was asked to be the North American Representative for Media Futures:
Policy and Performance International Conference, a major conference
in Queensland, Australia. During this period, I was writing, publishing,
editing, and travelling to conference and trade shows regularly.
I guest edited "The N E Double U" issue of the journal
Framework in 1993, and that same year served as chair for the panel
"Theorizing New Media," at the Society for Cinema Studies
Conference in New Orleans. Since then, I have lectured or been a
featured speaker at Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Royal College of Art,
the University of Stockholm, the Getty Research Center, UC Berkeley,
UCLA, USC, UCSD, and the California Institute of the Arts, among
others. I have published regularly in art/text, Afterimage, Film
Quarterly, Artforum, Artbyte, The Journal of Film and Video, Wired,
and numerous academic collections. I arrived at Art Center College of Design in 1994, right after
the establishment of the school’s graduate program in computer
graphics and was, from what I have been able to determine, the first
person anywhere in academia to hold a position exclusively devoted
to researching and teaching the history and theory of digital media.
That same year I won the school’s great teacher award. Since
then, I have shepherded the program through a merger with the graduate
program in graphic design, and am now a member of the Core Faculty
of the graduate Media Design Program. While at Art Center, I coordinated
a number of allied initiatives, including the founding of Mediawork:
The Southern California New Media Working Group and the Institute
for Technology & Aesthetics (ITA). The ITA is an interdisciplinary
space unique to Southern California for the development of new forms
and theories of computers and culture; its mission is to ground
the discourses of technologies in the constraints of their practice
and to create interdisciplinary collaborations that expand the parameters
of visual intellectual culture. Public programming has included
The Digital Dialectic: A Conference on the Convergence of Technology
& Theory in 1995, "SCRIPTED SPACES: An ITA Conference on
Entertainment Design, Narrative Architecture, and Virtual Environments"
in 1998, co-sponsorship of "Unwriting the Word: A Festival
of Music, Murmurs, & Media," 1999 at Loyola Marymount University,
and sponsorship of Mediawork, a quarterly gathering at Art Center
of specialists from a range of disciplines and institutions discussing
their work and debating the impact of the computer on contemporary
culture, and the Mediawork Pamphlet series. Approach Geert Lovink, the media activist and co-founder of the seminal
listserve <nettime>, did an interview with me recently called
"Enemy of Nostalgia," which will be coming out in his
new collection, Uncanny Networks: Collected Interviews with Media
Theorists and Artists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). In it he
asked me to offer a summation of my work. My answer was as follows:
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