Contributors
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Casey Alt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University. His current research focuses on the history of digital media and the cultural effects of digital media's employment in scientific and artistic practice, particularly as used in the biomedical sciences. Over the past few years, Casey has also designed and developed digital media tools that facilitate collaborative humanities research over the Internet and has collaborated in producing digital art installations for various Bay Area art centers and museums.
John Johnston is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of two books, Carnival of Repetition (University of Pennsylvania, 1990) and Information Multiplicity (Johns Hopkins, 1998), and the editor of Literature, Media, Information Systems (Amsterdam, 1997), which contains his introduction to the German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, and a selection of the latter's essays. Johnston has published over forty-five articles on postmodern literature and contemporary cultural theory, as well as many translations of French theorists, including Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. He is currently completing Machinic Life: The Lure of the Post-Natural, a book about how the machines, distributed networks, and autonomous agents constructed in cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the new AI are transforming traditional conceptual oppositions and opening new spaces of "machinic life."
Timothy Lenoir is Professor of History of Science and Technology at Stanford University, and chair of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Since coming to Stanford in 1989 Lenoir has worked on the history of Silicon Valley and on the history of recent science and technology, particularly the history of science since 1965, the period when computer applications began to be introduced into a number of fields in biomedicine. He has been interested in the ways in which computer graphics, [End Page 517] artificial intelligence, imaging, virtual reality, and robotics have transformed the work practices of fields such as biochemistry, surgery, and genetics. Lenoir is engaged in two current projects, one on the history of computational biology and bioinformatics, and the other the history of interactive simulation, particularly military simulations, and videogames. Together with a group of colleagues and students Lenoir has been working on a project called "How they Got Game." They are designing a multi-sited installation scheduled to open in December 2003 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and at the Stanford Cantor Center for the Visual Arts addressing critical theoretical issues of new media.
Brian Rotman is Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He has written books on zero and on infinity; his most recent book is Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford, 2000), and most recent piece of writing is "Urschrift," a comic dialogue to appear in Freidrich Kittler's Festshrift. His current project is to exit from an obsession with the alphabet, especially the claim that its unacknowledged transcendental legacy includes the God of monotheism and the "mind" of Greek philosophy.
Sha Xin Wei is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches critical studies of techno-science and media. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2001 from Stanford University with a dissertation on the phenomenology of differential geometric practice and the technologies of writing, as a joint project in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History and Philosophy of Science. Sha established the Topological Media Lab at Georgia Tech for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. His research concerns agency and performance in the presence of hybrid matter. [End Page 518]
