Presenter Biographies
Events | Forum : Schedule | Presenter Biographies | Participant Pack | Team
Click to jump direct to a particular presenter:
body>data>space | NESTA | Benedict Arora | Ghislaine Boddington | Dooeun Choi | Emmanuel Cuisinier
Ivor Diosi | Rick Hall | Michael Takeo Magruder | Dan McQuillan | Charlotte Moore | Celine Naninni
Sarah Platt | Derek Richards | Pear Urushima | Stanza
body>data>space
body>data>space is a collective of artists and designers engaged in creating unusual connections between performance, architecture, new media and virtual worlds. Using our own collaboration methodologies and networked creation processes, the group visions the future of the human body and its real-time relationship to evolving global, social and technological shifts. body>data>space utilises performance, installation and interaction techniques to comment on these changes through the creation of innovative forms of education, art and entertainment.
Formed in 2005, and emerging from previous digital ground-breaking organisations shinkansen and Future Physical, we have over 20 years work experience in the international cultural and creative industries and in the digital sector. The body>data>space collective contains mature professionals and those with fresh, topical and younger thinking – an inter-generational grouping from those in our 20s to our 50s.
Forums, cluster projects, workshops, research groups, journeys, immersion environments and responsive spaces are all core elements of our creation outputs. We engage the public in the creative side of the work, in majority, enabling equal authorship through the participation of others.
We move forward with expanded ideas for event telematics and creative participation through virtual/physical gaming. Future projects explore digital mobility on a European scale, interauthorship, future work and play environments and social engagement through crowd sourced initiatives and media facades.
NESTA
NESTA is the UK’s leading independent expert on innovation.Through a blend of practical programmes, investment in early-stage companies and research we test and demonstrate ingenious ways to tackle some of the country’s biggest social and economic challenges.
But we don’t do it alone. We work with public, private and third sector partners – bringing together powerful combinations of people, resources and bright ideas.
Benedict Arora, Programme Director, Education, NESTA
Benedict joined NESTA in September 2008. He has a background in innovation in the children’s services and education sectors. Before joining NESTA, he worked for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, where he set up a programme to support the development of Children’s Trusts and to commission effective services for children and young people.
His previous projects and strategy work include developing a digital media strategy for the Department for Education and Skills; taking Teachers’ TV from proof of concept to launch; setting up the TeacherNet website; and working on the Children in Care Green Paper. He has also worked at the European Parliament.
Ghislaine Boddington, Creative Director, body>data>space
Ghislaine Boddington is an artist, researcher, director and curator specialising in the integration of performing arts, body responsive technologies and interactive interfaces. An expert in virtual-physical environments she holds in depth knowledge of the way the human user perceives, participates and moves, communicates and behaves within “intelligent” digital space.
Ghislaine develops visions and solutions based on twenty years work within the collectives shinkansen, Future Physical and body>data>space. In 2005, fifteen years of their work was acquisitioned by the British Library, named the shinkansen Collection and archived at www.connectivity.org.uk.
She has directed and curated numerous events, workshops and symposia throughout east and west Europe, US, China and Japan. She is respected internationally for her long term work on identity politics and intercultural relations, and on her use of Interauthorship in collaborative team work and creation processes.
She holds an Artist Research Associateship at ResCen, Middlesex University, which supports her long term obsession with remote space/body connectivity through realtime telematics. Her fascination is with tele-kinetics, tele-presence and the evolution of tele-intuitive interfaces, both in work and play. She regularly moderates complex live events, using her interauthorship methodology and writes/collates collections of topical thoughts on the body at the centre of digital interaction from artists worldwide.
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Dooeun Choi, Creative Director, Art Center Nabi
Dooeun Choi is creative director of Art Center Nabi, which opened in 2000 as the first media art center in Seoul, Korea. She is interested in new ways of mediated communication between humans, machine, and other lives. In 2002, she produced a wireless art project called Watch Out!, which was proposed by Maurice Benayoun using mobile SMS and public screens. She also organized the Wireless Art Competition in 2003 with Resfest Digital Film Festival, Korea. Since 2003 she has run a mobile gallery called ?gallery on the SK Telecom’s mobile service and launched an art blog-zine project called love virus in 2004.
She has been curating public art programs on COMO which is an urban screen platform launched in Dec. 2004. She is also extending COMO to other cities in Korea including Tomorrow City in Incheon and linking it to international cities such as New York and Melbourne towards a networked open theater.
She was invited as art director for 2003 Uijeongbu International Digital Art Festival in Uijeongbu, Korea and also as co-curator of media arts exhibition and workshop called Intermediae_Minbak, for ARCO 2007 in Madrid, Spain.
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Emmanuel Cuisinier, Visual Arts Officer, Centre des Arts
Emmanuel is based in Paris and was born in Papeete (Tahiti), French Polynesia. Following a Fine Arts Masters degree and a Post-Graduate degree in Cultural Project Engineering in Paris, Emmanuel has worked as artistic programmer, exhibition curator, lecturer, guide and educator in various contemporary art centres, museums and galleries in France and Canada. Since 2004, he works in the Centre des Arts, Enghien-les-Bains, near Paris as the officer for visual arts and publications. He also works as an adjunct Faculty member at the University Paris VIII and as a freelance writer for various French institutions and newspapers.
