Project Background
If It Doesn’t Kill You, It Makes You StrongerThe concept for Contagion was developed during a stay in the isolation ward of Dundee Hospital, in 2000 where, on return from a trip to Kumasi, Ghana, I was quarantined and put under observation suspected of carrying the deadly Ebola virus.
During my hospitalization I discovered much about Ebola, including it being termed an ‘unsuccessful virus’, mainly in that the virus was so virulent that it killed all of its hosts, before they had chance to spread it further. The incubation period, or the time for which the virus is infectious without the host knowing, plays a critical role in this. AIDS is a highly successful virus, because it can have up to a ten-year incubation period. I learned that measles could lay dormant for fifty years.
I was critically ill with time on my hands to ruminate both within and on the spread of disease and information. My arts practice had reflected for some time previously on scientific themes and metaphors of mutation and infection, and now the analogies between virus, image, memory and gestation became of extreme fascination and relevance.
I began work on Contagion later that year with Dr Keith Skene from Dundee University, a collaborator on a previous work, Silvers Alter. We shared a similar curiosity with the parallels between living systems, be these microbiological or societal, and more specifically the effect of newcomers into these systems. My particular interest stemming from my ‘disease’ and internment was with the similarities and differences of various biological infections and the cultural, political and economic systems surrounding the research of these diseases and the economies of R & D into their treatment. This combined with an ongoing investigation of how systems re-organize and react when new entities join (players, mutants, infections, ‘synthetic’ genes, new species, for example), suggesting wider implications than the purely technological and biological. How do communities evolve when newcomers, for example asylum seekers or migrant laborers, join them? This interest in the cultural and ethical implications of gene patenting and new reproductive technologies evolved through a long interest in what human traits are deemed valuable. This has been informed by early exposure to the politics of eugenics, informed by a trip to the Majdanek Concentration Camp near Lublijn, within the context of me discovering my own family history whilst on a family ‘holiday’, aged seven.
Between 2003-2007, living in Australia, I started collaborating with a some highly esteemed epidemiologists working in diverse fields, all sharing almost obsessive interest in how their research might be applied into everyday life. Dr James Fielding, Dr Stephen Corbett and Professor Nick Crofts, all played a significant part in my research and development of the concepts and content within Contagion.
Dr James Fielding had studied the transmission of measles amongst abstainers from childhood immunisation programmes in South Australia. Obviously people sharing values and beliefs against ‘convention’ generally tend to group socially together, and cluster into supportive communities. This has a fatal effect when one of these non-immunised children contracts measles. James had worked on tracing the source of the first contamination. The exchange at a supermarket checkout turned out to be the first point of contaminating a young boy, who then went on to fatally infect numerous other children in the community.
Dr Stephen Corbett had been involved with mapping the outbreak of SARS at Amoy Gardens, 2002, and was investigating control mechanisms for the expected pandemic of avian flu in Australia. Stephen was also running an international workshop on bio-aerosols, in which we participated. One of his interests was in the relationship between infectious disease and invasion. Many countries suffered defeat not at the hands of superior armies from the west, but by the diseases their soldiers brought or ignited by not adhering to local customs and eating of clearly diseased animals. It is disturbances of the environment that have historically created new opportunities for new infections to spread and War is, of course, a great environmental disturbance. These changes, along with destruction, have historically often created new opportunities, evolution of ideas, customs and beliefs.
Stephen had studied the 1918 flu outbreak, which transferred between animal species. Part of the current concern over the potential proliferation of avian flu is that the ‘natural reservoir’ of the avian influenza viruses is migratory wild birds – and although these birds are most resistant to the infection, the domestic birds that they frequently come into contact with, including chickens and turkeys, are particularly susceptible to epidemics of rapidly fatal influenza.
