Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello are the founders of  Troika Ranch , a New York-based company that integrates dance, theater and interactive digital media in live performance works.

Coniglio has focused his career as an artist and computer programmer towards a singular goal: to find ways for the movements and vocalizations of performers to interactively manipulate digital media in a meaningful way. 

Stoppiello’s choreography reflects her keen interest in visual rhythm, kinetic complexity and non-linear motion. An examination of the changing state of the human body as it responds to the increasingly technological world that surrounds it is a reoccurring and underlying theme in her works.

Steve Murakishi, former Head of the Print Media Department (1981-2002), Cranbrook Academy of Art & Design, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

Steve Murakishi has worked as an artist, curator, writer/lecturer, teacher, and was the Head of the Print Media Department, at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1981 – 2002. He currently resides in Boston and works as an independent artist and curator.

The edges of Murakishi’s works are in the cultural, political and sometimes common identities of our contemporary milieu. These works cut deeply into the elliptical path of social complexities, cultural differences and individual identities.

James B. Kerkhoff, Assistant Dean for Information Technologies, College of Fine Arts
University of Texas at Austin

Jim Kerkhoff manages Information and Instructional Technology for the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Having worked extensively in the television broadcast and recording industry, he consults in the area of business and technology integration and has taught Electronic Music and Composition, Theatre Sound Design and Sound Recording. He is an active musician and performer with credits that include the James B Petersen Concerto Award, and Javabeat, an album of music suitable for underscoring multimedia and video productions. He has produced numerous compositions and sound designs for theatre including works for Contemporary Dance Fort Worth, Tapestry Dance Company and Western Oklahoma Dance Theatre. He holds a bachelors degree from The University of Nebraska at Omaha and a masters degree from The University of Texas at Austin.

Colin Fallows is Professor of Sound and Visual Arts at Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, England. He has explored crossovers between sound and the visual arts as an artist, researcher, curator and lecturer. Colin has produced work for live ensemble performance, recordings, exhibition, installation, radio and the Internet. His artistic and curatorial projects have been featured in numerous international festivals including Video Positive, ISEA98, Intermedia and Ars Electronica.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.  His interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics.  He collaborates with a wide range of scientists in fields related to these interests.

Lanier’s name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research. In the early 1980s he founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he lead the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first “avatars”, or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications.  Sun Microsystems acquired VPL’s seminal portfolio of patents related to Virtual Reality and networked 3D graphics in 1999.

From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004 he was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion.