Anna Everett is Assoc. Professor of Film Studies Dept. at UCSB, where she works in the fields of film and media history/theory, African-American film and culture, and Internet and digital media analysis. She is the author of Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Duke Univ. Press, 2001) and is currently at work on books titled Digital Diasporas: A Race for Cyberspace and Inside the Dark Museum: An Anthology of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1959. Recent articles include: "Lester Walton's Ecriture Noir: Transcoding Cinematic Excess" (Cinema Journal, 2000), "'I Want the Same Things Other People Enjoy’: The Black Press and the Classic Hollywood Studio System" (Spectator, 1997), and "The Other Pleasures: The Narrative Function of Race in the Cinema" (Film Criticism,1995-96). She is founder and managing editor of the Internet journal, Screening Noir Online; and she is currently organizing the conference titled "Race in Digital Space 2.0."

Everett is the recent winner of the prestigious UCSB Plous Award, the top recognition for younger faculty at UCSB. (See her online c.v.)

Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson is a television writer/producer who is best known for her work on the Buffy and the Vampire Slayer series. (Her Buffy episodes include "Band Candy," "Earshot," "Superstar," "A New Man," and "Rm w/a Vu." ) Her other credits include Star Trek: DS9, Ellen, Angel, and Buffy: The Animated Series. Previously, she was a graduate student in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. She initially entered the world of TV writing by interesting producers of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series in a script idea.

Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies at UC Santa Barbara who works in the fields of television history, global media, video art and activism, cultural studies, law and media culture, and feminist media theory. A special focus in her research is the cultural meaning of satellite, imaging, and GPS (Global Positioning System) technologies.

Parks recently completed a book titled Cultures in Orbit: Satellite Technologies and Visual Media (forthcoming Duke University Press). She is also co-editing a collection of essays called Planet TV: A Global Television Studies Reader, and she has published several articles in book collections and journals. She is a former editor of The Velvet Light Trap; she serves on the CULTSTUD-L advisory board; and she has produced programs for Paper Tiger TV, a video activism collective.

Recent courses that Parks has taught include, "Television History," "Video Art and Activism," "Global Media," "Women and Film", "Law and Media Culture," and "iWrite.edu : Writing for the New Media."

(See her home page)

Constance Penley

Constance Penley is Professor of Film Studies at UCSB; Director of the Center for Film, Television, and New Media; co-editor of Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, and a member of the GALA Committee. She has written and lectured widely on feminist media and cultural studies and on science and technology studies. Her most recent work includes NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (Verso, 1997) and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science, and Gender (ed. with Treichler and Cartwright; New York Univ. Press, 1998). She is co-librettist of Biospheria: An Environmental Opera, which premiered at UC San Diego in March 2001. (See her c.v.)

Respondent: Victoria Vesna

Victoria Vesna is a digital and network artist, Professor, and Chair of the Department of Design/Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. Previously, she taught in the Art Studio Department at UCSB.

Vesna’s work can be defined as experimental research that creatively connects networked environments to physical public spaces. She explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and shift perceptions of identity in relation to scientific innovation. She completed her Ph.D. at the Center for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CaiiA), University of Wales. Her thesis was entitled Networked Public Spaces: An Investigation into Virtual Embodiment.

Currently she is developing a large collaborative project titled"notime". "Building a Community of People with No Time" is a series of projects taking place on the net and in physical public spaces. It is designed to raise questions about perceptions of time and identity as we overextend our personal networks through communication technologies. There are three manifestations of notime, all interconnected and networked: a net project, a physical installation, and a performance involving cell phones. notime is part of the traveling exhibit, telematic connections: the virtual embrace. Other recent works by Vesna include Bodies INCorporated, a large networked collaborative project installed as a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute and the ArtHouse in Dublin; and Datamining Bodies, exhibited at an old mine in Dortmund, Germany.

Vesna has initiated and produced a number of projects that address issues of art, science, and technology—e.g., the special issue of Artificial Intelligence & Society titled "Database Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and Category in Art"; a CD-ROM, Life in the Universe with Steven Hawking (a UCSB/MetaTools co-production), and a book/CD-ROM for Terminals (co-edited and curated with Connie Samaras, UC Irvine) that deals with the cultural production of death. Forthcoming is a book she is co-editing with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy titled Context Providers.

Vesna's work has received notice in such prominent publications as Art in America, Artweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as Der Spiegel (Germany), the Irish Times (Ireland), Tema Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil). She has received numerous grants and sponsorships from various industries and educational foundations, including Alias/Wavefront, MetaCreations, GTE Outreach, the UC Santa Barbara Office of Research, the Getty Senior Research grant, Intercampus Arts, and the Ahmanson Foundation. Recent commissions are from the Walker Arts New Media Initiatives. (See Vesna's homepage for further information.)

Although Mr. Venturi derives his major reputation from his completed buildings, he is also respected as a theorist and artist who communicates his architectural ideas, formal and verbal, with grace and wit via his extensive writing, teaching and lecturing. His book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, is a recognized milestone in architectural theory. First published in 1966, it has since been translated and published in 18 languages. Other publications include Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture, A View from the Drafting Room (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) and his famous Learning from Las Vegas, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1972; revised edition 1977).