These Influenza viruses can swap or “reassort” genetic materials and merge. This re-assortment process, known as antigenic “shift”, and it results in a new subtype different from both parent viruses. Conditions favorable for this to happen have long been thought to involve humans living in close proximity to domestic poultry and pigs. Because pigs are susceptible to infection with both avian and human viruses, they can serve as a “mixing vessel” for the scrambling of genetic material, resulting in the emergence of a novel subtype. Evidence is also mounting that humans themselves also serve as sites for the genetic mutation of viruses. As new subtypes mutate faster than either natural or manufactured immunity, antigenic shift results in highly lethal pandemics. For this to happen, the novel subtype needs to have genes from human influenza viruses that make it readily transmissible from person to person for a sustainable period. Birds that survive infection excrete virus for at least 10 days, orally and in faeces, thus facilitating further spread at live poultry markets and by migratory birds. Stephen told me the story of one of the first outbreaks of human bird flu was the owner of a prize cock, “when their prize fighter cocks got a cold the owners would literally suck the snot out of it…”
Professor Nick Crofts, Director of Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, Melbourne, studied the epidemiology and control of blood-borne viruses, especially Hepatitis C among injecting drug users and prisoners in Australia, as well as a continuing program of research on HIV, AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. His major programmatic focus has been in preventing the spread of HIV among injecting drug users, especially in Asia. He had also mapped the spread of drug use as a communicable phenomenon using as a model the spread of knowledge between intravenous drug users in Footscray, Melbourne. He suggested that this displayed a reverse process to the spread of a virus, emanating out from source; contrarily, it was the uninitiated ‘novice’ in this situation who would force their way into this circle, the source of infection. Entry to this world, for young people who had nothing else, was a rite of passage. The novice approached the experienced user, the source of infection; and any 'randomness' about the choice of partner occurs within the 'sociogeographic space' one already inhabits.
In Australia the ideas for Contagion were reshaped as a result of the input from these people and from my perception of the different use of social spaces there; living on the other side of the world, I could see how outside and inside were reversed – opening the doors in the morning brought a blast of hot air rather than cold – people lived outside, and social space therefore was shared differently.
In Federation Square, a large civic space in Melbourne, the security cameras were treated like a game, surveillance images being broadcast live on the web. During a football match the square would be crowded with people sitting on the stone floor in the sunshine, their image broadcast live on the large screen intermittently along with live televised events.
The paradoxes raised by Australians’ geographical location and cultural attachment to the West and the composition of its population also contributed to the development of my ideas. The Greek, Macedonian, Serbian, Italian, families living in our street alone all considered home to be their country of origin. These continental émigrés were deliberately targeted by the Australian Government for their suitability to work in the Victorian climate. Non-indigenous Australians were people who moved, got out or were displaced from their home country for some reason or another; eloping from Ireland in an illegitimate affair, trying to find a new life for refuges from World War II, being incarcerated when Australia was considered a prison, or for some, attracted by new opportunities such as the gold rush. Most migrants to Australia were either people or their offspring who wanted or needed to move away from their roots, socially, economically, or culturally. Currently the population of Melbourne is purported to be 50% Asian. Australia is an island with the same population of Greater London.
The successful containment of public health risks depends on the epidemiological and laboratory capacity of affected countries and the adequacy of surveillance systems already in place. It also depends on the ability to contain the virus. Today's efficient air travel ensures a virus that can be carried by humans would spread to all parts of the globe within days. Without the ability to travel out of Australia, perhaps with a breakdown in electronic systems, Australia is easily quarantinable.
The two pandemics that have affected the ‘first world countries’ recently are SARS and human variant avian flu (bird flu). Both of these have been evidenced as having originated in Asia. The epidemiological studies that had been undertaken in the 2002 outbreak of SARS showed that there were three schools of thought on how this spread; firstly, airborne; secondly through water transportation; and thirdly, by vermin.
“[In] the white heat of public debate generated by this epidemic in Hong Kong, Public Authorities were at pains to say that SARS was not a wind borne infection, and they were probably right for all circumstances except those pertaining at Amoy Gardens. Subsequent modeling has demonstrated this convincingly.” SC
The visualisation of a theory of airborne infection radically helped scientists to understand very complex data patterns. As an artist I had been experimenting with graphic interfaces which aestheticised scientific concept; previous media art works such as Silvers Alters and Infected considered contexts in which images are presented and how they are further authenticated by practice and institution.
