Shannon Mattern is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She’s the author of three books: The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Dirt and Data: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press. Her work is online at wordsinspace.net/.
Jessica Marie Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. As a historian and Black Studies scholar, Johnson researches black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation. As a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent. As a black feminist media maker, Johnson’s praxis is “accountable to the Kitchen Table.” She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Her work is online at jmjohnso.com.
Shlomo Dubnov is a Professor in the Music and Computer Science departments at UC San Diego. His research on statistical modeling of musical style led to the development of the field of machine improvisation and initiated a new growing area of musical information dynamics that uses information theoretical tools for modeling of music cognition and computational creativity. He is the director of the Center for Research in Entertainment and Learning at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute where he leads a lab on experiential and extended reality technologies, and teaches in the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts program. He is a founding member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. His research is online at crel.calit2.net/.
Miriam Posner is an Assistant Professor at UCLA in the Information Studies department and the Digital Humanities program. She studies data… but maybe not in the way you think! She researches and writes about what it is, how it works, and how data is different from the ordinary stuff that populates the world around us. She is writing a book about how data works in global supply chains. The way information moves, and who has access to which data, makes a big difference to the people who make the things we buy. Her work is online at miriamposner.com/.
Zach Kaiser is an artist, teacher, theorist, music producer, and DJ. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture at Michigan State University. In his work, which critically engages with his background as a designer working in the tech industry, he takes up the mantle of the artist-as-experimenter—questioning “the limits of preconstituted fields… along with the accepted criteria of judgment by which they would be held to account”—in order to critique Graphic Design’s participation in the distribution of the sensible—the delimiting of sensory experience that determines how we participate as political subjects. His work is online at mediated.space/.
Molly Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship in China. Her book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, was listed as one of the Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2018, was honored with the Goldsmith Book Award, and has been awarded the Best Book Award in the Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics Section of APSA. Her work is online at margaretroberts.net/.
Danielle Dean is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Her work explores the colonialism of mind and body—the interpellation of thoughts, feelings and social relations by power structures working through news, advertising, political speech, and digital media. She focuses on the processes of construction of race, gender, age and class that are generated through target-marketing practices, commodifying subjectivities. She is interested in subverting such processes, to both understand and shift them toward a non-essentialized space of being, blurring fiction and reality. Her work is online at danielleadean.com/.
Gabi Schaffzin is an artist, educator, and researcher, and currently a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Art Practice Concentration at the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation project combines design history, disability studies, and a history of computing to trace the history of designed pain scales in the United States throughout the 20th century. He is a 2018–19 recipient of the Andrew V. and Florence W. White Dissertation Scholarship from the UC Humanities Research Institute. His work is online at utopia-dystopia.com/.
Clinton Tolley is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the philosophical legacy of 19th and 20th century modern European philosophy (especially German idealism, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, critical theory), as well as 20th century Mexican philosophy. His work addresses questions in philosophical psychology and the philosophy of culture, especially aesthetics and philosophy of technology. More information can be found at his website clintontolley.info/.
Esme Murdock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at San Diego State University. She works in the areas of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics and social and political philosophy with particular attention to environmental justice, philosophies of race and gender, and settler colonial theory. Her research explores the intersections of social/political relations and environmental health, integrity, and agency. Specifically, her work troubles the purported stability of dominant, largely euro-descendent, and settler-colonial philosophies through centering conceptions of land and relating to land found within African American, Afro-Diasporic, and Indigenous eco-philosophies. She has work appearing in Environmental Values and the Journal of Global Ethics. Her work is online at philosophy.sdsu.edu/bios/murdock.htm.
Bradley Voytek is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Data Science at UC San Diego. His research focuses on “the human side of data science.” The promise of neuroscientific advancement, in his view, is the reduction of suffering. He specializes in automated science, aging, attention, working memory, oscillatory network communication, and the interactions between the brain, cognition and society. His research program is focused on combining large scale data-mining and machine-learning techniques with hypothesis-driven experimental research to understand the relationships between neural oscillations, cognition and disease. He is a Faculty Fellow of the Halicioglu Data Science Institute. His work is online at voyteklab.com/.
