Dan Collins: Dan is the founding Co-Director of the PRISM lab (a 3D visualization and prototyping facility) and heads the first-year art program in the School of Art (artCORE) at Arizona State University. As a member of the Intermedia faculty at ASU, Dan teaches courses in the School of Art and the new Digital Culture program in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (HIDA). Over the past two decades, Dan has collaborated on a variety of discipline-based research projects that harness digital media for 3D visualization, prototyping, and archiving. He serves as president of the Board of Trustees of the Telluride Institute in Colorado, and has helped develop and administer a “watershed education program” (WEP) that delivers experiential, place-based learning to public schools in the San Miguel River system. His recent work, collected under the umbrella term "The Interactive Watershed," focuses on locative media, participatory research methods, and community mapping with an environmental focus. Dan has created a number of interactive maps (with Gene Cooper) for nationally recognized museums, including the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix that capture a variety of environmental and social factors.
Meredith Drum: Two of Meredith’s most recent new media projects present nonfiction material through emerging digital technologies, offering participants significant physical and semiotic choices about the trajectory of the visual, aural and textual events. The goal of this work is to reveal hidden and intersecting histories of consumption, pollution, corporate responsibility and competition for resources between operators, including nonhuman life forms, with varying degrees of power. Oyster City, which she is currently producing with two other artists, is an eco-psychogeography game and walking tour through lower Manhattan using a unique augmented reality browser for mobile devices. The piece invites participants to visit a constellation of content-relevant sites populated by media assets, including 3D sculptures that players can walk into; game elements; sound landscapes; and video vignettes. By tracing vectors between sites, players learn about relationships between the NY Harbor Estuary and its many human, animal and industrial inhabitants; how commerce and class intersect with oysters as food; new ecological reclamation efforts aided by oyster beds; and other urban histories. Media assets are placed via GPS coordinates and activated by, and responsive to, participants. Louisiana Re-storied is an interactive, documentary installation concerning environmental justice and pollution governance in Southern Louisiana. The work examines a particular geography, the stretch of Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where small, predominantly working class, African American communities are sandwiched uncomfortably between large petrochemical plants and oil refineries. Meredith recently joined the faculty of the Intermedia program at Arizona State University.
Eric Margolis: Eric is a sociologist and teaches in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. His visual ethnography of coal miners was broadcast as Out of the Depths-The Miners' Story, a segment of the PBS series A Walk Through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers. An article, Class Pictures: Representations of Race, Gender and Ability in a Century of School Photography, (Visual Sociology Vol. 14, 1999) was reprinted in Education Policy Analysis Archives and received Honorable Mention for Best Article in an Electronic Journal by the Communication of Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. He has published widely on historic photographs and produced a number of visual sociology projects including photo exhibits, multimedia, and video programs, and photo essays for sociology texts. Most recently, he co-edited the Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Sage 2011) with Luc Pauwels.
Helen Rowe: Helen is the director of Ecosystem Conservation and Resilience Initiative (ECRI) and
assistant research faculty in the School of Life Sciences. ECRI provides a venue to engage scientists, place-based land and water managers, and policy makers. Dr. Rowe brings together new collaborations to advance current strategies of ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation and increase our understanding of ecological principles. In 1998, the Nature Conservancy Midwest Chapter awarded her a two-year grant to develop research initiatives designed to test the principles and practices of their large-scale Tallgrass prairie restoration projects. She is currently the PI of a $500,000 Ecosystem Services project with four co-PIs, a graduate student, and a post-doc funded by USDA NIFA. She is senior personnel on an NSF Research Coordination Network on Phosphorus Sustainability ($750,000). Her role on that grant is to maintain and enhance communications with and among the Working Groups and with the Steering Committee, including orientation activities for the Working Groups.
assistant research faculty in the School of Life Sciences. ECRI provides a venue to engage scientists, place-based land and water managers, and policy makers. Dr. Rowe brings together new collaborations to advance current strategies of ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation and increase our understanding of ecological principles. In 1998, the Nature Conservancy Midwest Chapter awarded her a two-year grant to develop research initiatives designed to test the principles and practices of their large-scale Tallgrass prairie restoration projects. She is currently the PI of a $500,000 Ecosystem Services project with four co-PIs, a graduate student, and a post-doc funded by USDA NIFA. She is senior personnel on an NSF Research Coordination Network on Phosphorus Sustainability ($750,000). Her role on that grant is to maintain and enhance communications with and among the Working Groups and with the Steering Committee, including orientation activities for the Working Groups.
Kaard Bombe: Kaard is a student in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, working towards a degree in Mass Communications & Media Studies. Kaard is taking the lead in producing on-site videography and assisting with interviews, and is excited to create a comprehensive chronicle of many stories and people throughout the project. Kaard currently works for the Pac-12 Network, XOS Digital, and the ASU State Press, and does contract videography and photography for Phoenix wedding studios such as C. Van Rensburg Photo, Kirk McGee Studio, and Urbane Wedding Company. He also runs his own production company, kb films, through which he has taken on projects ranging from travel documentaries to sports highlight reels. In 2012, his short documentary 'Diversity at Aliso Niguel High School' was screened at the Newport Beach and Riverside Film Festivals, and won Best-Edited Film at the Sunset Film Festival. This year, his first travel film, 'A Grand Canyon Adventure - The Vlog' will be screening at the Fear No Film Festival at Salt Lake City's Festival of the Arts. In the few seconds of free time Kaard has, he enjoys working on updating his camping blog, TentTalk. To see some of Kaard's video work, check out his website at kbombefilms.com
Shaun Ylatupa-McWhorter: Shaun is a computer scientist with expertise in programming, data base management, GIS mapping, and interface design.