Steve Benford
Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. He is currently an EPSRC Dream Fellow and Director of the EPSRC-funded ‘Horizon: My Life in Data’ Centre for Doctoral Training. He was a Visiting Professor at the BBC in 2012 and a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research in 2013. He has received best paper awards at the ACM’s annual Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2005, 2009, 2011 and 2012. He also won the 2003 Prix Ars Elctronica for Interactive Art, the 2007 Nokia Mindtrek award for Innovative Applications of Ubiquitous Computing, and has received four BAFTA nominations. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2012. His book Performing Mixed Reality was published by MIT Press in 2011.
Marcos Novak
Marcos Novak is Professor and Vice Chair of the Media Arts and Technology Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the transLAB and is affiliated with the AlloSphere, Art, and CNSI. He is a global nomad, and an artist, theorist, and transarchitect. In 2008, "Transmitting Architecture", the title of his seminal 1995 essay, became the theme of the XXIII World Congress of the UIA (Union Internationale Des Architectes), the largest architectural organization in the world.
His projects, theoretical essays, and interviews have been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in over 70 countries, and he lectures, teaches, and exhibits worldwide. Drawing upon architecture, music, and computation, and introducing numerous additional influences from art, science, and technology, his work intentionally defies categorization. He is universally recognized as the pioneer of architecture in cyberspace, of the critical consideration of virtual space as architectural and urban place, and of the use of generative computational composition in architecture and design. He originated several widely recognized concepts, such as "transvergence", "transarchitectures", "transmodernity", "liquid architectures", "navigable music", habitable cinema", "archimusic", "eversion", "allogenesis", and others, anticipating many of the developments in digitally derived art, architecture, and music, and in virtual, augmented, mixed, and alternative reality research. His seminal essay "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace", already translated into the world's major languages, is now included in several anthologies of critical documents of the digital era, along writings of key figures such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Marshall McLuhan, and others. His pioneering work "Dancing With The Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress", developed at the Banff Center between 1991-1994 as part of the "Art and Virtual Environments Project", included the world's first 4-dimensional immersive environments, exploring and allowing navigation through spaces using four spatial dimensions, with time being fifth. His current research involves nano~ and bio~ technologies, and explores the hypothesis that we are in a cultural phase characterized by "the Production of the Alien", paralleling the Renaissance "Production of Man”.
He has participated in many international exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including the 9th Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Biennale di Venezia in 2004, and the 7th Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Biennale di Venezia, in 2000, where he represented Greece, with additional participations in the Biennales of 2001, 2004-5, 2006, and 2008. In honor of the pivotal role he has played and is continuing to play in the acceptance, integration, and development of the digital in advanced architecture, and as part of "Digital|Real", a major international architecture exhibition hosted by DAM (Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt, Germany), he was invited to write "Liquid, Trans~, Invisible: The Ascent and Speciation of the Digital in Architecture. A Story", a combined history/biographical chronology of the ascent of the digital in architecture and his part in it.
In 2004, he was honored to become a Fellow of the World Technology Network. Since 2013, he is Distinguished Affiliated of the Fleming BSRC (Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center), Athens, Greece. He serves on numerous editorial boards and scientific committees.
photo credit: Eric Minh Swenson
Stephen Scrivener
Stephen Scrivener studied Fine Art at undergraduate and master levels, the latter at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where he began to use the computer as a means of art production. Subsequent to the Slade, he completed his Ph.D. in a computer science department and, thereafter, worked as a lecturer and researcher in various university computer science departments. Up to 1992, his research focussed on the design and development of interactive systems for artists and designers and on how such systems are used. During this period he undertook many funded design-focussed research projects (supported by grants in excess of £2 million) almost all of which involved academic, commercial and industrial collaboration. He moved back into an art and design department in 1992, and since then his research has focussed on the theory and practice of what is often called practice-based research.
