The Yes Men / October 10, 2007
The Yes Men have received international acclaim for their work publicly impersonating powerful individuals and corporations such as 
Exxon, Dow Chemical, and the George W. Bush presidential campaign staff, at conferences, on television, radio, film, and the internet. 
These political activists/tricksters stage these events in order to “correct” the identities of these institutions, portraying them in a light that 
the public is not used to seeing. Each of these events sparks huge media attention, harnessing the mass media as a vehicle for activism.  
Among other accomplishments, their work has resulted in two feature films, The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), and The Yes Men (2008), 
distributed by United Artists and directed by Chris Smith (American Movie, American Job, Home Movie). They have written a book, The Yes Men, 
published by Disinformation Press. Members  of the Yes Men have received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, 
The Rockefeller Fund for Media Artists, Creative Capital, and the Herb Alpert Foundation. Their work has been shown at major museums 
such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Mass/MoCA. The first major exhibition of their work debuted at the Miller Gallery at 
Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.       

LoVid / November 16, 2008
LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, 
digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting 
hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also 
reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body
and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.

Steve Kurtz / March 10, 2008
Steve Kurtz is a professor of art at the SUNY Buffalo, former professor of art history at Carnegie Mellon University and a founding member of the 
performance art group, Critical Art Ensemble. He is known for his work in BioArt, and Electronic Civil Disobedience, and because of his arrest by 
the FBI in May 2004. His work often deals with social criticism. Since its formation in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida, the Critical Art Ensemble has 
been frequently invited to exhibit and perform projects examining issues surrounding information, communications and bio-technologies by 
museums and other cultural institutions. These include The Whitney Museum and The New Museum in NYC; The Corcoran Museum in Washington 
D.C.; The ICA, London; The MCA, Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and The London Museum of 
Natural History; and the Kunsthalle Luzern. The collective has written six books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages. Its 
work has been covered by art journals, including Artforum, Kunstforum, and The Drama Review. Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of awards, 
including the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, 
and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation.

Paul DeMarinis / March 17, 2008
Paul DeMarinis has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer 
installations and interactive electronic inventions. He has performed internationally, at The Kitchen, Festival d'Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in 
Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz and created music for Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His interactive audio artworks have been shown at the I.C.C. 
in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York and The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Exploratorium 
and at Xerox PARC and has received major awards and fellowships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., 
N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Award and the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artist Fellowship.  Much of his 
work involves speech processed and synthesized by computers, available on the Lovely Music Ltd. compact disc "Music as a Second Language", and the 
Apollohuis CD "A Listener's Companion" Major installation works include "The Edison Effect" that uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning 
ancient phonograph records with lasers, "Gray Matter" that uses the interaction of body and electricity to make music, and "The Messenger" and "Firebirds" that 
examine the myths of electrical communication.  Public artworks include large scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, at the 1996 Olympics 
in Atlanta and Expo 1998 in Lisbon and an interactive audio environment at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport in 2003.
 DeMarinis is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.   
 http://www.well.com/~demarini/ 

Nao Bustamante / April 24, 2008
Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance and video artist originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California.  Her (often precarious) work 
encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video. Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around 
the world. Her work has been exhibited, among other locales at, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the 
Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts 
Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. Most recently she was one of four winners of the Chase Legacy Film Challenge grant in partnership with HBO and Kodak, 
presented at the Sundance Film Festival 08.  
 Bustamante holds the position as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.   
 http://www.naobustamante.com/  

Paper Rad / May 6, 2008 
Paper Rad is a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania/Providence, Rhode Island American art collective that makes comics zines, video art, net art, MIDI files, paintings, 
installations, and are in a variety of bands. The three primary members are Jacob Ciocci (OBERLIN ALUM!), Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones.Although they 
continue to publish their own zines, music, and online content, they are represented by Foxy Production gallery in New York and have shown at several major 
galleries including Pace Wildenstein, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Deitch Projects. They also published a book, Paper Rad, BJ and da Dogs in 
late-2005 as well a DVD on Load Records in 2006 (Trash Talking). 
 http://www.paperrad.org/index-temp.html
 http://www.paperrad.org/
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Rad  

