Staff

Sheldon Brown, CRCA Director, Professor of Visual Arts

Sheldon Brown is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) where he is a Professor of Visual Arts and the head of New Media Arts for the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Cal-(IT)2). His work examines the relationships between mediated and physical experiences. This work often exists across a range of public realms. As an artist, he is concerned about overlapping and reconfiguring private and public spaces; how new forms of mediation are proliferating co-existing public realms whose geographies and social organizations become ever more diverse. Art that explores schismatic junctions of these zones – the edges of their coherency - allow glimpses into their formative structures and provide a view that suggests transformative modes of being, extending constrained boundaries. sgbrown(at)ucsd.edu

Miller Puckette, CRCA Associate Director, Professor of Music

Miller Puckette obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT (1980) and Ph. D. in Mathematics from Harvard (1986). Puckette was a member of MIT's Media Lab from its inception until 1987, and then a researcher at IRCAM (l'Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Musique/Acoustique, founded by composer and conductor Pierre Boulez). There he wrote the Max program for MacIntosh computers, which was first distributed commercially by Opcode Systems in 1990 and is now available from Cycling74.com . In 1989 Puckette joined IRCAM's "musical workstation" team and put together an enhanced version of Max, called Max/FTS, for the ISPW system, which was commercialized by Ariel, Inc. This system became a widely used platform in computer music research and production facilities. The IRCAM real-time development team has since reimplemented and extended this software under the name jMax, which is distributed free with source code. Puckette joined the Music department of the University of California, San Diego in 1994, and is now Associate Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He is currently working on a new real-time software system for live musical and multimedia performances called Pure Data ("Pd"), in collaboration with many other artists/researchers/programmers worldwide. Pd is free and runs on Linux, IRIX, and Windows systems. Since 1997 Puckette has also been part of the Global Visual Music project with Mark Danks, Rand Steiger, and Vibeke Sorensen, which has been generously supported by a grant from the Intel Research Council. msp(at)ucsd.edu

Carol J. Hobson, CRCA Administrative Director and UC New Media Arts Manager

Carol Hobson has worked in cultural planning, consulting, and arts management for over 22 years. Her experience encompasses the organization, presentation, and promotion of cultural and arts programs, new media arts projects and special events. She has curated and produced exhibitions, festivals and public events throughout the west coast and with international partners, and was voted one of the "Coolest People in the Arts " in San Diego by the SD Union Tribune. Her work at the University of California has provided a solid track record in the successful cultivation and implementation of new initiatives in the digital and new media arts, and their associated programs. Hobson has experience with design processes, community outreach and involvement, and curriculum development and educational programming. Currently she is the Administrative Director for the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD; she supports the New Media Arts Layer of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2); and she manages the UC Digital Arts Research Network which is a consortium of eight UC campuses who collaborate on digital and new media arts research and projects. chobson(at)ucsd.edu

Todd Margolis, CRCA Technical Director,

Todd Margolis is an artist, educator and technologist. In 2004, he received his MFA in Electronic Visualization from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a founding member of the immersive and interactive art and technology non-profit organization, Applied Interactives, and also a member of the art collaborative Sine::apsis Experiments. Margolis has recently been appointed the Technical Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UCSD. Margolis was previously a Visiting Research Programmer at UIC, developing a new virtual reality system, The Varrier(tm) Auto-Stereographic display. Results of this research were presented at SPIE 2001, IEEE VR in 2004 and will be presented at this years SIGGRAPH. Margolis frequently lectured on new media at UIC, Columbia College, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as shown his work nationally and internationally, in such venues as Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Art Chicago, ICC (Tokyo, Japan), ISEA (Paris, France) and SIGGRAPH (LA and New Orleans). As an artist-in-residence at (art)n Laboratory, he participated in the creation of a permanent art installation at Chicago's Midway Airport. He was also awarded the 2000 Christian and Oline Larsen Scholarship for Electronic Visualization and had been the recipient of a UIC Research Assistantship from 1998 till 2003. tmargolis(at)ucsd.edu

Carolyn Staggs, CRCA Fund and Program Manager,

cstaggs(at)ucsd.edu