Andrew Quitmeyer is a researcher looking into digital tools to fight human solipsism. He works to examine and build cybiotic tools which create interaction loops between creatures and machines.
He is also the creator of this research into “Digital Naturalism”
Hannah Perner-Wilson combines conductive materials and craft techniques, developing new styles of building electronics that emphasize materiality and process. She received a B.Sc. in Industrial Design from the University for Art and Industrial Design Linz and an M.Sc. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where she was a student in the High-Low Tech research group. Since 2006 Hannah has collaborated with Mika Satomi, forming the collective KOBAKANT. In 2009, as research fellows at the Distance Lab in Scotland, KOBAKANT published the website titled How To Get What You Want, where they share their textile sensor designs and DIY approach to E-Textiles.
Peter Marting is a PhD Researcher at Arizona State University looking into collective behaviors of the cecropia tree -symbiotic Azteca ants.
Here is a short documentary which summarizes a bit of his research into this mutualism.
Antonia Hubancheva is bat researcher since 2007. Her passion for science led her in the rainforest of Panama, where her most recent project is about trying to understand how sleep deprivation affects bat behaviour.
Michael Nitsche is an Associate Professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the primary advisor leading Andrew Quitmeyer’s research into “Digital Naturalism.”
He teaches courses mainly for the Digital Media Masters and PhDs, as well as for the Computational Media undergrad program. He is founder and Director of the Digital World & Image Group (DWIG), which is the home for all his current projects. Some of our work is done in connection with the Experimental Game Lab.
I am active member of a number of interdisciplinary centers and groups, these include the Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center (GVU), the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT), and in the past, the Responsive Objects, Surfaces, and Spaces (ROSS) initiative.
His main research interest are interactions in hybrid spaces. These include real-time 3-dimensional virtual environments as well as the physical locations where we engage with digital media.
He runs an irregular blog about machinima, Freepixel and together with his students we run our studio blog. More recently, he has kicked off the CoLab teaching experiment, which has its own blog.
He has been collaborating with a variety of academic and commercial partners on different research projects: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE), the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) in Cambridge, Alcatel-Lucent, the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute, as well as game developers Funatics, and EA‘sTiburon. Currently his work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the GVU, and Google.
He holds an MA in Drama and German language from the Freie Universitaet Berlin. The final thesis was about writing screenplays for interactive environments. He did a MPhil in Architecture and the Moving Image at the University of Cambridge with a final thesis on ‘The Architecture of Interactive Storytelling.’ He finished my PhD in 2004 on ‘Virtual Story Spaces’ also at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College). You can find a one page summary of my thesis here. A completely re-worked version of the thesis was the basis of my first book ‘Video Game Spaces. Imagery, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds‘ (MIT Press, spring 2009).
If not immersed in some digital adventure he collects screenplays. In a former lifetime, he gathered some experience in independent film production, scriptwriting, and even before that he worked as Improv actor for some years at the Fast Food Theater, Munich. More currently, he is getting more and more fascinated by puppets and crafting.
You can download his CV (excluding service and teaching) here.