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Ivor Diosi, body>data>space Associate and New Media Artist
Ivor is an artist and technology alchemist. His main obsessions are identity, the existence of space-time, of organic life and of consciousness. He works in fields of virtual reality, augmented reality, human-computer interfaces, game-engine modifications and artificial life. He is the founder of international art movement Humane After People and principal artistic partner of Archilla Vimmi.
Major exhibitions and festival participation – Kinetica Ar Fair London 2009 and Virtual Physical Bodies exhibition, Paris 2009 (with body>data>space) ISEA Artcamp Singapore 2008, Viper 2006, ZKM International Media Art Award 2003, New York Digitalsalon 2001, ACA Media Arts Festival Japan 2001, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Telefonica Life 4.0, Telecom 99 Palexpo Geneva, Slovak National Gallery – Hundred Years of Slovak Photography. Ivor currently lives in Prague.
Rick Hall, Director of programmes Ignite! and Founder of rehearsal.org.uk
Rick is a writer and consultant in the arts, young people and creativity in education. Until July 2006, Rick was Project Leader of Ignite! at NESTA. Ignite! continues as an independent organisation dedicated to promoting creativity in learning; and Rick is engaged by Ignite! as Director of Programmes and leads on developing new partnerships.
Rick is the founder of rehearsal.org.uk. Because we all have a capacity to learn from not getting it right first time, rehearsal is a space for experiment and risk-taking, improvisation and collaboration, creativity and imagination.
A former teacher, actor, writer and director of theatre for young people, Rick was Director of Artswork, the youth arts development organisation from 1991 to 1995; and prior to that director of theatre in education at Nottingham Playhouse. Rick has also worked for a number of funding bodies including the Arts Council, the Big Lottery and the Millennium Festival.
Rick is now Chair of Artswork, and also of Theatre Writing Partnership, a new agency for writing in the East Midlands. In May 2008 Rick was appointed to an Honorary Fellowship at Nottingham University in the School of Education. He is also a Fellow of the RSA.
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Michael Takeo Magruder, Artist and Researcher, King’s Visualisation Lab, King’s College London and body>data>space Associate
Michael is an artist and researcher in King’s Visualisation Lab, King’s College London. His work uses emerging technologies, including high-performance computing, mobile devices and virtual environments, blending Information Age technologies with modernist aesthetics to explore the networked, digital world. His work has been showcased in over 200 exhibitions in 30 countries, including the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, EAST International 2005, Georges Pompidou Center, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau. His work also regularly appears in international New Media festivals such as Cybersonica, CYNETart, FILE, Filmwinter, Rencontres Internationales, SeNef, Siggraph, Split, VAD and WRO. His artistic practice has been funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Arts Council England, The National Endowment for the Arts, USA and public galleries in the UK and abroad. Michael has worked with the body>data>space collective since 2007, on the Virtual Physical Bodies project, Robots and Avatars and several other new projects for 2009/2010.
Dan McQuillan, Head of Digital for Make Your Mark Campaign, Co-founder Social Innovation Camp
After a Ph.D in Experimental Particle Physics, Dan worked with people with learning disabilities and as a mental health advocate. He founded Multikulti, a community-led multilingual site for asylum seekers & refugees which won a Global Ideas Bank Social Innovations Award, and SocialSource, a collective advocating for open source in the voluntary sector. After some personal experiences of human rights abuses, Dan joined Amnesty International as Director of Ecommunications where he introduced blogging and social networks. He headed Amnesty’s first delegation to the UN’s Internet Governance Forum. Dan is a former Director of The Open Rights Group and a consultant for NGOs in Central & Eastern Europe who are using crowdsourcing and mashups to promote anti-corruption. His current post is Head of Digital for Make Your Mark which campaigns for an entrepreneurial culture in the UK. In 2007 he co-founded Social Innovation Camp which brings together geeks and social innovators to create social startups in 48 hours. He blogs at www.internetartizans.co.uk and you can find him on Twitter @danmcquillan
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Charlotte Moore, Producer, Sidekick Studios
Charlotte graduated with a degree in Fashion, Media & Culture from the London College of Fashion in 2001. It was around about this time she realized that people were much more interesting than clothes. One of the first employees at the then newly formed trend forecasting and consumer insight consultancy, The Future Laboratory, she was involved in ethnographic research and worked on the bi-annual trends monitor Viewpoint. Seduced by childhood dreams of working for MTV she went on to work at Viacom Brand Solutions International as their Youth Trends Expert and Editor of MTV Sticky, the youth trends magazine. Realising that making a difference was much more interesting than making money for a media juggernaut, she then took up a planning position at v, the National Young Volunteers Service to help them reach a UK youth audience. During her time there she commissioned v’s youth insight project that was to become Voicebox. After meeting Adil Abrar, the brain behind the Voicebox concept, she realized that social innovation is that thing she’d been looking for, and so left v to get involved in other projects for social good at Sidekick Studios. It was around about this time they decided to put an industrial robot into Houses of Parliament.
