Artup is a community blog, meetup and monthly grant interested in supporting technologically engaged artists, projects and organizations on the West Coast.
Background image by Andrew Benson.
Founders
If you would like to apply to become a trustee, please email a brief introduction to mat @ artup. us!
Our current trustees are:
- Theo Armour – Architect, Artist, Investor
- Zach Berke – Entrepreneur, Innovator, Founder of Exygy
- Chris Delbuck – Creative Director at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Artist, Programmer
- Danielle Engelman – Director of Programs for The Long Now Foundation
- Mary Franck – Media Artist, Senior Interactive Art Engineer at Obscura Digital
- Mark Slee – DJ, Artist, Software Engineer
- Vlad Spears – Musician, Programmer
- Camille Utterback – Interactive Installation Artist and MacArthur Genius
Theo Armour
Theo Armour was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Paris and the United States. Theo lives in San Francisco and Paris and has three daughters currently living in Paris, Oakland and San Luis Obispo.
He is an architect educated at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He practiced architecture in London and Hong Kong and has been a member of ARCUK (now the ARB), RIBA and HKIA. While in Hong Kong, he was employed by
YRM and Apple Computer Hong Kong; a founder of PC Plus, an IBM PC dealership specializing in Computer Aided Design, the Hong Kong Macintosh User Group and the Asian Venture Capital Journal; and a member of the IEEE
and the HKCS. He also served as a board member of theSports Assiciation for the Physically Handicapped. His primary endeavor was computer-aided design consultant at CAD-Asia.
Theo was awarded the English Channel Swimming Association’s Van Audernaerde Prize for Best Disabled Swim in 1980. In 2006 he was awarded first place for fastest disabled swimmer in the annual “Escape from Alcatraz” competition.
In the 1990’s he was Program Manager at Autodesk for AutoCAD Releases 13, 14 and the beginning of Release 2000. Subsequently he has implemented web sites for a number of artists, start-ups and various worthy organizations and has been an angel to a number of start-ups.
From 2001 to 2008 he was a member of the Board of Advisers of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and was designer and webmaster of their web site from 2001 to 2004.
Theo has helped a number of artists and designers with their web sites helping including Lynn Hirshman Leeson and Professor Lawrence Lessig with their web sites. Theo is a collector ofweb sites that are works of art. He firmly believes that the great art of the future will be the art of the Internet and would be pleased to hear from artists, curators and galleries with similar intentions.
He has a web presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and GitHub. Theo is an angel investor and technical adviser helping small start-ups. These include Hommage, Point 65, Orbitec,Norroc and PhilQuo Ventures.
His current endeavors include investigating and developing collaborative and error-checking tools for Computer Aided Design systems as discussed on mangojango.com and methods for displaying quantitative day using animation and 3D, in particular with using webgl and three.js, as discussed on jaanga.com.
Mary Franck
Mary Franck is a media artist whose works embody beautiful and unsettling potentials of contemporary digital technology. Usually shrouded in innocuous applications, she exposes these technologies to be fantastic and bizarre extensions of human desire and power by embedding them in art pieces. These installations anthropomorphize the machine and explore the ways in which technology augments human experience and perception. Inspired by organic patterns and systems, artificial intelligence and symbolism, her works are responsive and aware.
Her recent work re-imagines video as material, crafting luminous, dream-like visual environments and physicalizing them as installation or by locating dancers within them.
Presently she is Senior Interactive Art Engineer at Obscura Digital.
Chris Delbuck
Chris Delbuck is an Interactive Designer and Developer living in the Bay Area. He graduated from San Francisco State University with degrees in Conceptual Information Arts and Digital Media Design. Chris has worked as a User Experience and Interface Designer for companies like Zynga and Groupon, and serves as Creative Director for Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.
Camille Utterback
Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback’s work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world.
Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; The Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev, Ukraine; and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Utterback’s work is in private and public collections including Hewlett Packard, Itaú Cultural Institute in São Paolo, Brazil, and La Caixa Foundation
in Barcelona, Spain.
Awards and honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002) and a commission from the Whitney Museum for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website (2002). Utterback holds a US patent for a video tracking system she developed while working as a research fellow at New York University (2004). Her work has been featured in Art in America (October, 2004), Wired Magazine (February 2004), The New York Times (2009, 2003, 2002, 2001), ARTnews (2001) and many other publications. It is also included in Thames & Hudson’s ‘World of Art – Digital Art’ book (2003) by Christiane Paul.
Recent public commissions include works for The Sacramento Airport, The City of San Jose, California, The City of Fontana, California, and the City of St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Other commissions include projects for The American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, The Manhattan Children’s Museum, Herman Miller, Shiseido Cosmetics, and other private corporations.
Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.
Zach Berke
Founder of software development house Exygy, Zach is an entrepreneur and innovator who has spent the last 10 years building and working with tech startups and nonprofits around the world. Zach has a degree in Computational Science with High Honors from Dartmouth College where he was the recipient of awards for his research in computational neuroscience as well as pioneering work on large scale WiFi networking. Zach is a frequent speaker on the topics of technology, social enterprise, and the agile/lean startup model of development.
Danielle Engelman
As Director of Programs for The Long Now Foundation, Danielle Engelman is responsible for the foundation’s public programs including the monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking, the Long Now Special Events which have featured Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings and Jem Finer’s Longplayer; 1,000 years in 3 simultaneous acts both held at YBCA and Terrible Noises for Beautiful People at Ann Hamilton’s Sound Tower and outreach at venues and events like Maker Faire, the Exploratorium and The Chabot Space and Science Center.
She joined Long Now in 02006 to develop the organization’s first membership program which now has 3,000+ members in over 38 countries.
Her background is in art, culture and education. She was Project Manager for the site-specific sculpture Defenestration in downtown San Francisco, and co-produced the long running lecture series, The Tentacle Sessions.
She has produced events or been otherwise involved with noteworthy Bay Area arts organizations such as the Burning Man Project, the SF Fringe Festival, 21 Grand, SomArts andthe Lab. She also has a background as a teacher and school administrator in Montessori education.
She received her BA in Ancient Near Eastern Art and Architecture from U.C. Berkeley.
Mark Slee
Mark Slee is interested in the design and cultivation of human experiences.
This interest manifests through active work in the fields of art and technology, informed by an ongoing exploration of cognition.
Vlad Spears
I sonify. I illustrate. I imagine and describe. I leap from cloud tops into waiting planes. I triangulate and reify.
I travel within sound waves, one vibratory locus to the next. I am made of wish and sinew, blood and work. I am built for adaptation, evolution,
flex.
My mind is filled with dragonflies. Sidewinder hands make push and pull. My vision traps possiblity. My consciousness, simultaneously, citizen and rule.
My feet have trod historic paths, in multiple directions. I am far older than I seem. I spin through ana/kata, inner/outer, tau/theta. I swing from mindfulness to dream.
I embrace Occam, Ada, Darwin. I burn with the discipline of rational search. My heart beats with pure, godless science: the fusion glow of the universe.