Person

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an investigation of his activities by the Department of Defense and the FBI after he spammed a large number of unpublished email addresses at Nellis Air Force Base.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.