Arse Elektronika San Francisco 2013
| Speakers |
aestetix
After getting suspended (twice) from Google Plus, aestetix joined forces with other nym survivors to create NymRights, a group focused on exploring facets of naming dynamics and teaching others.Nathan James Bather
Nathan James Bather works as a Team Assistant at BBC Worldwide in London. He is actively working with Film and Video, incl. Super 8, script writing, narrative crafting, photography, drawings and collages. He is co-founder of the Death Ray Film Club London and a bone collector. Interested in pop culture, experimental music and art, social media and its impact and manipulation of society (Adam Curtis).Christie Dudley
Christie started her career with a BSEE with an emphasis in digital communications from the University of Kansas. A 15 year enterprise network engineer career, largely in finance and manufacturing followed. Starting with a study in anthropology she decided to change fields, eventually pursuing an old interest in communications security and privacy and a brief internship in hardware security. Seeking to combine her interests in technology and society she began pursuing the field from a new perspective, enrolling as JD candidate at Santa Clara Law. She now consults on privacy issues related to communications technology while completing her law degree. She speaks around the world on privacy issues related to new technologies. She has also cofounded Fork the Law, an effort to bridge the gap between technologists and legislation.Rich Gibson
Rich Gibson works on the Gigapan and Explorable Microscopy Projects for Carnegie Melon University and NASA's Intelligent Robotics Group, and independently creating high resolution portraits of people and developing new ways to archive physical spaces with explorable images. He is a bricoleur hacker, artist, programmer, author, and builder. He helped create the Neogeography movement, coauthoring Mapping Hacks and Google Maps Hacks. The process of working with and exploring how we interact and explore space lead him to the more generalized world of providing both context, and detail with explorable images. For the past four years he has been obsessed with creating new ways to capture and use high resolution images of everything, including the Chaos Communications Camp in 2007, Volcanos in Arizona for NASA, the incredibly tidy offices of Monochrom in Vienna, details of cell metosis in mouse testis with sub-micron resolution, and portraits of people with the details of landscapes.Catharina Cronenberger Golebiowska
Catharina Cronenberger Golebiowska is a visual artist, who combines objects such as machine fragments, spectral lenses or highly reflective materials with analogue videos, following theories in astrophysics and physical phenomena. Her work is an overlapping of multiple layers and is shifting between the known and the great unknown. Since 2007 she participated in about 50 international exhibitions, presented texts and works in several publications, is actively organising symposiums and giving talks, founder of the artist platform The Chess Club, hosting the Death Ray Film Club, working as producer, graphic designer and acting as an ambassador for culture and art for the German National Academic Foundation in London.Johannes Grenzfurthner
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator and director. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally-acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the "Arse Elektronika" sex tech festival in San Francisco, host of "Roboexotica" (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and is working on two feature films: "Sierra Zulu" and "Over Lunch". He gave talks at SXSWi, O'Reilly ETech, FooCamp, Maker Faire, HOPE, Chaos Communication Congress, Google (Tech Talks), ROFLCon, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Influencers, Mozilla Drumbeat Barcelona or the Neoteny Camp Singapore. He and his projects have been featured in The New York Times, Liberation, Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Playboy, Reuters, Slashdot, Boing Boing, New Scientist, The Edge, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, ZDF, Gizmodo, io9, Wired, Sddeutsche Zeitung, CNet and the Toronto Star. Recurring topics in Johannes' artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, subversion, science fiction and the debate about copyright und intellectual property.Dr. X.Treme
Dr. X.Treme quit building quantum computer systems for the US spy agencies in 2012 to build sex machines full time. He is the founder/CEO/inventor of X. Treme Orgasmatronics, and the X-1 Orgasmatron (which won a Golden Kleene at Arse Elektronika 2012), a new type of sex machine based on hacking the applied physics of vibrators.Rex Johnson
Rex Johnson is a polymath adventurer interested in discovering new means of exploring and sharing our world. A fascination with science, nature, and the unknown lead him to his current work, designing and implementing computer-vision based animal behavioral research and documentaries. As a Digital Media PhD student, he also develops techniques and tools for expressing ideas in engaging and powerful new ways. His trans-disciplinary, multimedia works have been featured in outlets such as PBS, NPR, Cartoon Network, Make Magazine, Discovery Channel, and Wired. His current research explores how digital media can be used to explore animal behaviors situated in their natural context. He works with diverse groups of scientists designing open-ended tools as well as multi-modal performances for exploring and communicating animal behavior.Kyle Machulis (Nonpolynominal Labs)
Nonpolynomial Labs is the quasi-official kinda sorta company behind the projects of Kyle Machulis, better known as qDot. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Computer Science, Kyle currently spends his days as a mild-mannered engineer, and his nights sitting in front of his computer with the firm belief that someone on the internet cares about what he does.Nonpolynomial Labs houses Kyle's personal projects in immersive environment and alternative input research. Going by his favorite mantra, "As free as possible", he works to create immersion in video games and virtual worlds through the absolute cheapest, easiest means possible. Not only does he not have a research budget, but he also enjoys proving the fact that simple user interface additions to a very complex computer-generated world can create new kinds of emergent play and interaction.