Matt Coolidge / September 25, 2008
Matt Coolidge is the Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a non-profit art/research organization that employs a 
multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. He serves as a 
project director, photographer and curator for CLUI exhibitions, and has written several books published by the CLUI, including Back to the Bay: An Examination of the 
Shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Region (2001), and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (1996). He lectures widely in the United 
States and Europe on contemporary landscape matters, and is a faculty member in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts, where he 
teaches a class about “nowhere.” Coolidge received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2004, a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship in 2005, and in 
2006 was honored with the Lucelia Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, an award given to one artist a year under 50 who has made a distinguished 
contribution to American art. The work of the CLUI has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and other institutions around the world.
 http://www.clui.org   
CLICK HERE TO SEE WORK PRODUCED IN CONJUNCTION WITH THIS VISIT, (DIVERSIFY OR DECAY: THE RUST BELT BUCKLES)

Trevor Paglen / December 8, 2008
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism, and 
other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. Paglen's visual work has been exhibited at 
Transmediale Festival, Berlin; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); 
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the Istanbul Biennial 2009, and has been featured in numerous publications 
including The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, Modern Painters, Aperture, and Art Forum. Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, 
Art Matters, Artadia, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. Paglen is the author of three books. His first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s 
Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006) was the first book to systematically describe the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. 
His second book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Melville House, 2007) an examination of the visual culture of “black” military 
programs, was published in Spring 2008. His third book, Blank Spots on a Map, was published by Dutton/Penguin in early 2009. In spring 2010, Aperture will 
publish a book of his visual work. Paglen holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley, an M.F.A. frm the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from 
UC Berkeley. Paglen lives and works in Oakland, CA and New York City.

Nathan Martin / November 19, 2008
Nathan has over 10 years of experience leading interdisciplinary teams in the creation of interactive systems. Nathan was a Research Fellow and Artist in Residence at the 
Studio for Creative Inquiry @ Carnegie Mellon University for 3 years before launching DeepLocal. Martin is also founder of an internationally exhibited art group called 
Carbon Defense League which has a ten year history creating media art that has received mainstream attention through media outlets such as BBC, CNN, and ABC. 
Martin is also founder of two musical groups, a since defunct internationally touring band and an experimental sound art group. Martin has taught Art and Design at the 
university level for three years and was recently recognized as one of the top 40 entrepreneurs under age 40 in the country by American Venture Magzine. He has worked 
for clients including Palm Computing, General Dynamics and NASA. Nathan holds an MFA in electronic and time-based media from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Roger Conover / March 16, 2009
Roger Conover is Executive Editor at MIT Press, where he is responsible for the publication of nearly 1000 titles in art, architecture, and related fields. The publishing 
program he began at MIT Press in the 1970s has attained legendary status, not only within the context of academic publishing, but contemporary art and architecture at 
large. Among the series of books he has launched at MIT Press are several he edits himself, including one on writings by contemporary artists and another on East 
European avant-gardes. Educated as a poet, Conover's own writing has been supported by grants from the Watson Foundation, the Loeb Fellowship, and the Academy 
of American Poets. A strong advocate for the role of editors and curators as cultural producers, Conover has served on the editorial boards of Harvard Design Magazine, 
Whitechapel Gallery, and Tate Magazine, and has guest curated exhibitions for several museums in Europe, most recently ZKM.
      

Rick Prelinger / February 25, 2009
Rick Prelinger, an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was 
acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years’ operation. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available 
online for free viewing, downloading and reuse.  Rick has taught in the MFA Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts and lectured widely on American cultural 
and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access.  He made three laserdiscs and fourteen CD-ROMs with the legendary Voyager Company, 
and sat on the National Film Preservation Board for five years as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. His feature-length film “Panorama Ephemera,” 
depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004 and played in venues around the world.  His “Field Guide to Sponsored Films,” was 
published in 2006 by the National Film Preservation Foundation.  He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library that is open 
to the public, located in downtown San Francisco. 

