Paul Vanouse uses electronic media to explore contemporary culture through cinematic and installation works often designed for mass audiences. His thematic sources range from the hand-gesture language of Chinese opera to the O.J. Simpson affair to the Visible Human Project. His work has been shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Louvre in Paris. Vanouse teaches and is a research fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Before that, he taught and was a research fellow at the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Since 1997, Vanouse's work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Howard Heinz Endowment, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is currently working on a collective project called Terminal Time, which will present world history as an interactive, cinematic experience. Peter Weyhrauch's professional interests include artificial intelligence, interactive entertainment, simulated virtual environments, and computational drama. He received his B.S. in computer science from M.I.T. and earned his master's and Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. As a member of Carnegie Mellon's Oz project research group, Weyhrauch collaborated with the school's animation group to complete his first major work, The Edge of Intention, an interactive, animated piece also known as "The Woggles"--a reference to the characters who inhabit the work's simulated world. The piece was shown at the AAAI-92 Arts Exhibition, the Boston Computer Museum, SIGGRAPH 1993, and the 1993 Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, where it received an honorable mention. Currently, Weyhrauch works on commercial versions of interactive entertainment at Zoesis, Inc., the Boston-based company he cofounded in 1996. |