Eunsu Kang is an artist, researcher, and educator who explores the intersection of art and machine learning, one of the core methods for building AI. She creates interactive audiovisual installations and artworks using Machine Learning methods. Her signature has been seamless integration of art disciplines and innovative techniques. Her work has been invited to numerous places around the world including Korea, Japan, China, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, and the US. She is a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. Her work is online at kangeunsu.com/.
Mark Marino is an author and scholar of digital literature, as well as a Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. His works include Salt Immortal Sea (with John Murray, Joellyn Rock, and Ken Joseph), “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” “a show of hands,” “Living Will,” and a collection of interactive children’s stories called “Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House.” He directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at USC, a research group dedicated to humanities approaches to the exploration of computer source code. His book, Critical Code Studies, is available February 11th through MIT Press. His work is online at markcmarino.com/.
Ryan Germick is an artist, illustrator, and a Principal Designer and Creative Director at Google leading the Google Assistant Personality team. He leads a global group of writers, designers, linguists, and creative folk of all stripes who strive to bring excellence, innovation, and a human touch to Google Search, Assistant, and News. They are responsible for these products’ conversational experiences, content strategy, and in the case of the Google Assistant, their actual personality and accompanying editorial content. His goal is to fully realize the creative opportunities of personal and person-like technology to help people live their best lives. His work is online at ryangermick.com/.
Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication, and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. Her current project focuses particularly on access produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labor, technological systems, and economic models and conditions. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently working on her first manuscript: “The Automation of Access.” Her work is online at louisehickman.com/.
Monte Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Classical Studies Program in the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the influence of Greco-Roman philosophy on modern science and philsophy, reconstructing lost works of philosophy, and comparison of ancient wisdom traditions. His work is online at montejohnson.info.
Tobin Chodos is a composer, pianist and musicologist. His academic work focuses on efforts to systematize and codify the art of music. In that vein, he has published work on the rise of jazz pedagogy, the arrival of Hip Hop in the college classroom, and, most recently, on the automated music recommendation industry. A former fellow of the Dave Brubeck Institute and the Asian Cultural Council, he has performed around the world as a pianist and been commissioned by many noted contemporary music ensembles. His work is online at tobinchodos.com.
Ethan Edwards is a researcher in Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) at Nokia Bell Labs, an initiative which fuses art with engineering to humanize technology. He works directly with scientists and artists to help facilitate collaboration and builds technology which crosses these domains. He is a creative technologist, having graduated with an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University and has had work featured in museums, galleries, and performances around the world. His independent artwork explores traditional aesthetic themes in radically new media contexts. He has designed and led numerous large scale exhibits at Nokia Bell Labs. His work is online at ethanedwards.org.
bani haykal is an an artist, composer, and musician based in Singapore. bani considers music (making / processes) as material and his projects revolve around modes of interfacing and interaction in feedback / feedforward mechanisms. For Cultured Data he is performing his work sifrmu v12 (2020), an ongoing artwork which looks into human-machine kinships, from making-with to symbiosis, it is a work which situates itself at the intersection of encryption and intimacy. His work is available online at banihaykal.pagexl.com.
Organizers
Erin Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where she advises on digital research and education practices, infrastructure, and policy for campus with a focus on ethics, experimentation, and agency. Her research focuses on liberatory approaches to technology in and through higher education and the intellectual and political implications of technological forms of surveillance and control. She is the founder and director of KNIT, a digital commons for UC San Diego, San Diego State University, and the San Diego Community College District, and co-founder of the Ethical EdTech wiki project, which provides resources for more ethical and inclusive forms of technology for teaching and learning. Her work is online at erinroseglass.com/.
Robert Twomey is a postdoctoral scholar with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and a Lecturer in Data Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego. Trained as an artist and engineer, his work explores the impacts of emerging technologies on sites of intimate life. His dissertation, A Machine for Living In, deployed smart home technologies within his house to narrate the everyday, while questioning the promise of pervasive machine intelligence. He has presented his work at SIGGRAPH, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Seattle Art Museum, and his research has been supported by Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA. His work is online at roberttwomey.com/.