Simparch / April 13, 2009
SIMPARCH is an American artist collective that was founded in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1996. Presently this group is organized and maintained by Matthew Lynch 
and Steve Badgett. Their practice involves large-scale, usually interactive installations and works that, as the group's name suggests, examine simple architecture, 
building practices, site specificity and materials that may be salvaged, recycled or generally brought together with a kind of d.i.y. attitude. Often collaborating with other 
artists, builders, art critics, graffiti artists, filmmakers, and skate boarders, and musicians, SIMPARCH works at providing sites which allow for social interaction and 
experimentation with design and materials.  Simparch's work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial (2004), Documenta XI, The Tate Modern, Yerba Buena Center 
for the Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, among many other venues.  
CLICK HERE TO SEE WORK PRODUCED IN CONJUNCTION WITH THIS VISIT

Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker whose work plies the territory between experimental and documentary genres. Her films and frequent 
work in other media, including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture often explore the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes: from 
Muslim Xinjiang China, to rural Iceland, to gated suburban California. She recently completed a series of works that collectively address concepts of the paranormal 
in the information age and is presently working on a new film about the milieu of elevated threat, patriotism, wilderness and the possibility of transcendence.
Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Nato Thompson, December 3, 2009
Nato Thompson is Chief Curator for Creative Time in NYC.  Since January 2007, Nato has organized major projects for Creative Time such as Democracy in America: 
The National Campaign (2008), Paul Chan’s acclaimed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007) and Mike Nelson’s A Psychic Vacuum. Previous to Creative Time, he 
worked as Curator at MASS MoCA where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions such as The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), a survey of 
political art of the 1990s with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including BookForum, Art Journal, tema celeste, 
Parkett, Cabinet and The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The College Art Association awarded him for distinguished writing in Art Journal in 2004. He recently curated 
an exhibition for Independent Curators International titled Experimental Geography with a book available by Melville House Publishing. His book on art and activism is 
due out by Autonomedia in October 2009.      

Miya Masaoka, November 21, 2009
Miya Masaoka (born Washington, D.C., 1958) is an American musician and composer who performs on the 17-string Japanese koto zither, often augmenting it with string 
preparations and electronic triggers (as in her "Koto Monster", where additional laser beam "strings" hover over the koto). She is Japanese American.  She is known for creative, 
improvisational technique, and a sensibility that combines experimental Western approaches with the tradition of the koto.  Her compositions have included works for large 
ensembles, sometimes with unusual sound sources such as hives of bees, or the amplified sounds of human bodies (brain waves, heartbeat, etc). One notable piece was 
performed outdoors in a plaza on San Francisco's sometimes unsavory Market Street, utilizing an ensemble of dozens of musicians, a pair of male and female exotic 
dancers, and taped interviews with sex workers: "What's the Difference Between Stripping and Playing the Violin?" An impressive blend of musical composition, and 
site-specific conceptual art.  She has also done performance art utilizing insects (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, bees) crawling across her body (references to 
the Yoko Ono film Fly).  Miya Masaoka is known as one of the more distinctive members of the Bay Area Improv Scene (sometimes also called the Creative/New Music scene) 
in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a founding member of the electro-acoustic improvisation and experimental trio Maybe Monday with saxophonist Larry Ochs from 
Rova Saxophone Quartet and guitarist Fred Frith.  She is married to trombonist George Lewis. 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miya_Masaoka 

Cat Mazza
Cat Mazza is an artist whose work combines craft with digital media to explore the overlaps between textiles, technology and labor. She is the founder of microRevolt, 
a web-based project that hosts the freeware knitPro. Mazza is a 2007 Rockefeller Media Arts fellow in New Media and a 2008 Creative Capital grantee in Film/Video.
This fall her work exhibits in Craftwerk 2.0 at the Jönköpings läns Museum (Jönköpings Sweden) and She Will Always Be Younger Than Us concurrent with Judy Chicago
in Thread highlighting contemporary artists working with fiber and feminist concepts at the Art Gallery of Calgary (Alberta Canada). Past work showed at the Triennale di 
Milano (Milan, Italy), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York City), Garanti Gallery (Istanbul, Turkey) and new media festivals Futuresonic (Manchester UK), FILE 
(São Paulo, Brazil) and Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) where her work received a 2005 "Digital Communities" award. She has spoken about her work at multiple venues 
including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Museum, the New School for Social Research and Harvard University. Mazza’s work has been written about 
in the New York Times, Modern Painters, and several books including KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects of Knittings New Wave, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st 
Century and Preble's Artforms.  Mazza was a founding staff member of the New York City art and technology center Eyebeam from 1999-2002. She received her MFA from 
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005), her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (1999) and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at UMass, Boston. 

