The current list of speakers for this session, subject to change, is:
Robert Tercek is one of the world’s most prolific creators of interactive content. He has created breakthrough entertainment experiences on every digital platform, including satellite television, game consoles, broadband Internet, interactive television and mobile networks. His career is filled with milestones, including the launch of the first multichannel television service in Asia (STAR TV in 1991); the first multiplayer Java games on the Web (Sony 1997); the first interactive game shows on US Television (Sony, 1999); the world’s first streaming video service on mobile phones (PacketVideo and NTT DoCoMo V-Live, 2001); the largest live interactive video events on the web (Oprah Winfrey’s 2009 web casts); the largest free book download in history (Suze Orman 2009), and more.
Amy Li: How Mobile Technology is Transforming the World
Amy Li is a multidisciplinary creative director and designer, specializing in branding, creative marketing strategy, and user experience design for global brands such as Yahoo, AT&T, VW, Sony etc. She is also on the board of directors of Humanity+. Amy is passionate about combining design, technology, and human factors to create state of the art products that impact our daily lives. One example of this is the iPhone app Have2P. It is a fun and creative app that addresses a universal human need in a new high-tech fashion. It was showcased as “App of the Week” in the New York Times, and also featured in Gizmodo.
Amy also has years of experience specializing in designing visually engaging web sites with intuitive interfaces, flash animations, emails, and landing pages with a strong focus on branding and UX design. Her portfolio can be seen at meidesign.net and she is easy to connect with on LinkedIn and Twitter. One of her true passions in life is to use her skills to help members of the scientific community become better communicators, one typography at a time.
Amy earned her BFA with honors at CSULB, one of the top eight graphic design programs in the country, and later continued her education in Advanced Web and Interactive Design at UCLA.
Natasha Vita-More: Human Enhancement: Emerging Designs for Wearable Selves
Natasha Vita-More, PhD researcher, University of Plymouth, is media designer and theorist and a frequent guest speaker on topics concerning the future in the international arena. She is best known as designer of “Primo Posthuman”. Her writings have been published in numerous books, she has appeared in more than twenty-four televised documentaries, and featured in magazines including The New York Times, Wired, Village Voice, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, U.S. News & World Report, Net Business, and Teleopolis. Natasha is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Visiting Scholar at 21st Century Medicine, Scientific Board of Lifeboat Foundation, and advises non-profit organizations including Alcor Life Extension Foundation. She was formerly president of Extropy Institute from 2002-2005. As a bit of history, Natasha authored the “Transhuman Statement”, Create/Recreate: the 3rd Millennial Culture (cybernetic culture and the future of humanism and the arts and sciences). In the early 1990s, she hosted the TV show “Transcentury UPdate” and was elected to the Green Party as a Los Angeles Councilperson.
J-Walt: Immersive VR performances and real-time world building
J-Walt is a performer interactive designer, filmmaker, graphic artist, and composer. For two decades, he has been at the forefront of interactive art and computer performance, expanding the uses of computer animation into uncharted territories. His Spontaneous Fantasia performances combine aspects of animation, video games, music, theater, dance and architecture into a seamless new art form. He has performed for thrilled audiences around the US as well as in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Edmonton.
In March of 2006, J-Walt won a Technical Academy Award for his development of a real-time pre-visualization system, and in 2003, he received a Themed Entertainment Award for a digital puppetry attraction, one of many digital puppet projects he’s developed over his career. He produced location-based video games for Sony. He was a founding member of Disney’s VR studio, which created a state-of-the-art virtual reality experience for Disney’s EPCOT center in 1995.
J-Walt grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and attended the Experimental Animation department of CalArts, graduating in 1988. J-Walt’s movies and images have been exhibited at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, MOCA, Sinking Creek Film Festival, New York Animation Festival, and others. In his spare time, he organizes the Los Angeles Abstract Movie Workshop. He lives in Altadena, California.
David Levy: Robotic Art: a look at its evolution and social and cultural influence
David Levy is a leading international concept artist. He studied industrial design and architecture in France and the Netherlands respectively, and is currently working in Los Angeles, California as senior concept artist in the movie industry. He has contributed to titles for the PC, XBOX, and PS2, PS3, XBOX360 and recently worked on the development of Prince of Persia 3, assassin’s creed and Tron Legacy. His unique interests merge video gaming, film and his industrial design background to create fantasy elements at many scales.
Michael Masucci: Mediating the Transition- can art minimize a backlash from techno-phobic fundamentalism?
Michael J. Masucci is a pioneering desktop digital video artist, and director/producer as well as an author, curator, educator and community activist. Co-founder and Artistic Director of EZTV, which the American Film Institute hailed as “one of the core pioneers and advocates of digital technology in the moving images arts”, Masucci and EZTV were recently honored by their inclusion in the upcoming Getty Center Museum and Research Institute ‘s “Pacific Standard Time”, a massive retrospective on the most significant of Los Angeles’ contemporary artists. Earlier this year, at UCLA, they were celebrated for their innovations in the fusion of art, performance, film and new media, in an event hosted by SIGGRAPH.
EZTV, created in 1979, continues to be what Wired.com called “an avant-garde video production company and digital art center”. Projects for which EZTV has been a key collaborator have premiered at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Cannes Film Festival, the American Film Institute, as well as on BRAVO, the BBC, PBS and numerous festivals, conferences and art spaces. Masucci and EZTV have been profiled in media ranging from the LA Times to Millimeter Magazine, and from the Discovery Channel to the Financial News Network, as well as in several books on the history of the media arts. Long an advocate of the integration, of emerging technologies with the arts and human interaction in general, Masucci has worked with the California Lawyers for the Arts, and will soon be completing his doctorate in law, entirely online.
RU Sirius: Problem Solved: What’s Next for H+ Magazine
R. U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman in 1952) is an American writer, editor, talk show host, musician and cyberculture celebrity. He is best known as co-founder and original Editor-In-Chief of Mondo 2000 magazine from 1989–1993. Sirius was also chairman and candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election for The Revolution Party. The party’s 20-point platform was a hybrid of libertarianism and liberalism. At one time, he was a regular columnist for Wired News and San Francisco Examiner, and contributing writer for Wired and Artforum International. He’s also written for Rolling Stone, Time, Esquire and other publications. Sirius has written several hundred articles and essays for mainstream and subculture publications. He was Editor-in-Chief of Axcess magazine in 1998, and GettingIt.com from 1999-2000.