Juan Geuer, Artist, Ottawa
Juan Geuer is a well known Canadian artist who was born in the Netherlands in 1917 into an environment of artists and philosophers. Before he came to Canada in 1955 he lived in Bolivia for 14 years where he developed as an inventor, artist and social activist. In 1956 he began to work with geophysists, first as a draftsman and later as a participant in scientific research, the whole time making art that strove to find ways to connect with the natural world beyond the boundaries imposed by scientific and artistic practices. His work has been exhibited in several important international institutions.
Laura Kurgan, Architect/Artist, Columbia University
Laura Kurgan runs an interdisciplinary design practice in New York City which blends academic research with public projects. She designed Around Ground Zero, a fold-out map of the area around the site of the World Trade Center, widely and freely distributed in the months after September 2001. Over the last decade she has worked with new spatial information and mapping technologies, especially declassified satellite imagery and GPS technology, in a series of research projects and installations about post Cold war geopolitics. This work, which has been exhibited internationally, is collected in You Are Here: Post-Military Technology and the New Landscape of Satellite Images, forthcoming from Zone Books (MIT Press) in 2005.
Lize Mogel, Artist, New York
Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography, distributing and inserting cartographic projects into public space. Recent work asks viewers to become active producers of their local landscape. She also works with the radio collaborative neuroTransmitter, and is currently an Architecture/Urban Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Antony Orme, Geographer, UCLA
Antony Orme is a geographer with specific interests in Earth's surface forms and processes, and with the changes wrought on the physical landscape by human actions. His research encompasses coasts, rivers, mountains, deserts and glaciers, past and present, and he also explores the shifting foundations of the Earth and environmental sciences. As such, he is fascinated by how scientists through the ages have presented their understanding of landscape through art and, conversely, how artists have interpreted landscapes according to their ilk and available media, often but not always in keeping with the ideas of their time. His own research frequently involves the preparation of hand-drawn maps and illustrations.
Trevor Paglen, Artist/Geographer, Berkeley (www.paglen.com)
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Forging a hybrid practice between contemporary art, social science, and investigative journalism, his work in "experimental lecture," installation, photography, sound, and video has shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), U.C. San Diego (2004), the California College of the Arts (2002), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He is a contributing editor to the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, directs the Center for Experimental Geography at U.C. Berkeley, and develops tactical media projects with the prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance.
Dont Rhine, Sound artist, Los Angeles
Dont Rhine is a founding member of the audio activist organization Ultra-red. Besides his work with Ultra-red, Rhine has written widely on sound art theory and practice with articles published in FUSE Magazine (CA), Spex (DE), and in the upcoming anthology Sound Generation: Recording, Tradition, Politics (Autonomedia Books).
Barbara Maria Stafford, Art Historian, University of Chicago
Barbara Maria Stafford's work investigates key intersections between the arts, sciences, and myriad visual technologies from the seventeenth century to the contemporary era. A continuing interest that threads its way throughout her publications is the illumination of the role of perception, aesthetics, and the interwoven senses in past, present, and emergent imaging technologies (from the medical to the informational). Recent activities, both at the research and seminar levels, focus on integrating key problems in image history with cognitive science, neuro-and evolutionary biology, and the new philosophy of mind.
Ultra-red, Artists, Los Angeles (www.ultrared.org)
In the world of modern electronic music and sound art, Ultra-red distinguish themselves for their intrepid blend of political commitment and innovative sound. Rejecting both self-satisfied formalism and convenient political posturing, Ultra-red have for over ten years pursued a precarious but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Collectively, the Los Angeles-based group has produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations and pubic space occupations (ps/o).
Ewan Branda
Ewan Branda is an architect and software designer who is working on a Ph.D. in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA in which he is investigating historical interactions between informatics and the representation of environment. His current research is on photography, statistics, and the development of the archaeological park in the 19th century. For the last five years he has been Technical Editor and Data Architect of the Electronic Book Review, one of the longest standing journals of online critical writing.
Denis Cosgrove
Denis Cosgrove is a professor of Geography at UCLA whose work has evolved from a focus on the meanings of landscape in Human and Cultural Geography, especially as these have evolved in Western Europe since the fifteenth century, to a broader concern with the role of spatial images and representations in the making and communicating of knowledge. He is especially interested in the role played by visual images in shaping geographical imaginations and thus in the connections between Geography as a formal discipline and imaginative expressions of geographical knowledge and experience in the visual arts (including cartography).
Heather Frazar
Heather Frazar is a printmaker and geographer who recently received her master's degree in Cultural Geography at UCLA (September 2004). Her research and artwork focus on the material underpinnings of scientific knowledge(s). She is currently investigating a two-mile-long ice core called GISP2, which was extracted from Greenland and is stored at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado.
Shana Lutker
Shana Lutker is a visual artist, finishing her MFA in UCLA's Art Department in the area of Interdisciplinary Studio. Her current project takes up narratives and artworks recorded from her dreams in an attempt to map the unconscious. Work from this project will be included in an exhibition at Kunstverein Lagenhagen, Germany in June. She works at X-TRA, a non-profit art magazine out of Los Angeles.
Emily Scott
Emily Scott is a Ph.D. student in Art History at UCLA. Her work addresses visual culture and nature, with an emphasis on post-1945 art, media, and architecture that critically engages landscape and/or ecology. In 2004, she created Los Angeles Urban Rangers, an event-based art project exploring local inner-city ecologies, which was exhibited at Art Center College of Design and will reappear at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in April. This summer, she will begin a dissertation on land art and wasteland aesthetics.