Kyle is known as a tinkerer/hacker/pioneer/visionary in the realm of sex technology (or at least, a ton of bloggers seem to think so). Through his Slashdong webpage, he uses the topic of teledildonics (remotely actuated sexual experience) to teach the basic concepts of electrical and mechanical engineering. He also tracks the convergence of sex and technological advances in toys and interaction. He was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at Prixxx Arse Elektronika.
Kyle runs the OpenYou Project, reverse engineering and documenting protocols and hardware for consumer health tracking. His interest stems from the idea of taking biometrics beyond health and sports tracking, and integrating it into the quality of his every day activities, be them physically active (like rock climbing) or sedentary (like programming).
Maggie Mayhem
Maggie Mayhem is a performer, writer, outlaw from Santa Cruz, CA. She has been called a "traitor to feminism" for her work in pornography and outspoken fight for sex worker rights. She has been seen everywhere from Yale University, Kink.Com, SxSW, IndiePornRevolution, BIL, Farmhouse Conf, Cum and Glitter, and more! She blogs at MissMaggieMayhem.Com, shoots independent queer pornography with her husband Ned Mayhem at MeetTheMayhems.Com, and develops sex technology at PSIgasm.Net.Ned Mayhem
Ned Mayhem is a freelance scientist and queer sex worker. Ned is currently finishing his PhD in quantum nanoelectronics. When he is not sciencing madly in the lab, teaching physics to interested adults, or having sex for money, Ned writes software to give agency to sexual harassment victims, sex workers, and small independent adult businesses. In the future, Ned is interested in studying ways to use new big data techniques for modelling radical socioeconomic systems based on highly nonlinear causal networks.Lex Pelger
Lex Pelger is a Brooklyn based scientist and writer covering drugs & sex. His current project is a graphic novel about cannabis called "People of the Cannabinoids" - an ethnographic look at Mary Jane using interviews with scientists, growers, activists, green midwives, crustpunk trimmers, cops against Prohibition, directors of cannabis venture funds & marijuana reverends. He's an active member of NYC's Open Love Tribe and an ally at the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP). Some of Lex's articles on pro-dommes, sound-directed MDMA therapy, the truth about bath salts, erotic suturing and a chart of the best legal analogs of your favorite drugs may be found at his site: lexpelger.com.Christophe Pettus
Christophe Pettus started Blowfish in 1994. He's made dirty videos, published sexy comics, and generally had the time of his life since then.Kristen Stubbs
Dr. Kristen Stubbs is a queer/pansexual roboticist who's more interested in people than in technology. Kristen earned her Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Kristen recently launched her first startup, Passionate Produce (passionateproduce.com), a crowdfunding platform which is sex/kink-positive, positive towards people who identify as part of a gender/relationship/sexuality minority, size-positive, and positive towards people with disabilities. Kristen is currently working to build a sex toy or piece of BDSM equipment using every workshop at Artisan's Asylum in Somerville, her local makerspace. Her insertable, muscle-controlled, light-up dildo prototype "The Hammer" was awarded a Golden Kleene at Arse Elektronika 2012 and has been named the #1 Geekiest Sex Toy by Cracked.com (http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-geekiest-sex-toys/). Kristen blogs about technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure, including her own experiences and creations, at toymakerproject.com . She also co-organizes teasecraft-boston, a local meetup group for sex/kink-positive makers (teasecraft.com).Adam Rothstein
Adam Rothstein is an insurgent archivist and researcher, who writes about media, technology and politics. He has worked with and studied a number of projects that design resilient networking and organization strategies, including the Zwischenzug Factory, the Occupy movement, and elements of the Cascadia movement. Along with Megan Rosalynn Rothstein, he studies the theory of networked narrative politics. He has contributed to The Atlantic Tech, Rhizome.org, The New Inquiry, The State, and Longshot Mag. He is currently in Portland, Oregon, and posts as @interdome on Twitter.Megan Rosalynn Rothstein
Megan Rosalynn Rothstein recently received an M.A. from the University of Oregon in Folklore. She researches a discourse of vernacular belief in online forums, specifically focusing on Free Energy. She also does research on multi-modal communication in the workplace. She focuses this research on the Bureau of Emergency Communication (AKA 911) in Portland, OR. where she is employed as a senior dispatcher. In addition to this work, she is active with the Zwischenzug Factory and produces installation art pieces with Adam Rothstein. She has made ethnographic contributions to Chinavine.org, a website devoted to the folk culture of China. Her writing has appeared in Willamette Valley Voices on two occasions and she has book reviews in Western Folklore and Cultural Analysis.