The Jacquard machine is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé. The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The machine was patented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques Vaucanson (1740). The machine was controlled by a "chain of cards"; a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence. Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design.
Librascope was a Glendale, California, division of General Precision, Inc. (GPI). It was founded in 1937 by Lewis W. Imm to build and operate theater equipment, and acquired by General Precision in 1941. During World War II it worked on improving aircraft load balancing.
Camille Utterback is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of painting and interactive art. One of her most well-known installations is the work Text Rain (1999).
Cary Wolfe is an American academic. He teaches English at Rice University. He has written on topics from American poetry to bioethics. He has been a voice in debates on animal studies and advocates a version of the posthumanist position. He is series editor for Minnesota Press's Posthumanities Series. He was born and grew up in North Carolina.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Steven Moore is an American author and literary critic. Best known as the primary authority on the novelist William Gaddis, he is the author of the two-volume study The Novel: An Alternative History.
Romantic Circles is an academic peer-reviewed website dedicated to the study of Romantic literature and culture, featuring online editions of many texts of the Romantic era, as well as essays devoted to Romantic literature, culture, and theory.
Kate Armstrong is a Canadian artist, writer and curator with a history of projects focusing on experimental literary practices, networks and public space.
Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.
PhET Interactive Simulations, a project at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a non-profit open educational resource project that creates and hosts explorable explanations. It was founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman. PhET began with Wieman's vision to improve the way science is taught and learned. Their stated mission is "To advance science and math literacy and education worldwide through free interactive simulations."
Steve Tomasula is an American novelist, critic, short story, and essay author known for cross-genre narratives that explore conceptions of the self, especially as shaped by language and technology.
J. R. Carpenter is a British-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. She was born in Nova Scotia in 1972. She lived in Montreal from 1990 to 2009. She emigrated to England in 2010, and became a British citizen in 2019. She now lives in Southampton, England.
Warren F. Motte is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. His focus is contemporary writing, with an emphasis upon experimental, avant-garde, or other subversive forms of both fiction and poetry. Motte has authored or edited many volumes of literary criticism, including the first book-length study of the renowned French writer Georges Perec, an authoritative book on the experimental writing group known as Oulipo, and major studies of other writers such as Edmond Jabès, Marie NDiaye, Christine Montalbetti, Antoine Volodine, and Jean Rolin. Motte's recent books include Mirror Gazing, a study of over 12,000 mirror scenes in literature, and French Fiction Today, devoted to the contemporary French novel. In 2015 Motte was named a Knight in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Republic. In 2016 he was named a College Professor of Distinction by the University of Colorado Boulder, and in 2018 he was named a Distinguished Professor, the highest honor the University of Colorado awards to its faculty members.
Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.
Max Bruinsma is a Dutch design critic, editor, curator, and educator.
Joseph Tabbi (1960-) is a US academic living in Norway, and is a full professor at the University of Bergen. He is a literary scholar and theorist, notable for his contributions to the fields of American literature and electronic literature.
Samantha Gorman is an American game developer known for her combination of narrative, theatricality and gaming in VR environments, and for introducing gestural interactions in touchscreen narratives. She has won multiple awards for her work, both in the field of games and in electronic literature and new media writing. Gorman co-founded the computer art and games studio Tender Claws in 2014 and has been an assistant professor at Northeastern University since 2020.
Lori Emerson is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and founder of the Media Archaeology Lab, a museum dedicated to obsolete technologies spanning from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. She is known for her work in media archaeology, digital preservation, and digital archives.
VAS: An Opera in Flatland is a novel by the American author Steve Tomasula with design by Stephen Farrell. It was first published in hardback in 2002, and reissued in paperback in 2004. A special “Cyborg” edition, with an audio CD was published in 2009. The novel adapts several characters and settings from Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published in 1884. Set at the start of the 21st century when technologies like cloning, transplants, and other body modifications were becoming common, VAS employs a wide range of historical representations of the body from family trees and eugenic charts to visual representations of genetic sequencing. Bound in a cover that resembles human skin, the novel is printed in two colors, one that resembles flesh and one that resembles blood. It explores how definitions of the body and the self both emerge from differing narratives, and tells the story of people searching for a sense of identity in a dawning post-biological future.
