Spring 2019 Contributors

Mez Breeze crafts VR sculptures/paintings, VR + AR experiences, games, experimental storytelling, Virtual Reality Literature, and other genre-defying output. In 1994 Mez first started using the World Wide Web to author digital works and she hasn’t slowed since. Recent happenings include Mez’s Virtual Reality Literature Experience Our Cupidity Coda being a Finalist in the 2018 EX Experimental New Media Art Awards (also making both the 2018 Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition and the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards for Digital Literature Shortlists). In January 2019, Mez’s Virtual Reality project “A Place Called Ormalcy” was shortlisted in the New Media Writing Prize. In November 2017, This Golden Stance was showcased at the Las Ranetas International Festival of Virtual Reality alongside Oculus Story Studio’s Dear Angelica and Sony’s Snatch: as of May 2018, this VR Sculpture is now on official display at the Museum of Other Realities. Also in 2018, Mez partnered with Microsoft, Samsung and MasterpieceVR for their VR Influencers Sustainability Initiative where VR Artists were invited to design models using a Windows Mixed Reality Headset. In 2016, Mez took up an invite from the digital arts organisation Rhizome to have work memorialized in their Net Art Anthology. Mez’s projects are taught worldwide. Her works reside in Collections as diverse as The World Bank, Cornell’s Rose Goldsen Archive and the National Library of Australia. She is also in the process of developing a comprehensive career archive with Duke University’s Curator Collection team: this archive is to be housed at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Mez currently serves as an Advisor to the Mixed Augmented Reality Art Research Organisation, an Editorial Board Member of the Digital Journal Thresholds, a co-founder of the XR Artists Collective, and is a Senior Research Affiliate of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab.

Alan Sondheim is a city-based new media artist, musician, writer, and performer concerned with issues of virtuality, and the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked with his partner Azure Carter among others. Sondheim is interested in examining the grounds of the virtual and how the body is inhabited. He performs in virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture technology extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. His writing stems out of codework, a problematic style in which code substrates and surface content interfere with each other - in which, in other words, the textual body and body of text are deeply entangled. His current music is based on the impossibility of time reversal, on fast improvisation, and anti-gestural approaches to playing.

Will Luers is a digital media artist and writer living in Portland,Oregon. In the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, he teaches multimedia authoring, creative programming, electronic literature and digital cinema. His art has been exhibited internationally and selected for various festivals and conferences, including the Electronic Literature Organization, FILE(Brazil) and ISEA. The generative e-lit work novelling, a collaboration with Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, won the 2018 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature. His work can be found at will-luers.com.

Alan Bigelow is the recipient of the Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature (2017); the Lauréat du Prix Poésie Média, BIPVAL international Prix de Poésie Média (2011); the Judge's Prize, Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition (2017); and First Runner Up, Digital Humanities Awards (2016). His work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction and poetry have appeared in the Library of Congress (USA), SFMOMA, La Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, The National Art Center (Tokyo), Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, The Museum of New Art, Art Tech Media, FILE, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, New River Journal, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and many other places worldwide. He is currently a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, USA. You can see his work at webyarns.com

Makensi Ceriani is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Virginia Tech. Makensi is a volunteer editor and reader at Noemi Press and Frontier Poetry, and has had work published in Burning House Press, Rag Queen Periodical, and Z Publishing’s Best Emerging Poets Anthology.

Dashiel Carrera is a Half-Argentinean writer, programmer, and musician from Massachusetts. Following his graduation from Brown University, Dashiel turned down tech recruiters from Google and Amazon to become an artist. His experimental writing, music and new media explore the intersection of language, sound, and logic. He has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Indy, released 5 records on the label 75OrLessRecords, and won awards from HackPrinceton, HackCooper, and Brown Creative Arts Council. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in fiction at Virginia Tech, and Technical Editor of The New River. You can find more from him at www.dashielcarrera.com