[-empyre-] October´s Guests

[marcus bastos <bastos.marcus@gmail.com>]

Dear - empyreans -,

I am posting a brief introduction to this month´s guests, so that
everyone can get to know a little better about each of them:


+ Bill Seaman (http://www.billseaman.com )
Seaman´s work explores text, image, sound and interface relationships
through technological installation, virtual reality, linear video, and
other computer-based media and/or computer mediated media, 
photography  and studio based audio compositions. He is self-taught as
a composer and musician.  In 1983 he helped to pioneer interactive
video while at MIT. He has been active showing his work
internationally since 1984.

In the 80's his work focused on intricate video pieces exploring
poetic image, sound, text  relationships. In the 90's his work shifted
to interactive video installation and later virtual reality
exploration.  He was the first artist invited to the
Intercommunication Center in Tokyo where he showed a translation
version of the work The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers.

In each case Seaman's works have explored meta-meaning and emergence
as central strategies. Other major works during this period were the
installation "Passage Set/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue",
1995, which showed internationally.

His work "The World Generator/The Engine of Desire" (1995-present)
with programmer Gideon May, functions as a discourse mechanism
exploring an expanded linguistic approach to emergent meaning. This
work was fully articulated in Seaman's Ph.D. Thesis - Recombinant
Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific
Generative Virtual Environment.

In 2003 he premiered the "Hybrid Invention Generator". The work was a
second major collaboration with Gideon May. This work was funded by a
gift from Intel and represented another major push in the exploration
of emergent meaning (1999-2001). Seaman has been active as a writer
exploring notions surrounding Recombinant Poetics and differing
aspects related to meaning production.


+ Brigid Mc Leer (http://www.inplaceofthepage.co.ok)
McLeer work is cross-disciplinary. Rather than being focused on a
particular medium, it is led by a desire to describe aspects of
identity and place that are ambivalent, dynamic and unsettled. Using
photography, writing and processes of assemblage the work manifests
'conditions of inconclusiveness' in installations, photographic works,
mixed-media sculpture, web projects and page-based works.

Moving between the practices of art, poetry, architecture and critical
writing, the challenge of 'place' has become a driving force of the
work. It is central both to the subject matter of a piece but also to
the context in which it might be shown. As such, the work has been
made for galleries and found spaces as well as for poetry and art
journals or, as in the case of this project, for the web.

Among her projects are: 'Habitat', an ongoing photographic, text and
video project presented as a work in progress; 'Freeze Drawn', shown
as part of Writing Instructions/Reading Walls, at The Poetry Society
Café, London curated by Susan Johanknecht and Redell Olsen; and "In
Place of the Page", a cross-disciplinary project exploring the
relationship between our real experiences of place and the ways in
which place is imagined, constructed and proposed through virtual
modes such as writing, architectural drawing and digitial space.

"In Place of the Page" is ongoing in different phases, the first of
which was an email correspondence between the artist (Brigid Mc Leer)
and 10 invited participants, addressing questions of place, writing
and internet space (March - November 2000).
These emails were then 'translated' by the artist into graphic/visual
texts ('textplans'). The textplans are now being reinterpreted by an
architectural designer (Katie Lloyd Thomas) as if they were actual
architectural plans - and through this process we are designing a
building.


+ Friedrich W. Block (http://www.brueckner-kuehner.de/block )
Block is the curator of exhibitions of experimental literature,
covering a range of material that goes from visual to digital poetry.

In 1990, he was curator of "Transfutur", an important exhibition with
visual poets from Brazil and German speaking countries. In 1992, he
organized, with André Vallias, the exhibition p0es1s, with works from
Augusto de Campos, Richard Konstelanetz, Jim Rosenberg and Eduardo
Kac, among others.

Lately, he has been focusing on curating shows of digital poetry, such
as "p0es1s. Digital Poetry", that happened in Berlin, in 2004. The
online version of poesis is at http://www.p0es1s.net/, and works as a
platform to explore the characteristics and possibilities of digital
texts.

He has published about art and media, experimental literature, and the
media-culture of humor. Recently, he has been investigating how the
academic and literature critical discussion on new media poetry and
digital texts swings to and fro, in method and conception between two
poles: one is the 'work immanent' approach of structure description
and classification, and the other the deduction of abstract media
esthetics.


+ Giselle Beiguelman (http://www.desvirtual.com)
Beiguelman is a new media artist and multimedia essayist who teaches
Digital Culture at the Graduation Program in Communication and
Semiotics of PUC-SP (São Paulo, Brazil). Her work includes the
award-winnings "The Book after the Book" (1999) and egoscópio (2002).

She has been developing art projects for mobile phones ("Wop Art",
2001), praised by many media sites and the international press,
including The Guardian (UK) and Neural (Italy), and art involving
public-access, by the web, SMS and MMS, and internet-streaming for
electronic billboards like "Leste o Leste?" and "egoscópio" (2002),
released by The New York Times, Poétrica (2003) and esc for escape
(2004).

Beiguelman's work appears in important anthologies and guides devoted
to digital arts including Yale University Library Research Guide for
Mass Media and has been presented in international venues such as
Net_Condition (ZKM, Germany), el final del eclipse (Fundación
Telefonica, Madrid), Desk Topping - Computer Disasters (Smart Project
Space, Amsterdan) Arte/Cidade and The 25th São Paulo Biennial.



+ Sue Thomas (http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~sthomas/ )
Thomas is the author of several books, most recently 'Hello World:
travels in virtuality' (2004). She has managed numerous online writing
projects and is interested in the impact of digital technologies on
writing and lived experience - see the collaborative project Writing
and the Digital Life. In 1995 she founded the trAce Online Writing
Centre at Nottingham Trent University and was Artistic Director until
joining De Montfort University as Professor of New Media in 2005,
where she is developing research into transliteracy.

She is the editor of WDL, a collaborative transdisciplinary blog about
the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience.
WDL discuss topics related to writing and reading in the context of
'new and old' media, transliteracy, craft, art, process and practice,
social networks, cooperation and collaboration, narrative and memory,
human computer interaction, imagination, nature, mind, body, and
spirit.

Her most recent papers are "Virtuality and Air" and "Voices from
Everywhere". She is currently co-editing, with Dene Grigar, a Special
Issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac — 'Wild Nature and the
Digital Life' — and preparing the essay essay 'Narratives of Digital
Life at the trAce Online Writing Centre', for Computers and
Composition.