sponge, San Francisco, California

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Chris Salter received his Ph.D. in theater, computer music and psychoacoustics at Stanford University. His theoretical work concerned the limits of contemporary performance, based on complexity theory, economics and the history of recent theater. He has worked as an affiliate at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford and at the Steim lab in Amsterdam. Chris has also worked at the Salzburg Festival, the Royal Opera House-Covent Garden and the VolksbŸhne-Berlin as an assistant to Peter Sellars, Peter Stein and Frank Castorf. Since 1995, he has worked with William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet to develop interactive performance systems. He also recently played at the The Kitchen in New York as part of Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger's Cloud Chamber installation/band. for the past two years, he has been an organizer of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival.

As co-founder of sponge, Chris' current work includes serving as music designer and project coordinator for the TGarden project, and as a researcher / designer of the Sauna urban architecture experiment.

Principal, Water-cooler Logic

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Helga Wild was educated in the continental tradition of experimental psychology with heavy emphasis on quantitative methods, experimental design, statistics, and test theory. After her Ph.D. in Psychology/ Physiology at K. Franzens-University, Austria, Helga has been invited as research fellow to the Institute for Systems Theory, J. Kepler-University, Austria; Stanford University and Xerox PARC.

At the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) she acquired in addition qualitative, i.e. ethnographic, techniques. She has since combined qualitative and quantitative techniques in the service of attaining a better grasp of the multiple layers of social and organizational reality.

Over the course of eight years Helga Wild managed a large number of increasingly complex projects, carried out ethnographic research and social design, and developed tools to help embed new practices in the existing social fabric. She extended the IRL approach by using her skills in conceptual design to engage the client in an interactive design process whereby the results from the ethnographic research were re-embedded in the organization as new tools and/ or new practices, an approach which the institute adopted in 1998 under the term "Interactive Research and Design."

In 2000 Helga Wild joined WestEd's staff as a Research Associate within the Action Learning Group. Her work takes the form of:

• Ethnographic research: identifying unique work practices and knowledge through observation, interviews, video analysis, protocol analysis
• Facilitation and Participatory Design: helping stakeholders and experts co-construct solutions to address existing problems and leverage inherent potential
• Qualitative and/ or Quantitative Evaluation
• Design and Development of visualizations, tools, and processes to help make visible and embed new practices
• Assisting an organization or community in developing the internal competency to support their objectives and the way they work.

Thoughtshop/Concordia
Fine Arts Montreal, Canada

Jason E. Lewis is a digital media artist and technologist, and Assistant Professor in the Digital Image/Sound & the Fine Arts Department at Concordia University in Montreal Canada. Jason studied philosophy and computer science at Stanford University, and obtained an M.Phil. at the Royal College of Art, London. For the last few years he's focused on experimenting with dynamic and interactive text, conducting a long-range research project called ActiveText, which takes a fundamentally different approach to digital text and typography that has resulted in a number of pieces which challenge received notions about how words exist on-screen. He founded and led the Arts Alliance Laboratory, an art + technology studio in San Francisco. His work has been featured at Ars Electronica and SIGGRAPH and funded by the English Arts Council.

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
McGill University

Jeremy Cooperstock (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1996) is an associate professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a member of the Centre for Intelligent Machines, and a founding member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology at McGill University. He directs the Shared Reality Lab and leads the technical development of the Ultra-Videoconferencing system, for which he was recognized by an award for Most Innovative Use of New Technology from ACM/IEEE Supercomputing and a Distinction Award from the Audio Engineering Society. Cooperstock's past accomplishments include the Intelligent Classroom, the world's first Internet streaming demonstrations of Dolby Digital 5.1, uncompressed 12-channel 96kHz/24bit, multichannel DSD audio, and three simultaenous streams of uncompressed high-definition video. Cooperstock is a member of the ACM and chairs the AES Technical Committee on Network Audio Systems.

Cooperstock's research interests focus on computer mediation to facilitate high-fidelity human communication and the underlying technologies that support this goal. His Ph.D. thesis investigated the use of computer control over a state of the art videoconference environment, resulting in a reactive room that responds to the activity of users. Following his doctoral studies, Cooperstock spent a year as a visiting researcher at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan, where he developed a prototype VCR interface that responds to speech and pointing commands, so natural that "even your mother can use it." He has also conducted research with IBM at the Haifa Research Center, Israel, and the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Founder of the XS lab
Design and Computation Art
Concordia University

Joanna Berzowska was born in Poland and has lived in Algeria, Gabon, Canada, Norway, Australia and the USA. She obtained undergraduate degrees in Pure Mathematics and in Fine Arts, and a Masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on what she calls "Computational Expressionism". She has worked as a researcher with the Institute for Interactive Media at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and with the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She co-founded International Fashion Machines, where she serves as Chief Creative Officer. She is currently on the faculty in the Design Art and Digital Image and Sound Department at Concordia University. Her work has been shown at SIGGRAPH, the Art Directors Club in NYC, the Australian Museum in Sydney, the NTT ICC in Tokyo, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Montreal, Boston, Mexico City and Cannes.

