Project Leaders

M. Simon Levin

M Simon Levin has been creating site-specific projects that explore relational aesthetics using a variety of custom designed tools for the past 15 years. These projects investigate the often-blurred boundaries between the private and the public resulting in poetic interventions into space and place. His teaching and inter-disciplinary art practice has led him to create numerous site-specific art projects for public and private spaces in Canada, USA, Mexico and Australia. Simon co-founded collective echoes, a non-profit arts organization committed to producing collaborative public works. Within a model of co-mentorship, this collective teams up young emerging and established artists with a community to explore and to create art that is relevant to the concerns of that community. These projects fused pedagogy, community development and public art to explore innovative approaches to contemporary culture making.

Laurie Long

Laurie Long, an independent filmmaker, has spent the past decade working in a broad variety of roles in productions ranging from guerilla style performance poetry videos and independent documentaries, to extreme sports television. Her work has been broadcast extensively in Canada, screened theatrically and exhibited internationally. Most recently working as artist in residence at International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia, Laurie collaborated with artist M. Simon Levin on Centre For S.A.L.T Expression - a site-specific multimedia production exploring relational aesthetics in a remote Australian farming community stricken with land salinity. Her ability to make people comfortable in front of her camera has gained her remarkable access into the lives of her many documentary subjects. From exploring SM dungeons and fetish parties, to train hopping with a paraplegic graffiti artist, Laurie explores the lives of characters engaged in exceptional circumstances. In her commitment to exploring diverse voices in marginalized cultures, she works toward changing the demographic landscape of representation in the mainstream media.

Kevin Hamilton
http://kevinhamilton.org

Kevin is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at UIUC, as well as a practicing artist and researcher. He has lectured or conducted workshops for the 2006 ISEA symposium, Glowlab's Psy.Geo.Conflux in NYC, Bratislava's Multiplace Festival, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam, Berlin's Public Art Lab, and the New Forms Festival in Vancouver. Online exhibitions have included University of British Columbia's Digital Visions, Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery in Chicago, Drain Magazine, Rhizome.org and in the Dutch design competition, Fusedspace. Gallery exhibitions have included shows at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Marshall Arts (TN), Boston's Arts Interactive Gallery, and at Spain's Ciberart Bilbao and MADnet festivals. From his base at the University of Illinois, Hamilton co-organized 2005's Walking as Knowing as Making symposia, a series of weekend-events that gathered artists, activists, historians, critics, and geographers to discuss the role of walking in their work. He also curates a program in temporary site-based art for UIUC's Siebel Center for Computer Science. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design before attending graduate school at MIT's Visual Arts Program, where he graduated in 2000.

Piotr Adamczyk
homepage at the ORCHID group

is a graduate student in the Division of Human Factors and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Mr. Adamczyk has taught graduate interdisciplinary courses involving students from studio arts, engineering, and computer science in theme-based collaborative projects. In these courses students create pieces or performances for public display using hybrid methodologies from HCI and the Arts.