Epidemiologists, in tracing spread and patterns of infection, also investigate human behaviour, human movement, individual, mass and swarm behaviours. They look at a broad and complex interrelationship of disease, food supply, human densities, habit patterns, number and distribution of hosts, the life-cycle of the virus, immunity, susceptibility, evolution and mutation of viral strains. We attempted to translate these considerations for the programming of Contagion, in terms of biological spread.
The scientist agreed that the fear of pandemic is greater than the pandemic itself. Human fear through the mediation of information causes mass hysteria and panic. What may have been effective quarantine measures in the 1918 outbreak – isolation until the virus has no more hosts and subsequently dies out – now poses a different problem. Questions of border control could not be overlooked, especially in Australia where passengers of civic planes are traditionally sprayed with insecticide and where citizenship was first tested. How do you isolate communities such as Australia? What are the ethical complications surrounding border control, the denial of visas and electronic funds to travel? Would isolation in a totally electronically dependent migration system be simple? Who would be administered vaccination (already out of date due to the speed of mutation of the virus)? Who would be permitted to travel out? Or would the virus spread before awareness grew sufficiently to prevent international travel? If we don’t know about the pandemic, we cannot react, and mass behavior cannot be controlled. We are controlled by the mediation of information.
Moiré Sinister by Sean Cubitt (back to top)
Moiré Sinister by Sean Cubitt
The figures in the darkened room move round looking up at the screens where their smoky images move with them. When they touch, colours and sounds intersect. There is a virus in the room.
A virus cannot replicate itself: it needs a host. When William Burroughs described language as 'a virus from outer space' he implied that language needs a human host to reproduce, just like any other virus. From the point of view of language, we are just warm meat where it can find the missing sequences that allow its RNA to replicate. Communication needs us in the same way we need air. It doesn't care about us. Stories don't care who tells them, so long as they are told again, infecting the next generation. Religions infect generation upon generation. Ideas of science and beauty are passed along like colds. Media are the vectors of viruses, and meaning is their symptom. Meaning and emotion.
Out here in the cold of interstellar space there spins this fragile ball of warmth and wet. It is the most intricate thing we know. On this planet there is a huge biomass, millions of tons of it, called humanity. There is a law of ecological science: for a given area, there is an optimum number of species. You can observe this closely on islands. The human biomass is an island. There are not enough species to populate it. In a crowded world, lots of species would like to live in our nice island environment. Many species have been there for millennia; parasites that help us digest and take their percentage off the top, others that clean our teeth. Some are nastier, and kill us if we don't keep feeding them. And many have no care for us.
These are the viruses that are most like people. They come into an environment – me, for example – thrive, reproduce, devastate the place they are in, and move on. This could be the history of SARS, or the history of Australian colonisation. Colonists care no more for the land than digital signals care about cables.
This metaphor breaks down only if you believe, as we have trained ourselves to believe, that cables don’t care about signals either. But the truth is that signals and cables cannot be distinguished from each other, any more than story tellers can be separated from stories, the religious from their religions, media from what they mediate. And since societies are so entirely composed of mediations that it is impossible to conceive of a society without media, we must begin to recognise that infection with the virus of communication is not an option.
It is not an option because the infection brings us great delight. Our media of communication – stories and sex, clothing and cooking, songs and art – have as their symptoms pleasures and meanings we would not forgo. We love our disease.
But there are media we do not love so much. Weapons are media. They have simple, stupid, ugly messages; mostly, they say ‘Die’. Many of our symbols speak about weapons, and other media we do not love so well, like money and its lack. That is a medium no-one wants to be entirely deprived of, now, in this economic world. Symbols of poverty and pain are mixed with the symbols of love, warmth, comfort and well-being, in unexpected shapes, shapes we call stories, poems, songs, works of art. Or television. Or the internet.