Celine Naninni, Project Co-ordinator, Centre des Arts
Celine completed her post-graduate degree in political sciences from Sciences Po – Toulouse and cultural sciences french university diploma in “cultural mediation” at Paris III. She has worked as European project coordinator within the frame of the Youth programme (founded by the European Commission) for the Pépinières européennes for young artists / artists residencies network as part of the ‘artists in context’ programme. Celine also worked as Exhibitions coordinator in collaboration with the Louvre Museum for museums in Singapore and Hong Kong. Since 2008, Celine is project coordinator at the Centre des Arts, Enghien-les-Bains, nr Paris and is in charge of the professional meetings for the Bains Numériques festival.
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Sarah Platt, UK Director, Kinura
Sarah Platt is a digital media creative and business owner, specialising in web video projects, interactive online events and live webcasting.
She has have managed web video projects for clients such as BP, Astra Zeneca, the NSPCC, Greenpeace, Merrill Lynch, Churchill Insurance and Amnesty International to name just a few. Current clients include the DCMS, Haymarket Publishing, Tate, the bfi, bTWEEN, St George’s University Hospital, Southwark Council and bmi.
Specialties: digital content production, managing live webcasting projects, producing interactive video for events, advising on webTV marketing, cross-platform content production, video archives, digital asset management.
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Derek Richards, Director, Hi8us South
Derek is a multimedia producer in every sense. As an artist he has exhibited installation work around the world often in collaboration with other artists, including Keith Piper and Rita Keegan and pioneered trans-Atlantic live collaborative performances between remote venues in the 90s. He has worked as a musician with the likes of Courtney Pine, scored for film and TV and has composed music for and directed theatre. He has won a total of 11 awards for his digital and new media work with clients/partners including the BBC, Channel 4, the Science Museum, the Virgin Group, and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music for whom he produced the major online interactive learning resource, SoundJunction funded by the government’s Department of Culture Media & Sport through Culture Online programme.
Most recently Derek has been working extensively in participatory arts and media contexts internationally and has consulted to the government on the ‘Creative Economy Programme’.
Derek is the Director of Hi8us South. Hi8us South is an award winning participatory media production company which works collaboratively with young people and partner organisations to reflect young people’s needs and give them a voice. Hi8us’ BAFTA award winning cross platform interactive drama, L8R, is used across the UK in over 400 sites.
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Pear Urushima, Marketing Guru, Apple. Inc
Pear Urushima is a marketing guru working for Apple, Inc. in California. She’s thrived in high-technology for more than 15 years, designing and implementing marketing programs for a diversity of F1000 companies. Currently, she specialises in marketing iPhone in the science and medical industries. Examples of her work with featured Profile videos for Apple can be found on these web pages: www.apple.com/science/ and www.apple.com/iphone/business/profiles/. Pear has also inspired and headed up many live events for Apple including a series on the intersection of art and science called “Images of the Extraordinary” www.apple.com/science/prosessions/frankel/ and “Envisioning Global Change” www..apple.com/science/prosessions/globalchange/ which was presented at the Apple Store, Regent Street, London.
A native to Los Angeles, Pear loves the fine arts, photography, film, and video. Her creative passions include, playing taiko drums with San Jose Taiko (www.taiko.org) for whom she has performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In 2007, she made her debut as a composer for San Jose Taiko, writing “The Sound of Ma”, a song about the virtual space in between the sound of drum beats and the connection between the body, space, and time.
In June 2009, Pear participated as a guest panelist and judge for Bains Numériques in Enghien-les-Bains, France. She is a member of the Art House Co-op.
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Stanza, Artist and Technologist
Stanza’s work crosses borders between artistic, technological and scientific sectors. Stanza creates participatory digital artworks that invite viewers to guide data flows or to simply observe self-generating compositions. His digital paintings shift through abstract and iconic patterns, which people can explore akin to virtual environments. Interactive and visually appealing, his style also maintains the substantive power through multi-facetted content.
Stanza is currently a recipient of an AHRC creative fellowship 2006-9 for a project called, ‘The Emergent City’, researching sensors and the impact of live data in the architectural and urban environment. Stanza was also awarded a NESTA dreamtime fellowship in 2004. This prestigious award provided incoming investment, allowing experiments using new displays, sensors, and live data to make responsive spaces and interactive installations.
Work has centred on the idea of the building as a new display system and various projects have been made using live data, the use of live data in architectural space, and how it can be made into meaningful representations as well as a whole series of work manipulating real time CCTV data to making artworks with them. These works reform the data, work with the idea of bringing data from outside into the inside, and then present it back out again in open ended systems where the public is often engaged in or directly embedded in the artwork.
