Christa Erickson, cDACT Director and Associate Professor of Art
Electronic Installation, Physical Computing, Video Art
Staller 4246, 631.632.1058 christa.erickson@stonybrook.edu
Erickson is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the politics, pleasures, and pains of spaces mediated by electronic technologies. She weaves together combinations of video, tactile materials, programming, physical cinematic devices, and live data in interactive installations. Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited widely both within the United States and abroad. Sites within the United States where her work has been shown include the PPOW (NY), Jamaica Center for the Arts (NY), SVA Visual Arts Museum (NY); the Walker Art Center (MN); the Institute for Studies in the Arts at ASU (AZ); the California Museum of Photography; Maryland Art Place; and Firehouse Gallery (VT) as well as numerous university galleries and museums. Internationally, she has had exhibits at the Banff Center for the Arts (CAN), the Hong Kong Arts Centre, several art museums in Argentina, and at international media arts festivals like FILE (Brazil), SIGGRAPH Asia (Japan), CYNETart (Germany), HTMLLES (Canada), Medi@terra (Greece and Eastern Europe), and Ciber@rt (Spain). Her work has been cited in the New York Times, Leonardo, Village Voice, Wired, Parachute, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, San Diego Union Tribune, Arizona Republic, and "Coolsite of the Day." She was Artist-in-Residence at the Hong Kong Arts Centre for Digital Now 2003 and an Artist-in-Residence at Sculpture Space in 2007. She also writes, curates, and regularly speaks about new media. Her essay "Networked Interventions: Debugging the Electronic Frontier" appears in the anthology Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Urban Metropolis (Routledge, 2002). She teaches digital arts courses and has received a Presidential Mini-Grant for Innovative Teaching. Her background includes commercial print and web design, media and animation production, and software engineering. Ms. Erickson has an MFA from the University of California, San Diego and degrees in sculpture and computer science from the University of Texas, Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at Stony Brook, she taught at UC, San Diego and at Indiana University, where she founded the University’s Digital Media program.

Tamara Berg, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Digital Media, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision
Tamara Berg's main research area is Digital Media, specifically focused on organizing large collections of images with associated text through the use of techniques from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. Today billions of images with associated text are available in web pages, captioned photographs from news sources, video with speech or closed captioning, and others. In order to organize, search and exploit these enormous collections we have developed methods that combine information from both the visual and textual sources effectively. Past projects include: automatically identifying people in news photographs, classifying images from the web, and finding iconic images in consumer photo collections. She spent 2007-8 working as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research where she developed various digitial media related projects including the automatic annotation of consumer photographs.

Raiford Guins, Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies
Digital Cultural Studies, Game Studies, Media Controls
Humanities 2121, 631.632.7456 raiford.guins@stonybrook.edu
Working across media, cinema, and visual studies, Raiford Guins’ thinking is deeply interdisciplinary. It reflects the doctoral training in cultural studies that he pursued within the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. How consumer technology – Internet filters, the V-chip, “clean” versions of music, DVD players that block content, and video game consoles with parental controls - perform censorial actions is the subject of his book, Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (University of Minnesota, 2009). He also teaches and writes about video game culture. His work on sound, black cultural producers, and game history appears in AfroGEEKS: Beyond the Digital Divide (Center for Black Studies, UCSB, 2007). He has also arranged a photo-essay on the French artist, “Invader,” for Design Issues, composed an elegy to Ms. Pac Man for Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, and argued for the importance of the spatio-materiality of games in Journal of Visual Culture. At present Raiford is writing a book for Routledge on video game culture. In addition to roaming the world for games, he actively studies everyday objects and things as well as design history. One related publication is The Object Reader (co-edited with Fiona Candlin, Routledge 2009) which collects seminal work on objects as well as produces original work dedicated to the study of single objects. Lastly, Raiford is a founding Principal Editor with the Journal of Visual Culture (Sage) and he has edited Popular Culture: A Reader (co-edited with Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, Sage 2005). He has contributed chapters to the following collections:  the MacArthur Foundation Series Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (MIT, 2008), The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (MIT, 2006), Horror International  (Wayne State, 2005), The Techniques of Terror: The Films of John Carpenter (Wallflower, 2005), The Visual Culture Reader 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2003), and Lost Highways: An Illustrated Guide to the Road Film (Creation, 2000). His research also appears in journals such as: New Formations, West Coast Line, Television and New Media, and Parallax.

Zabet Patterson, Assistant Professor of Art
Digital Visual Culture/Art and Technology
Staller 4289, 631.632.1915 zabet.patterson@stonybrook.edu
Zabet Patterson specializes in the history and theory of digital media with a particular emphasis on the the intersection of computational media and art in the postwar period. She received her PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley in 2007. Her dissertation, entitled Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image, was supported by fellowships from the Townsend Humanities Center, the Rhetoric Department, and the Josephine de Karman Foundation. Zabet spent 2005-6 as Visiting Assistant Professor in the departments of Art History and Art at Northwestern University. Her publications include 'Consuming Fantasy in the Digital Era', in PornographyOn/Scene, a collection edited by Linda Williams, as well as forthcoming articles on Jim Campbell and John and James Whitney.

Margaret Schedel, Assistant Professor of Music
Composition, Performance, and Interactive Media
Staller 3358, 631.632.8610 margaret.schedel@stonybrook.edu
Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media. Her works have been performed throughout the United Stated and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her thesis, an interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. She is working towards a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth and McGregor Boyle. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She serves as the musical director for Kinesthetech Sense and sits on the boards of the BEAM Foundation, the Electronic Music Foundation Institute, the International Computer Music Association, the New West Electro Acoustic Music Organization, and Organised Sound.