In this darkened room of Contagion, images from television swim up in response to movements and interactions. This is a curiosity. As a species, we were used to making images and symbols. Now they come to find us, in endless streams, seeking out the warm, wet interiors where they can nestle, breed and find new hosts. We think they are 'our' media, but the truth is that we are theirs; we are the medium they pass through on their way to the next warm host.
To this extent, humans are like television sets. Nobody cares about the inner life of a television or a computer. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out. There is one difference however. Humans are unusual because what came into us before stays in us long enough to effect the next thing that comes in. We mutate the messages we get by making them interact with older messages. This makes us translating machines, machines that routinely produce misunderstanding. We also have the special quality of keeping things for years, even decades at a time, before we pass them on. Secrets, or things we have forgotten, or things we know so surely we have forgotten that once upon a time we had to learn them. Sometimes those things emerge, years later, in some utterly new form, magically transformed or horribly disfigured.
Into this darkened room we bring all our previous contagions: all the pictures, sounds, touches, tastes and scents we have ever sensed. We introduce them to the flux of other images. One shows these smoky figures that are in some electronic mirror 'us', pictures moving on a wall. But other pictures nudge at the edges of perception, images of great fragility and great violence. Gathered from the low-resolution environs of the Web, they are not clear. They too bear the scars of their histories, the trails of distribution, compression, decompression, formats they have passed through from camera to projection. They too remember how they got here, though like us they have no recollection of where they came from.
Some recall iconic moments: napalm in a Vietnamese rice field; nuclear tests. Some might be anywhere or any time: ultrasound embryos suspended before gravity; the microscopic replications of germs. Some are fearful. All are anxious, even the innocuous picture of a street corner seems to hide an ominous potential. Once it might have seemed that horror simply took place, untidily in a corner of a field while the rest of the world got on with ploughing and with suckling the children. But now every contact, every turn of the road seems to hide a nameless threat.
What are we to do? The world has begun to notice the vast unpopulated pampas of the human biomass, and has begun to hurl at us retroviruses from SARS to Ebola.
There is the religious defense. God strikes down his foes, the godless fornicators, with the vengeance of his immuno-deficiency syndrome. The god of the righteous is an unrighteous god. Ignorance is a great defense: there can be no transfer of avian flu to humans because there is no such thing as evolution. To stockpile antigens is blasphemy. Someone should tell George Bush.
Ignorance is deliberate isolation. People make themselves ignorant in an effort to protect themselves from the unwelcome. Their solution is to stop communicating: to allow nothing new into their translation machines, and to repeat forever the mantras of the past, as if the mantra would not mutate and evolve itself into something unrecognisably other than itself. Ignorance and the killing of communication means the beautiful colours and sounds of human interaction, the unforeseen excellence of acquaintance with a new mind, a new body, should be sacrificed. It is a kind of biosecurity, but it is also a kind of anti-immigration law, a Patriot Act of the mind.
It is an irony that so many of our symbols now are made to make us feel insecure, nervous, afraid. It has given rise to what is called biopolitics: the management of populations. Scared of what might happen, we surrender to governments and corporations, experts and civil servants, the task of arranging matters so that we only risk what we must, only gamble on sure-fire winners, or at least ring-fence the stubborn percentage of criminals, psychotics and sick people. From life insurance to epidemiology, we have given away our roll of the dice, our openness to chance, in favour of a planned and authorised regime of the good enough.
Some remnant of our old condition still remains. Mass management of populations has its limits. It can describe and plan for aberrations of the larger kind: crimes, illnesses. But the constant microscopic deviations of a body moving in a darkened room looking upwards at the screen, this is not controllable. If the biopolitical mind that manages populations is a database, the near-involuntary jostlings of people in this room are the database's unconscious, the material reality of gesture that escapes its plan.
Gina Czarnecki invites us to dive into the gene pool without washing our feet. To splash in the fluids. To take the risks, and to abide by the consequences. From initial exploration and play, the experience of the work gradually reveals its latent causalities, the interactions between people, which make a difference. There is a risk of glamourising the terrible pictures, but only if we do not understand the theatre of responsibility which we are invited to perform. The degraded image, smoky, grainy, dusty, foggy, pixellated, its colours drained or displaced, is a token of our place in these chains of connection, the grammar of images, articulated in our eyes as the virus of language is expressed in our voices. We do not chose which language we speak, but we can choose what things we say, and to whom.
Gina Czarnecki interviewed by Erin Branigan (back to top)
Gina Czarnecki’s film and installation artworks are informed by the human body’s relationship to disease, evolution, genetic research and the technologies of image production. The work is often made in close collaboration with specialists in these fields. In her writing, Czarnecki describes a childhood trip to Poland with her father, a survivor of WW2 concentration camps, and the impact this has had on her art. She has ultimately found a parallel between the reduction of human life to genetic units through DNA analysis and the technology of digital imaging with its modifiable pixel units, finding both can work as arbiters of, and smokescreens between, us and the ‘truth’. Czarnecki has applied these ideas to her most recent work Contagion, which is being funded by the prestigious Sciart Awards in the UK, the Art and Innovation programme in Victoria, and Melbourne City Council Arts Project award. The Wellcome Trust’s Sciart scheme ‘supports imaginative and experimental arts projects that investigate biomedical science’ and has its equivalent here in the Synapse project at the Australia Council for the Arts. Contagion uses mapping techniques employed to track contagious diseases such as SARS. Recently relocated to Australia from the UK, Czarnecki has collaborated with dance artists at Australian Dance Theatre, musicians, programmers and scientists working in the field of epidemiology. Her work is at the cutting-edge interface between science and art and here she talks to RealTime about Sciart, Contagion, and the broad sweep of her interests.
Science and Art
To give you a sense of the project, the scientists involved with contagion are epidemiologists based in Australia. James Fielding is from the Victorian Government’s Infectious Diseases Unit. Steven Corbett, who I got in touch with regarding the 3D computational mapping of SARS, is now one of the leading scientists involved with developing control systems for bird flu pandemic. And Nick Crofts runs the Turning Point drugs and alcohol rehabilitation centre. All of these people are specialists not only in epidemiology but also specifically in observing the patterns of human interaction and behaviour under various extreme conditions.
Keith Skene is my long term collaborator and is a micro-biologist interested in the evolution of eco-systems. We mainly work together over a Guinness, having really good conversations about the migration of birds, pollen and forensics, slime moulds, or the way systems evolve when newcomers join them - which is the basis for this project. Adaptation, evolution and change: mutation. What’s essentially human? The biological in its physical and psychological forms. That’s the territory I share with these scientists. And then there are a number of other related things I am seriously interested in which come together in this project.
Mapping disease
One is the notion of purity and contagion and the spread of disease. I was sick for some time in Scotland following a trip to Kumasi, Ghana. The doctors in the isolation ward where I was being cared for suspected Ebola (making a scary front page newspaper story). Consequently I learned a lot about the virus. Ebola is transferred exactly the same way as AIDS, but it’s not as successful as AIDS because it tends to wipe out entire communities, so it’s contained in that way. So then I started to look at successful diseases and their change over time, how they are transmitted and their effect on the way the world has evolved. For example, invading armies disregard local rules that are transmitted verbally through generations, unwittingly spreading disease. Europeans invading America, Australia and the islands caused so much biological havoc that a lot of those communities were totally destroyed, which provides a theory as to why it was easy for white people to invade and dominate most of the planet.
Contagion uses the SARS outbreak in Amoy Gardens in Hong Kong 2002 as an epidemiological example. Why I am interested in that outbreak is that there are 3 schools of thought on how it was transmitted - rat droppings, sewerage and airborne. In the case for airborne, 3D computational graphics were used. I’m interested in the possibility that the compelling visualisations, or the ability to visualise the outbreak, provided a kind of visual proof authenticating one theory. When the news of the potential airborne nature of SARS became public what followed was, as Stephen Corbett describes it, a ‘pandemic of fear’ which can be far more dangerous that the virus itself. Humankind’s only remaining threat is either ourselves or single cell, microbiological disease which is invisible and mostly indiscriminate.