University of California Irvine

Kavita Philip is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She works in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her current research areas are environmental history; postcolonial and feminist science studies; globalization;
new media technologies.

Her articles in environmental history, globalization, and new media studies have appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, NMediaC, and Environment and History. She has recently published a monograph on the history of colonial science in south India: Civilizing Natures, Rutgers University Press. She is
working on a new manuscript, co-authored with Terry Harpold, entitled Going Native: Cyberculture and the Millennial Fantasies of
Globalization (forthcoming, Routledge).

In her capacity as Affiliate Scholar, Prof. Philip is interested in the creation of metaphors for thinking in technoscientific contexts. Historians of science have long known that metaphors are indispensable parts of investigation and explanation, and that the richness and squishiness of metaphors have long challenged simple correspondence theories of truth. Her research constructs tools, ideas, and contexts which we can use to investigate, modify, and sharpen key concepts in the history of science.

sponge, San Francisco, California

Laura Farabo has created experimental performance and theater for 30 years in Mexico, Japan, Switzerland, Germany and the United States. As co-artistic director of beggars and of snake performance companies, Laura pioneered constructions of site-specific performance and video performance. Laura founded the non-profit arts organization nightfire in 1981, which produced in the subsequent 15 years works such as "Obedience School" (LA to NYC) and "Bodily Concessions" (San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle).

Laura has won awards and grants from numerous foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, The Hewlett Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, and the California Arts Council.

Currently, as a co-founder of sponge, Laura is conducting experiments in the form of responsive spaces -- TGarden -- and public urban installations -- Sauna.

FoAM
Brussels, Belgium

Maja Kuzmanovic was trained in fine arts in Venice, and earned an M.A. in Interactive Multimedia at the Faculty of Art, Media and Technology in the Netherlands, where she specialized in interactive film and storytelling, combining old and new arts of interactive film, audio-visual performance, fashion and print.

As Artist in Residence at CWI (Center for Mathematics and Computer Science) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and GMD (National Center for Information Technology) in Sankt Augustin, Germany, she worked on projects concerning innovations in the Internet as well as in VR technologies. She researched novel ways of storytelling in immersive virtual reality using CAVE.

Maja's projects have been exhibited at electronic arts and culture conferences, such as Invencao in Sao Paulo, Brazil; SEAFair in Skopje, Macedonia; DAC in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) and Mediaterra in Athens, Greece, and Siggraph.

She has taught wearable computing and virtual architecture at the Utrecht School of the Arts and at other design schools.

In 2000, she founded FoAM in Belgium, an association of artists, technologists and researchers, exploring novel modes and resources for cultural expression. One of FoAM's projects has been the TGarden responsive space built in collaboration with sponge.

Department of Theory
Schulich School of Music
McGill University 

Marcelo M. Wanderley was born in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1965. He holds a B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil, an M.Eng. degree in integrated analog circuit design from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil, and a Ph.D. degree from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie—Paris VI, Paris, France, on acoustics, signal processing, and computer science applied to music. From 1996 to 2001, Dr. Wanderley was with the Analysis/Synthesis Team at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique Musique (IRCAM), Paris, France, where he studied ways of designing new musical instruments based on computer-generated sound. Specifically, he focused on performer-instrument interaction and its applications to gestural control of sound synthesis. He is currently Assistant Professor and Music Technology Area Chair, Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, QB, Canada. He has published several book chapters and papers and is the coeditor, with Prof. M. Battier, of the electronic publication Trends in Gestural Control of Music. He was also the Guest Editor of the Special Issue of Organized Sound on mapping strategies for real-time computer music. His main research interests include human–computer interaction, input device design and evaluation, gestural control of sound synthesis, and musical acoustics. Dr. Wanderley was the Chair of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME03) that was held at McGill University in May 2003.

  Department of Theatre
Concordia University

Mark Sussman is a theatre artist and scholar working on the animation of public space and the integration of old and new technologies in live performance. Since 1985, he has worked in New York and on tour with Mabou Mines, Antenna Theater, Janie Geiser, Circus Amok, Ninth Street Theater, Paul Zaloom, and the Bread & Puppet Theater. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, where he received the Michael Kirby Memorial Award for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation. He joined the Concordia Theatre faculty as Assistant Professor in January, 2005, after holding full-time and part-time teaching positions at Barnard College/Columbia University, NYU, CalArts, Wesleyan, and the Parsons School of Design/New School University.