George Legrady

George Legrady is Professor of Interactive Media with a joint appointment in the UC Santa Barbara Art Department and Media Arts & Technology Program. He has previously held fulltime appointments at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, San Francisco State University, University of Southern California, and the University of Western Ontario. His current research is at once interdisciplinary, theoretical, and practical. In both his interactive digital art installations and his teaching, he is exploring the use of visualization technologies to interface with dynamically organized data (e.g., "self-organizing maps" of datasets).

Recent interactive installation exhibitions have taken place at the Centre Pompidou, Paris [Pockets full of Memories], 2001; the new Richard Meier designed Siemens World Headquarters in Munich, 1999/2000; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Sept-Nov 98; the Kunst und AustellungHalle der Bundes Republik in Bonn, [Tracing], 97-98; the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 97-98; the Palais des beaux-arts, Brussels, fall 97. His project "Slippery Traces" was presented in the Siemens¹ curated "Deep Storage" exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Aug 97; the Kunstforum, Berlin, Fall 1997; the kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, Spring 98; Projects Studios One, New York, summer 98, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Fall 98. Awards include a National Endowment of the Arts Visual Fellowship, a Canada Council Computer Integrated Media Award in 1997 and 1994, the "New Voices, New Visions" prize from Voyager Co, and Honorable Mentions at Ars Electronica, Austria in 1994 and 1989. CD-ROM publications include the National Gallery of Canada catalog "George Legrady: From Analogue to Digital", (1998); "Slippery Traces", in "Artintact 3", ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (1996); and "An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, HyperReal Media Production (1994).

His newest project is "Sensing Speaking Space" at the San Francisco MOMA (images | description)

(See his homepage for more information and links to his projects)

Cue P. Doll

Cue P. Doll is an open source alternativeware programmer. Her parodyware project "CueJack," distributed throught RTMark, made the in-home marketing barcode scanner "CueCat" more user-friendly by enabling consumers to learn about corporate abuses instead of viewing ads. More recently, she has been part of a software collective developing "Reamweaver," automatic web-parody software released by The Yes Men. Reamweaver enables the public to repair lies in corporate websites by substituting key words and phrases of their choice to create real-time "funhouse-mirror" sites. Cue P. is currently doing R&D on the user-friendly utilities of the future. Her soft/art has appeared in Kunstraum "Female Takeover" at Ars Electronica 2001, New Museum's Open_Source_Art_Hack, Slashdot, Wired, Linux Gazette, The Net Economy, Viridian Notes and other places.

Margaret Morgan

Margaret Morgan is an artist living in Los Angeles whose work draws upon feminism, structuralism, and theories of postmodernism to address issues concerning modernity, hygiene, and plumbing. Her work takes the form of installations made of plumbing systems; drawings in urine and builder's chalk; and photography. Her art uses plumbing as a motif to address histories of twentieth century art and life. Her thesis: in America's twentieth century, hygiene was god and the toilet its ambiguous icon. Shiny-bright and promising unparalleled cleanliness, the porcelain fixture was fetishized for its gleaming surface. It was also vilified for its inevitable failure to live up to that image. Worshipped and reviled, the bathroom has been a cipher for the many discomforts of modernity. As a figure equally prevalent in popular movies and the annals of art history, in television and in quotidian exchanges over the household chores, the toilet in the twentieth century has been a catch-all for symbolic—as much as bodily—effluvia. Her practice includes drawing, photography, video, installation and writing. Recent writings have appeared in the Journal of Post Colonial Studies, Women and Dada (MIT Press), and Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press). Forthcoming exhibitions of her "shit drawings" will be held at Susanne Vielmetter L.A. Projects and Galerie Patrik Schedler, Zurich. (For more info, see her home page).

Constance Penley

(See above)

Sandy Rodriguez

Sandy Rodriguez is an emerging Chicana artist raised en la frontera: San Diego, Tijuana, and Los Angeles. She currently resides in Los Angeles. Her installations, paintings, and performance pieces are strongly influenced by issues of gender, culture, political activism, juvenile justice and super heroes. Exhibited nationally and internationally, Rodriguez has recently been awarded the Artist in Communities grant from Side Street Projects in Los Angeles and the California Arts Council.

Graham Budgett

Graham Budgett is currently a Lecturer in Digital Media for the Art Department at UC Santa Barbara and a degree candidate in the UC Santa Barbara Media Arts & Technology Program. He is also Design Consultant to the Digital World Research Centre (DWRC) University of Surrey, England. Previously he studied at Trent Polytechnic University; Nottingham University; Saint Martin's School of Art, Central London; and Stanford University (receiving the Master of Fine Art Degree in 1982). He was Lecturer in Sculpture at the UC Santa Barbara from 1982-85 and Resident Artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin from 1986-87. Budgett has also taught at the University of Westminster, London (formerly the Polytechnic of Central London) and Middlesex University, London.

For GALAWeb, he has served as Video Editor and Faculty Advisor.

(See his home page for more info and links to his many online projects)

Laura Funkhouser

Laura Funkhouser has a B.A. in Art History from UC Santa Barbara and ten years of professional corporate and nonprofit marketing experience. Prior to entering the corporate marketing field, Ms. Funkhouser marketed visual and performing art organizations, including the Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Lobero Stage Company, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and was an art critic for the Seattle Weekly and L.A.-based Visions Art Quarterly. She currently sits on the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission.