Note: This page is for the dull life-as-a-list stuff. If you want to find out about the passions and themes of my work, try the 'about' page instead.
teaching
Professor of Digital Media, Art Department, UC Irvine
Affiliated Faculty, Center in Law, Society, and Culture, UCI
Associate Director, UCI Game Culture and Technology Lab (1999-2014)
Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UCI (2009-2012; 2014-15)
editable blurb
My beat is virtuality and its discontents. I have an awkward relationship with materiality that tends to put me at odds with the art world, and my preference for immaterial and virtual forms of art entails an aversion to techno-hype and to theorizations that denigrate the reality of life as an embodied being. My longtime explorations of virtuality began with childhood make-believe and fiction writing and expanded to include anything to do with net culture, pseudonymity in its myriad forms, virtuality, and digital-native artforms. Recently, I've been doing a great deal of work as a Wikipedia editor, and several recent projects have been inspired by my research for the 400 or so Wikipedia pages I've written (mostly on women in the fields of art, literature, and science). Earlier, I created a number of works in the areas of mixed-reality performance and installation, including such projects as Far-Flung follows function (2013), Galileo in America (2012), Hangmen Also Die (2010), Playing the Rapture (2008), Demotic (2004, 2006), The Roman Forum Project (2003), and Reading Frankenstein (2003). I co-curated two early exhibitions on computer games and art: "ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games" (2003) and "SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art" (2000) at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology.
I was the founder and longtime artistic director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering Internet performance troupe founded in 1993 that appeared at numerous international venues, including the 1997 Venice Biennale, documenta X, and UpStage festivals. I am also the founder and director of the Museum of Forgery, a virtual institution dedicated to prying open the cultural dialogue around forgery and related practices such as appropriation.
I was associate editor of the anthology Searching for Sebald (ICI Press, 2007), to which I was also a contributor. Other publications include "Social Proxies and Real-World Avatars: Impersonation as a Mode of Capitalist Production" (Art Journal, 2015), "Media Commedia" (Leonardo, 2005), "Eisbergfreistadt: The Fictive and the Sublime" (Visual Communication Quarterly, 2009), "A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia" (Extensions, 2007), "Media Commedia" (Leonardo, 2005), "25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds" (Anthology of Art, 2002), and "Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery" (Tout-Fait, 2002). From 1995 to 1998 I served as Guest Editor of the annual Digital Salon issue of Leonardo: the Journal of the International Society for Arts, Sciences, and Technology..
I am a longtime Associate of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit that explores the visual methods used to document, categorize, expose, and conceal the events that define contemporary culture. My involvement with the ICI includes co-organizing exhibitions, design and production of several books combining scholarship with art, and work on multi-year projects such as The AIDS Chronicles In 2011, I produced the research project and exhibition Evidence of Evidence at the ICI. I am also a member of FemTechNet, a network of scholars and artists who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism in a variety of fields.
Please email me for a more recent or longer CV than the one linked on this page.courses
As a faculty member in electronic art and design in the Art Department at UC Irvine since 1999, I have taught a range of courses, including (at the undergraduate level) Programming for Artists, Issues in Techno-Arts, World Building, Interactive Narrative, Digital Type and Communication, Design for Print, The Graphic Novel, Hypermedia, Digital Aesthetics, Performance and Persona, Interdisciplinary Digital Art, and Artists as Writers. Graduate courses include Critique Group, Colloquium, Appropriation Art & Ownership Seminar, Virtual Identity Seminar, and Research & Writing Seminar. More about the Art Department's electronic art and design area.