Steve Wilson, is a San Francisco author, artist and professor who explores the cultural implications of new technologies. His interactive installations & performances have been shown internationally in galleries and SIGGRAPH, CHI, , Ars Electronica, and V2 art shows. His computer mediated art works probe issues such as World Wide Web & telecommunications; artificial intelligence and robotics; hypermedia and the structure of information; GPS and the sense of place; synthetic voice; and biological & environmental sensing. He won the Prize of Distinction in Ars Electronica's international competitions for interactive art and several honorary mentions. Examples of his art installations include Protozoa Games which allowed people to play pinball with live single-celled animals and TransitTime which generated sound events based on the real time position of San Franicsco public transit trains obtained via GPS. He is Head of the Conceptual/Information Arts program at San Francisco State University. He was selected as artist in residence at Xerox PARC and NTT Research labs, been a developer for several hi-tech firms, and resarcher in NSF projects. He has published extensively including articles such as "Dark & Light
Visions", Artist as Researcher", "The Aesthetics and Practice of
Designing Interactive Events", and "Interactive Art and Cultural Change". He has published three books, Using Computers to Create Art (Prentice Hall, 1986), Multimedia Design with HyperCard (Prentice Hall, 1991), and World Wide Design Guide (Hayden, 1995),. His last book called "Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology" published by MIT Press in, 2002 is an international survey of artists, theorists, and researchers working in advanced inquiries in fields such as biology, medicine, physics, artificial life, telepresence, body sensors, vr, artificial intelligence, and information systems.
Contact Information:
Art Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway, SF, CA 94132 (415) 338-2291 swilson@sfsu.edu http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/
Potential Contributions of Bioartists to Research
Historically, artists reflected on scientific research from a distance, perhaps borrowing the images produced by scientific apparatus or commenting on the processes of science. Currently, however, artists are questioning the passivity of this approach and are exploring a much more proactive stance in which they actually conduct research. Based on research for his book Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (MIT Press, 2002), Stephen Wilson provides a mini-survey of places artists can introduce innovations into the research process. This includes, for example, definiton of research problems coming from agendas and priorities outside of science; methods of conducting research; experimental interventions and protocols; interpretation of findings; integration with other disciplines; and visualization of findings. Wilson illustrates ways of bringing scientific protocols into the arts with examples from his 'Protozoa Games' installation which uses digital microscope and motion tracking technology to allow visitors to play a version of pinball by synchronizing their own motions with those of single-celled animals.