Jo-Anne Green 
Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) and its world-renowned web site Turbulence. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa she graduated
from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 with a BFA Honours in Printmaking and a major in Art History. She emigrated to Boston in 1983 where she later obtained her 
MFA in Painting from UMASS Dartmouth. In 1985, Green co-founded Cultural Resistance to educate the American public about apartheid through the art and culture of South Africa. 
Until 1991, the organization curated multiple exhibitions, organized video screenings and performances, and published a monthly newspaper.   Prior to joining NRPA in March 2002, 
Geen was instrumental in starting the artist-in-residence program at the University of New Mexico's (UNM) Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center; this initiative led to the 
creation of the Arts Technology Center (ATC). Green served as program coordinator for both the ATC and the Arts of the Americas Institute at UNM for two years before returning to 
Boston in 2001. She has earned a MS in Arts Administration from Lesley University in 2003. Green has exhibited her paintings, one-of-a-kind artist's books, and installations in South 
Africa, Boston, and New York.   (Jo-Anne Green will be visiting Oberlin in collaboration between The Margin Release Series and the ESC Series hosted by Arzu Telhan.)

Brian Springer
Brian Springer is a media artist and fixer of ephemeral histories. NY Times Media Critic Stephen Holden called his 1996 documentary, Spin "a devastating critique of 
television's profound manipulativeness in the way it packages the news and politics." His 2007 documentary, The Disappointment challenges viewers to rethink how 
histories both large and small are documented, forgotten, and integrated into the larger cultural construction of nationhood. In keeping with this project's theme of the 
historically uncanny, film critic Grady Hendrix rated The Disappointment as the #1 Best Movie of 2007 That No One Saw. Other projects include international media 
installations with Projekt Atol (1996-10), collaborative theater/media projects as an artist-in residence in local public schools, and founding the nationally respected 
grassroots media arts center Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo. A member of the Nonstop Institute's Communications Team, Springer currently serves on the Executive 
Collective for the organization in Yellow Springs. His work has been shown at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), 
the Whitney Museum (NYC), the Institute for Contemporary Art (London), and has been broadcast nationally in the U.K. and by over 80 PBS affiliates in the US. 
He currently lives in Ohio.

Atul Bhalla     
Atul Bhalla has explored the physical, historical, spiritual, and political significance of water to the urban environment and population of his city (New Delhi) through 
artworks that incorporate sculpture, painting, installation, video, photography, and performance. In Immersion, Bhalla uses sand taken directly from the Yamuna River
to make concrete casts of portable water containers. These casts are then placed in water-filled vitrines, drawing a connection between Delhi’s historical source for 
water and the spiritually absent disposable containers of today. Similarly, in his photographic works of “piaus” (water spigots)—a public source of drinking water—
Bhalla examines water as both symbol and source of renewal and reexamination. Bhalla is particularly concerned about the relationship between the Yamuna and
urban communities. The Yamuna is one of the largest tributaries of the Ganges River and tens of millions of people depend on its water for irrigation, and 
municipal/domestic use. Venerated in Hindu mythology as the goddess of life, it is also one of the most polluted rivers in the world. With a focus on pollution and
scarcity of water, Yamuna Walk traces the artist’s five-day walk around the portion of the river that encircles New Delhi. At times through this journey Bhalla was forced
to climb fences and cross concrete overpasses to continue his quest. These modern obstacles weave their way into the fabric of rural life— connecting and hampering 
its development as well as continuation. Atul Bhalla earned his BFA from Delhi University and hisMFA from the School of Art of Northern Illinois University. His work has
 been in several museum exhibitions, most notably in The Newark Museum’s “INDIA: Public Places, Private Spaces” and the Fotographie Forum Frankfurt’s “Watching me – 
Watching India: New Photography from India,” and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Triennial.