What is perceived as the disease’s incubation period, the mortality rate, the risk factors and the epidemiological laws are used as a starting point for the programming rules of the interactive installation, Contagion.
Mechanical reproduction and imaging the truth
Contagion is also about an interest I have always had in the image and authenticity - how we have come to accept certain symbols or images as ‘visual truth’. My most recent work Spine 1.2 (union) gave rise to a lot of questions about falling bodies. Critic/curator, Sally-Jane Norman made an association between this work and imagery of 9/11 on a news list. I am interested in how quickly an image is attributed to - or contaminated by - a certain event, or becomes owned by a nation’s history as in this case.
We depend on context to recognise an image of truth. Science, law, medicine and the military present images and we take them as authentic, but so many of them are artificially constructed. Art can present fact but it’s often perceived as fiction. Medicine has been developing imaging technologies to prove the existence of something – scanning, the ultra-sound, the infra-red. I was on a train journey in the UK and I sat opposite a gulf war engineer and he said that ‘of course we kill people but we see them as little green dots on the screen and we just zap them’. So, on the one hand we have the technology to be able to see inside a womb and find any deformities, but we also use the same technology as a smokescreen between us and the reality of human destruction.
God, pigs and disease
And this question of truth and authenticity is linked to the demise of organised religions and the rise of scientific theories. The word quarantine comes from 40. It was allegedly a Christian system to stop contamination; a boat had to be docked for 40 days before they could bring anything onshore. It was so successful that it is believed to be the reason Christianity succeeded so well in certain places where other religions didn’t observe quarantine rules.
Then you look at the pig which genetically is most similar to us and the only animal that can catch influenza. The close proximity between humans, pigs and birds in Asia is thought to be the reason why bird flu seems to be stemming from there. The pig becomes the carrier or the host which transforms the virus between the humans and birds. We seem to have detached ourselves from traditional reasons for abstaining from eating pork as we have dissociated local tradition from spiritual belief, science and medicine. So I’m interested in mapping the history of western biomedical sciences alongside societal rules and the development of control mechanism for disease in an increasingly populated world.
The Installation
I was sitting in Federation Square in Melbourne watching people watching themselves on the ‘big’ screen. The quality of interaction made me reassess previous assumptions about interaction in more sanitised art gallery settings and inspired me to push interaction within my work further. I began by considering how the general public interact or respond to surveillance on a day to day basis (never mind the 90’s utopian theory).
I want people to have a visceral experience, albeit it digital, and hence have been developing an interface with Tim Kreger of a big colour palette in the installation space where people could mix colours in a liquid way. This makes up one projection on three circular screens in the space. The way the colour is mixed is based on people’s action and interaction and the spread of disease across changing environmental conditions. Participants are aware that through their movements they are spreading an infectious disease, but it becomes a compelling and intoxicating game. We’re using surveillance software that’s been specifically developed to recognise people based on motion and average colour. So if you leave the room and come back again, you will be recognised. This interest in the human body on a micro and macrocosmic level, the articulation of movement, interaction and mapping connects strongly to the many installation and dance projects I have done prior to this. Combining the observation of movement and time is my current exploration.
Contagion will have a trial at the Sydney Powerhouse Beta Space to gather information on interaction from the end of September until 16 October and will premiere in Melbourne in March 2007.
