Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. He is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University in Krems, Austria. He was formerly Universitair Docent of New Media at UvA, Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies program at Duke University, and Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah College of Art and Design. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and technology in the 1960s, historiography, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art. He edited and wrote the introduction to a collection of essays by Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003). His critically praised survey, Art and Electronic Media, was published by Phaidon Press in 2009.
Yolande Harris is a composer and artist working with sound, its image and its role in relating humans and their technologies to the environment. Through her performances, installations, instruments and writings, she investigates how sound relates us to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological. Her work has been presented internationally, including MACBA (Barcelona), Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, NIMk (Amsterdam), V2 (Rotterdam), ISEA Singapore, UCLA, Villa Croce Genova. Significant artist residencies include the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), STEIM (Amsterdam), Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht), Metronom (Barcelona). She held an Artistic Fellowship at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and was Lecturer in Interaction Design at the Technical University of Eindhoven. Her publications include “Inside-Out Instrument” (Contemporary Music Review 2006) and “The Building as Instrument” (Cambridge Scholars Press 2007). Yolande holds a BA in music from Dartington College of Arts, an MPhil in architecture/moving image from University of Cambridge, and is working on her PhD at the Orpheus Institute Gent. Her current research/practice considers the musical potential of sound worlds outside the human hearing range, through underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data. In 2009 Yolande was awarded a national artist stipend from the Netherlands Funds for Visual Arts.