He is a founder and Co-Artistic Director of GREAT SMALL WORKS, an OBIE Award-winning theater collective based in New York City. Since 1995, Great Small Works has been producing new theater works on a variety of scales, from miniature toy theater pieces using two-dimensional cutouts to giant parades and community processions and circuses. The company specializes in the reinvention of ancient, popular, and avant-garde performance techniques in contemporary contexts, creating variety evenings and festivals in addition to discrete performance works.

His writing has appeared in The Drama Review, (ai) performance for the planet, Connect, Stagebill, Cabinet, Radical Street Performance (Routledge, 1999), and Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT, 2001). He is currently preparing an anthology (with Susan Simpson) on Object Performance, and his Ph.D. thesis, in revision for publication, is on 18th and 19th Century stagings of the new technology of electricity.

Chair of the Department of Contemporary Dance
Concordia University

- Graduate of Hartford Conservatory
- former Assistant Artistic Director of le Groupe de la Place Royale
- founder and choreographer of Montanaro Dance
- has choreographed for a number of companies such as Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, Danse Partout, the National Film Board of Canada, l'Opéra de Montréal
- collaborated on video sensing systems to create interactive works at the "Institute for Studies in the Arts", Arizona State University
- has travelled world-wide as a consultant for an interactive image museum project based in Portugal.
- Choreographer for Varekai, a Cirque du Soleil production.

Michael has a background that has crossed the boundaries of many different art forms. Accomplished as a composer, musician, actor and trans-disciplinary artist, he is best known for his work in the field of dance.

Laboratory for Monetary
Research, Swiss Centre for Banking Studies, Lugano.
Stanford University

Niklas Damiris received his doctorate in theoretical biology and the foundations of physics at Wesleyan and Binghamton Universities. He didpost-doctoral work at Stanford in neurophysiology, and was a member ofXerox PARC's Embedded Computation Area.  While working at Apple Research Laboratories, Dr. Damiris is co-founded Pliant Research, a projectdedicated to the design of socio-technical systems that flexibly androbustly accommodate changing social needs.  Dr. Damiris has been a research fellow at the Institute for Politics, Philosophy and Management,Copenhagen Business.

Dr. Damiris is is currently collaborating on a monograph with Helga Wild, entitled The Wealth of Organizations, where social and ethical reasons areoffered in addition to economic arguments for the existence and structureof corporations. He is also collaborating with Sha Xin Wei on a second monograph, entitled Liquid Space, a field-theoretic approach tocomputational materials and the technology of writing.

Currently Dr. Damiris is consutling researcher at IBM Almaden Research
Center working on services and alternative economies.

University of California Irvine

Satinder Gill received her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, where she developed a model of knowledge transfer and acquisition based on an analysis of the tacit, experiential, and explicit dimensions of knowing.

She conducted post-doctoral research at NTT's information science and communication science research laboratories, and at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, Kyoto), where she formed the theory of Body Moves and the Engagement Space.
At Stanford University's CSLI (Centre for the Study of Language and Information), she expanded her conception of the relation between the body, cognition, speech, and the interface, in communication. During this time, she formed the CSLI Gestures and Dialogue Seminar. She is the Co-Editor of a book being produced from the Seminar that explores how an understanding of the complexity of human cognition can move beyond dualist theories of human knowing.

During her time at Stanford, she co-founded and served as Research Coordinator of the Real-Time Venture Design Lab. Here she developed an interactive framework and research agenda for the use of interactive media in the formation of communities of practice and knowledge design, building on her collaborations with the Stanford iSpaces project.

Inspired by the responsive media environment of the TGarden, Satinder Gill is extending her Body Moves approach to the pragmatics of meaning where salient body rhythms span more than one body.

Interactive
Telecommunication Program
New York University

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Tirtza Even has been a practicing video artist and documentary maker for the past ten years. Her work has appeared in festivals, galleries and museums in the United States, Israel, Italy, England, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the Johannesburg Biennial.

As faculty in the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University and at Columbia University, she has been teaching Video and Multimedia Production and Post-Production, Experimental and Documentary Film Theory, Video Art and Media Theory and Production and Physical Computing. She has published articles about video art history and theory in Israel and the United States.

A Fulbright scholar, she completed Masters Degrees in Cinema Studies (with a focus on Documentary and Ethnographic Film Production and Theory) and in the Interactive Telecommunication Program, both at New York University.