Paula Levine, Professor of Art
Area Head, Conceptual Information Arts (2011-present)

M.F.A. (1988) San Francisco Art Institute

Paula Levine works in digital media, looking at the interface of culture, history, and narrative. Current works use locative and mobile media to bridge between global and local. Her writings on locative media and the expanding cartographic imagination have been presented at conferences at ISEA, ZERO1, MIT and the University of Wisconsin's Conney conference for Jewish Studies. Recent writing focuses on locative media and empathic public space.

Rooted in video and experimental narrative, her videos have received many awards and have screened in New York's Lincoln Center, the National Gallery of Canada, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as in film and video festivals through out the world, including Canada, Europe and Japan.

• Email
• Web Site
• Phone (415) 338-6457

Stephen Wilson, Professor of Art
Area Head, Conceptual Information Arts (1984-2011)

M.F.A., (1980) School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Ph.D., (1972) University of Chicago

Stephen Wilson creates art that explores the cultural implications of emerging technologies (such as artificial intelligence, hypermedia and the structure of information, GPS, and environmental and biological sensing). His computer mediated installations have won international acclaim in museums, galleries and technology art shows such as SIGGRAPH and Ars Electronica. Other activities include NSF projects to investigate the role of new technologies in education and artist-in residencies at the Xerox PARC and NTT (Nortel) research centers.

Publications include five books: Using Computers to Create Art (Prentice Hall, 1986), Multimedia Design with HyperCard (Prentice Hall, 1991),  World Wide Web Design Guide (Hayden, 1995), Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, Technology (MIT Press, 2002), and Art + Science Now! (Thames and Hudson,2010,) as well as numerous articles exploring the intersection of art and research such as "The Aesthetics and Practice of Designing Interactive Events", "Interactive Art and Cultural Change", and "Noise on the Line: Emerging Issues in Telecommunications Art."

• Web site

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Founders & Area History

The Conceptual Design area was founded by James Storey and Bryan Rogers. Working within the Art Department at San Francisco State University, Bryan Rogers and James Storey created the Conceptual Design program in 1978.  The pioneering program attempted to define a relevant education for artists in the  technological era.  It was one of the first art programs in the country to move beyond historical media and to try to engage the contemporary cultural context.  Storey was an inventor and product design researcher who worked in art education and Rogers was an artist who had a joint MFA and PhD in Engineering from UC Berkeley.  Rogers felt that most art programs clung to traditional formats that did not respond to the cultural foment of the scientific and technological worlds and to the innovations of art movements such as the conceptual, electronics, performance, and earth art, which challenged conventional notions.  The program had several important features:

•  Emphasis on ideas not media  (students were encouraged to work in whatever media served their agendas and to invent new media if necessary)

•  Rigorous sequence of common core courses focused on processes and systems analysis. The sequence was stepped, growing more ambitious in its scope as students moved through the program

•  Attention focused on the latest developments both in art and science/technology

• Use of geometry as a meta-language and skeleton for inquiries

Page revised: 2.2012

- This page created by Stephen Wilson, Professor Conceptual/Information Arts Program, Art Department, SFSU (http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson) - More information about the Conceptual Information Arts program is available at (http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts)