Brett Stalbaum
Brett Stalbaum is an artist and research theorist specializing in information
theory, database, and software development. A serial collaborator, he
was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998, for
which he co-developed software called FloodNet (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html),
which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the
websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as
the Pentagon. As Forbes Magazine put it "Perhaps the first electronic
attack against a target on American soil was the result of an art
project." For EDT, this was all learned behavior taught by the example
of the Zapatistas. Stalbaum has been part of many other individual and
collaborative projects, and has published widely on digital art, its
context and aesthetics, and location aware media. He is a past editor
of Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE digital media lab.
Current projects revolve around landscape experimentation, software
development, location aware media and interdisciplinary theory. In
collaboration with C5 (www.c5corp.com), Stalbaum has participated in the development of the C5 Landscape Initiative,
(http://www.c5corp.com/projects/landscape/index.shtml),
and is the lead developer for the C5 Landscape Database, an open source
API for accessing and processing GPS and GIS data. In collaboration
with Naomi Spellman, Stalbaum helped organize the "Locative Media in
the Wild" workshop in July 2005. (http://34n118w.net/Workshop/)
Other recent work includes Remote Location 1:100,000, a
performance/installation/walking work with Paula Poole in the Great
Salt Lake Desert (for the Center for Land Use Interpretation Wendover
Residency Program). Brett and Paula's collaborations in the landscape
of the American West can be seen at the Painters Flat website: (http://www.paintersflat.net).
Past projects include Landscape Painting as Counter-Surveillance of
Area 51, a collaborative site-specific performance at the border of the
well known secret air base. As part of that performance, he instigated
an investigation of his activities by the Department of Defense and the
FBI after he spammed a large number of unpublished email addresses at
Nellis Air Force Base. Stalbaum holds an MFA in fine art from the CADRE
digital media laboratory at San Jose State University, and a BA in Film
Studies from San Francisco State University. He has taught art at San
Jose State University, and Computers and Information Technology at
Evergreen Valley College, where he specialized in teaching programming
languages through web-based distance education. Currently, he is
full-time lecturer and coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Computing
in the Arts Major (ICAM) at UCSD.