Ars Electronica Biographies

Amy Alexander

Amy Alexander is a digital media artist and performer of many aliases, as well as a recovering Unix administrator and filmmaker. She is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego. Somewhat specifically: she's a software artist (aka Plagiarist: plagiarist.org, aka De and Prog: deprogramming.us, aka Cue P. Doll: cuejack.com, reamweaver.com), text VJ (aka VJ Ubergeek: cyberspaceland.org, deprogramming.us), and curator. She's also one of the founders/continuers of the software art repository runme.org, along with Alex. Her software and performance projects involve the de-workification of life, the subjectivity of software, and various other repairs of technologies to make them do what they should really have done in the first place.

A more lengthy, serious, and/or tortuous biography is available upon request.

Nick Collins

Nick Collins and Fredrik Olofsson play together as klipp av, an audiovisual generative cutting algorithm duo (www.klippav.org). Nick enjoys laptop performance and computer music research. He is the author of the bbcut extension set and a number of plug-in UGens for SuperCollider.

Alex McLean

Alex Mclean writes Perl.

Adrian Ward

Adrian Ward is a software artist, programmer, systems administrator and lecturer. Since 1999, his London-based company Signwave UK has worked for a wide range of clients and customers, and has released a variety of software products, some of which question just how far one can stretch the definition of 'commercial software'. He is most known for his auto-generative software artworks that articulate concerns over authenticity, authorship and authority by deploying parody software into the graphic design community. His first piece, Autoshop - a parody of Adobe Photoshop - earned him a modest following in the Macintosh design community, whilst his latest offering, Auto-Illustrator - a fully-blown vector graphic design application - continues to insult, offend and abuse graphic designers looking for an easy ride everywhere. When performing music, Adrian works in collaboration with Alex McLean under the name of Slub. Together, they write generative software applications and perform them in realtime. Their gigs are chaotic and largely unpredictable: The software takes the music in whatever direction Alex and Ade feel appropriate. Together, they have played across the United Kingdom at numerous venues, have entertained club-goers in Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, and have two releases available through Cipher (Lithuania) and Fallt (Ireland). Adrian's other works include smaller desktop offerings and collaborative efforts with the likes of Stuart Brisley and Geoff Cox, with whom he has helped instigate the UK Museum of Ordure. He participated in the 2002 GENERATOR Exhibition at Spacex Gallery in Exeter, and has presented his work across the world at venues like Transmediale (Berlin), Lovebytes (Sheffield), Rhizome (New York) and Sonic Acts (Amsterdam). He is also the proud owner of awards from Transmediale and Real Software, and an honorary mention from the 2001 Prix Ars Electronica.

Click Nilson

Click Nilson emerged from the Swedish algorythmic music scene in the mid 1970s with his groundbreaking piece "An Instructional Game for 1 to many musicians". This piece, whilst entirely unrealiant on digital technologies, formed a key part of the techniques - along with other pioneering artists such as Sol Lewitt and Brian Eno - that formed the basis of what has today become th production of software in a live performative context - ie, livecoding.