Who is -empyre-

International Advisory Editorial Board

Tarsh Bates
AU

PHD The University of Western Australia
(Biological Art) SymbioticA

Tarsh Bates is an artist/researcher/educator interested in how knowledge and experience form and transfer through the relationships between material, bodies, environment and culture. She completed a Master of Science (Biological Arts) in 2012 and has worked variously as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, a toilet paper packer, a researcher in compost science and waste management, a honeybee ejaculator, an art gallery invigilator, a raspberry picker, a lecturer/tutor in art/science, art history, gender & technology, posthumanism, counter realism and popular culture, an editor, a bookkeeper, a car detailer, and a life drawing model. She is currently a candidate for a PhD (Biological Arts) at SymbioticA UWA where her research is concerned with the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a multispecies ecology. She is particularly enamoured with /Candida albicans/.

tarshbates.com

Shulea Cheang
Taiwan, US, France

Independent Artist

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist, filmmaker, networker. Cheang constructs networked installation and multi-player performance in participatory impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interface with transgressive plots and open network that permits public participation. Engaged in media activism and video art for two decades (80s, 90s) in New York City, Cheang concluded her NYC period with a cybernoia film FRESH KILL (1994) and the first Guggenheim museum web art commission/collection BRANDON (1998-1999). After releasing her second feature “I.K.U” (2000) at Sundance Film Festival, she relocated to Eurozone where she took up large scale installations and networked performance while co-founding several collectives to pursue cross-disciplinary projects. From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post-crash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works.  In 2017, she released her third feature FLUIDØ at Berlinale Berlin Film festival and is currently developing Unborn0x9, an ultrasound hack performance and UKI, cinema interrupted with game engine and mobile interface.

mauvaiscontact.info

Dale Hudson
UAE, US

New York University

Margaretha Anne Haughwout
US

Assistant Professor of Digital Studio, Colgate University

Margaretha Haughwout explores the intersections between ideas of technology and wilderness, digital networks and the urban commons, cybernetics and whole systems permaculture — in the context of ecological, technological and human survival. She collaborates with the Guerrilla Grafters: an art/ activist group who graft fruit bearing branches onto ornamental fruit trees, and the Coastal Reading Group: artists from different coasts who trouble the subjects of wilderness, speciation, humanness and ways of knowing. For 3 1/2 years, Haughwout and her collaborators at Hayes Valley Farm, an interim-use urban permaculture site in downtown San Francisco, cultivated low-input ecological systems and developed a unique lateral governance structure able to engage a range of different kinds of human input and navigate complex city politics. Haughwout has received numerous grants for community based work in San Francisco, and her personal and collaborative artwork is exhibited nationally and internationally. Haughwout received her MFA from the University of California Santa Cruz.

beforebefore.net
guerrillagrafters.org

Daniel Lichtman
US

Independent Artist

Daniel Lichtman (based in New York) is an artist who makes videos, installations and performances that consider lone-creators of public content such as the community television personality, whistleblower or amateur news presenter on YouTube. Working with both found and improvised material, his work reflects on the fantasies and constructions of freedom involved in producing real and imagined audiences. Currently a Media Arts Fellow at BRIC Arts and Media House, Brooklyn, Lichtman’s exhibitions, screenings and performances include The Drawing Center, The Queens Museum and The Bronx Museum, New York; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, University of Oxford, Oxford; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Flat Time House, London. He recently completed residencies at The Drawing Center, The National University of Colombia, and Flat Time House, and completed a portfolio project for BOMB Magazine. Lichtman received his BA from Cornell University, and his MFA from Goldsmiths, London. 

daniellichtman.com

Claudia Pederson
US

Witchita State, Assistant Professor
Art History in New Media & Technology

PhD, History of Art and Visual Culture, Cornell University, 2012

Claudia Pederson writes on and lectures in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on technology, media theory, and social practice. As an assistant professor of screen studies, she taught film at the H. Roy Park School at Ithaca College.

Her writings on play, games, digital photography, and techno-ecological art are published in Afterimage, Intelligent Agent,Eludamos, as well as the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Design Automation Conference (DAC), and CHIconference proceedings. Her most recent essay on contemporary Latin American artists working with robotics is forthcoming in an anthology on Latin American Modernism. Other forthcoming writings include two essays on contemporary Latin American practices in art and ecology in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, no. 90 (Spring 2015), and in art, feminism, and technology in Journal of Peer Production (Special issue: “Feminism and (un)Hacking,” July, 2015). A co-authored chapter (with the Film scholar Patricia Zimmerman), on feminist engagements with post-cinematic media will be published in Indie Reframed:Women Filmmakers and Contemporary American Cinema (Edinburgh University Press).

Byron Rich
Canada, USA

Assistant Professor of Electronic Art & Intermedia
Allegheny College, Meadville PA

Byron Rich is an artist, professor and lecturer born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His work exploring speculative design, biology futures and tactical media ecology has been widely shown and spoken about internationally. He pursued a degree in New-Media at The University of Calgary before finding himself in Buffalo, New York where he obtained an MFA in Emerging Practices at The University at Buffalo. He now teaches Electronic Art & Intermedia at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. 

byronrich.com

Margaret Rhee
US

Visiting Assistant Professor Media Theory
State University of New York - University at Buffalo

Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection, Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017), and chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. Her academic writing has been published in journals such as Amerasia Journal, Cinema Journal, and GLQ. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic studies and new media studies. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study.

mrheeloy.com
mediastudy.buffalo.edu/people/dr-margaret-rhee/

May, 2017 Robot Poetics, Ephemera, and Other Concerns
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2017-May/date.html