(Melbourne, September 2006)
Contributors (back to top)
Gina Czarnecki, Artist
Gina Czarnecki's films and installations are informed by human relationships to image, disease, evolution, genetic research, and by advanced technologies of image production. Through micro-editing and weaving tapestries of images, Czarnecki constructs vivid, highly aesthetic spaces.Christian Fennesz, Sound
Christian Fennesz is an internationally renowned electronic musician and composer, who uses guitar and computer to create shimmering, swirling electronic soundscapes of enormous range and musical complexity. Fennesz has created scores for several of Czarnecki’s projects including Spine, Nascent and Infected. As a musician, his most recent albums Endless Summer [Mego, 2001] and Venice [Touch, 2004] achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim. Fennesz lives and works between Vienna and Paris.Tim Kreger, Programmer
Tim Kreger is an interactive designer, creating works for museums, galleries and commercial organisations. He has an interest in developing fluid and responsive environements which entertain, engage and sometime challenge the user. He has worked closely with other artist in many collabortive projects. http://www.audioreactive.comStephen Corbett, Consultant Scientist
Dr Stephen Corbett is Acting Director at the Centre for Population Health, Sydney and Conjoint Associate Professor at the School of Public Health, Western Clinical School, University of Sydney. He is a leading expert in the environmental aspects and modeling of communicable diseases, and is the author of numerous articles and publications on Public Health issues. He is developing control mechanisms for situations of pandemic disease.Nick Crofts, Consultant Scientist
Professor Nick Crofts is a public health practitioner who has contributed substantial research on the spread and control of blood-borne viruses among injecting drug users, especially hepatitis C in Australia and HIV in Asia. Since 1990, he has worked extensively on all aspects of harm reduction, specifically control of HIV associated with drug use, in almost every country in Asia. He co-founded the Asian Harm Reduction Network in 1996 and the Centre for Harm Reduction in 1998. He is now Director of Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Fitzroy, Australia.James Fielding, Consultant Scientist
James Fielding is Surveillance Manager at the Communicable Diseases Section of the Department of Human Services at the State of Victoria, Australia. His interest is the spread of Measles amongst abstainers from the child immunisation programmes in SA.Keith Skene, Consultant Scientist
Keith Skene is a Lecturer in Natural History at the University of Dundee in Scotland. He is interested in how life evolved and how it is structured. His most recent work focuses on the role of energy as the organizing force of the Biosphere, pervading every level, from protein structure to ecosystems, and how such a universal concept can help predict what life on other planets may look like. Keith strongly believes that collaborative work between artists and scientists is essential, if we are to bridge the physical-metaphysical divide. Narrow fields of interest are limiting the human race, in terms of facing the challenges that lie ahead.Sean Cubitt, Writer
Sean Cubitt was born in Lincolnshire of Irish parents. He studied at Queens' College Cambridge and McGill University, Montreal. In the 1980s he worked freelance in art schools, community arts, journalism, the Open University and as National Organiser for the Society for Education in Film and Television. He spent the 1990s in Liverpool, where he became Professor of Media Arts at Liverpool John Moores University, and was involved in developing the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT). In 2000, he moved to New Zealand with wife Alison and dog Zebedee, where he was Professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato. In 2002 he was appointed Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee. He now holds dual nationality with New Zealand and the UK. In July 2006 we moved to Melbourne, where Sean is Director of the Program in Media and Communications. His publications include Digital Aesthetics, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia. He is the editor of the Leonardo Book Series, serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, and publishes widely in media, globalisation and aesthetics.Lizzie Muller, Interactivity Consultant
Lizzie Muller is a curator, writer and researcher specialising in interaction, audience experience and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD with the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney. Recent curatorial projects include the Mirror States exhibition at Campbelltown Art Gallery, Sydney and MIC, Auckland May-August 2008. She is the co-organiser of the research project Thinking Through the Body, funded by the Australia Council. In 2007 she was researcher in residence at the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal. Between 2004-2006 Lizzie was founding curator of Beta_space; a dedicated venue for exhibiting “prototypes” of interactive artworks at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Lizzie lectures on digital art, curatorial practice and interaction design at undergraduate and post-graduate level.Forma Arts & Media Ltd., Producer
Forma is one of Europe’s leading production agencies for high quality, interdisciplinary contemporary art. Collaborating with some of today’s most interesting artists, it produces, tours and publishes groundbreaking new projects that seamlessly combine diverse media. Its programme pioneers new hybrid forms of music, visual art, film, new media, dance, theatre and live art.
Forma’s international programme encompasses single concerts and large–scale tours for leading performing and visual arts venues and festivals; one-off exhibitions in established visual arts spaces; screenings at film and new media festivals; and major public realm projects that engage with particular places.