Keynotes

Keynotes will be presented at the The Bedford Regency Hotel. See schedule page for dates and times and map.

Kate Pullinger is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Her most recent novel, A Little Stranger, was published in January 2006. Other books include the novels Weird Sister, The Last Time I Saw Jane, and Where Does Kissing End? She co-wrote the novel of the film The Piano with director Jane Campion. She also writes for digital media; her multimedia online novel, Inanimate Alice, created with digital artist babel, won the first prize for Digital Art 2005, sponsored by MAXXI, the Museum of the Twenty-First Century in Rome, and Fondazione Rosselli. Kate Pullinger grew up outside Victoria, BC, but currently lives in London. [Keynote: From Print to Screen and Beyond: Digital Fiction and the Networked Book ]

Don Ritter is a Canadian new media artist and writer living in Berlin, Germany. He has over 25 years of experience with new media as an artist, academic, researcher, and designer. Since 1986, his new media installations and performances have been exhibited throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Ritter has held tenured professorships in art and design at Concordia University in Montréal (1989-1996), and at Pratt Institute in New York City (1996-2005). He has taught undergraduate and graduate art students from over 20 countries and supervised the production of over 3000 new media artworks. Prior to his academic positions, he was a telecommunications designer for Northern Telecom in Toronto and a human-interface researcher for Bell-Northern Research in Ottawa. Ritter has degrees in Fine Arts and Psychology / University of Waterloo, Electronics Engineering Technology/Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, a Masters in Visual Studies / Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he studied film at Harvard University. [Keynote: The Ethics of Aesthetics]

Mirjam Struppek works as urbanist, researcher and consultant in Berlin. She has lectured and published essays with a special focus on the livability of urban space, public sphere and its transformation and acquisition through new media. Since 2002 she has been developing the online-information-platform interactionfield about the relation of interaction, new media and public space. In this context she organises the monthly lecture and discussion evening Urban Media Salon. She developed the first international conference Urban Screens in 2005 and is currently working on further implementing this concept to utilise outdoor screens for a sustainable urban society. In 2003 she worked as Assistant in a gallery for still and motion pictures in Berlin. She holds a degree with distinction in Urban and Environmental Planning from University of Kaiserslautern and spent 1999 at a research semester at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Nagoya University, Japan. [Keynote: Urban Screens The Potential of Screens for a Sustainable Urban Society]