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Virtual 1.a. Possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities; effective in respect of inherent natural qualities or powers; capable of exerting influence by means of such qualities. 3.a. Capable of producing a certain effect or result; effective, potent, powerful. g. Computers. Not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so from the point of view of the program or the user. VIRTUALY2K with be video and sound recorded for the purposes of an educational documentary. Sound files of presentation will be made available here following the symposium.

Adam Ashforth is a visiting associate professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, who writes extensively about South Africa. His book Madumo: A Man Bewitched tells the story of a young Sowetan’s struggle against the curse of witchcraft at the close of the twentieth century. Witchcraft is a way of exercising physical influence at a distance by immaterial means; therefore, in this context, it is a theme of virtual reality. The University of Chicago Press will publish the work in the spring of 2000. John Perry Barlow is a former Grateful Dead lyricist. More recently, he co-founded and still co-chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was the first to apply the term "cyberspace" to the "place" it presently describes. In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and is presently serving as a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School. He writes and lectures for a living. Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior strategic researcher in the Decision Support Department of the U.S. Naval War College’s (NWC) Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Currently, he serves as the director of the War College’s "Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project." Before joining the NWC faculty, Barnett was project director at the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Publication Research, two major divisions of The CNAC Corporation, a private research firm in Alexandria, Virginia. He has published articles for Proceedings, The Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. His recent article, "The Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare," appeared in the January 1999 issue of Proceedings. Thomas J. Biersteker is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Transnational Organizations in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (on sabbatical in 1990–2000). He is the author/editor of five books, including State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He is currently conducting research on approaches to theorizing world order, on sovereignty and private authority in the international system, and on targeted financial sanctions. Wendy Hui Kyong Chunis an assistant professor in Brown’s Modern Culture and Media Department. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Sexuality in the Age of Fiber Optics. A student of both systems design engineering and English literature, Chun has combined these disciplines in her exploration of the internet and fiber optic networks. James Der Derian is a research professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is author and editor of several books, including The Virilio Reader, and he writes on issues of security, technology, and the information revolution for Wired, The Washington Quarterly, and 21-C. He is currently completing a book project entitled Virtual War. Der Derian is the organizer of the VirtualY2K conference. Ronald J. Deibert is assistant professor of politics at the University of Toronto and specializes in technology, media, and world politics. He is the author of Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. He is presently finishing a book manuscript on security and the Internet, and is engaged in research on virtual reality as postmodern religion. Manuel DeLanda is an independent author and filmmaker. He wrote two philosophical works, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, as well as many philosophical essays published in various journals. DeLanda teaches a seminar at Columbia University on "Theories of Self-Organization and Urban History," and lectures around the world on the philosophy of science and technology. Mary Ann Doane is George Hazard Crooker University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and English at Brown University. She teaches film theory, feminist theory, and semiotic theory, and is currently completing a book entitled Technologies of Temporality in Modernity: The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Ricardo Dominguez is the senior editor of The Thing (bbs.thing.net) and a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater with Stefan Wray, Carmin Karasic, and Brett Stalbum. He is also a former member of Critical Art Ensemble, a current Fakeshop worker, has collaborated with Francesca da Rimini on Dollspace and the Aphanisis Project with Diane Ludin. Ian R. Douglas is general editor and director of The Power Foundation (www.powerfoundation.org), and a former visiting scholar at the Watson Institute. He is working on a project entitled, On the Genealogy of Globalism, and teaches political philosophy. He has written many articles and essays on virtuality, technology, speed and politics. He defines his area of expertise as "the history of systems of power." Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher who studies the connections between political and ethical convictions, is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. She also has taught as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Vanderbilt University, Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the recipient of five honorary degrees and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. Her books include Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, Meditations on Modern Political Thought, and Women and War. Professor Elshtain is also the author of over 400 essays in scholarly journals and journals of civic opinion, and some 175 book reviews. She writes a regular column for The New Republic. Yaron Ezrahi, a professor at Hebrew University, is an authority on the theory and culture of modern democracies. He has written and published extensively on this subject, particularly on the impact of modern science and technology on democratic governments and the conduct of public affairs. His publications include The Descent of Icarus, Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy and Rubber Bullets, Power, and Conscience, in Modern Israel. Ezrahi is an international lecturer and advisor, who has consulted with the White House Public Goals Research Staff, Carnegie Commission on Science and Government, Israeli Parliament, and National Academic of Science. He appears regularly on Israeli television, as well as on Nightline, the NBC Nightly News, NPR, and CNN. Samuel G. Fulcomer is director of Brown’s Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization. A long-time member of Brown’s research staff, he also has held the position of associate director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology from 1997–1998. His principle academic interests are parallel computing architectures and high-performance networks. Abbott Gleason, Brown University’s Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, is the director of the Watson Institute for the academic year 1999–2000. Gleason, an expert on Russian history, is the former chair of the History Department and also served as director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. He is the author of Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1995), and the editor of the forthcoming work Nikita Khrushchev: Fresh Perspectives on the Last Communist (Yale University Press, 2000). His current research focuses on national identity in Russia and the United States from 1830–1930, especially as reflected in the visual arts. N. Katherine Hayles, professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, writes and teaches about the relationship between culture and technology in the twentieth century. Her recent book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, looks at the emergence of the concept of the "posthuman" and its reconfigurations of embodiment. Carmin Karasic is a website developer and digital artist focused on internet art. Karasic is the director of the Boston Cyberarts website and its cyber gallery, HyperArt Space. She is currently exhibiting in several online galleries, such as Cyber Art Gallery Eindhoven, NL (www.cage.nl), the Harriet Tubman House Gallery in Boston, and Cooper Union’s Brooks Gallery in New York City. She also performs in collaborative online venues, including Jeff Gompertz’ fakeshop and Johns Hopkins’ dialogue piece for ARS Intertwindness. Jon Katz is a media critic and author. He writes on and about the web for Slashdot.org, the Freedom Forum’s website Free!, and Rolling Stone. He is the author of ten books, six novels, and four nonfiction books. Villard Books will publish his latest work, Geeks, in February 2000. Thomas Keenan directs the new Human Rights Project at Bard College. He is also associate professor of comparative literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility and is at work on Live Feed, a study of the interactions between postmodern war, humanitarianism, and the media. Laura Kurgan teaches in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her projects construct sites for encounters between global data networks and highly specific local conditions. They expose, delineate, and visualize information infrastructures in an effort to reinvent architectural fundamentals—forms, materials, and media. Working with advanced information technologies including the global positioning system, high resolution satellite imagery, and digital money networks, her work seeks to describe and chart new territories of information. In addition to a design practice in New York City, her work includes installations and projects that have been exhibited in New York City, Barcelona, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this year at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. George Landow, a professor of English and art history at Brown University, has written and lectured internationally on literary theory and educational computing, as well as on nineteenth-century literature, art, and religion. His edited and co-edited works on hypertext and digital culture include Hypermedia and Literary Studies, The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing in the Humanities, and Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. A faculty fellow at Brown’s Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) from 1985–1992, Landow worked as a member of the team that developed Intermedia. He supervised, edited, and partially wrote various hypermedia documents on this system used to support English courses. He created and maintains three interlinked websites that together include 20,000 documents and that have won more than 30 awards. Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. He is probably best known for his work in virtual reality—a term which he coined—and was a principal pioneer in the scientific, engineering, and commercial aspects of the field. Currently, Lanier serves as the lead scientist of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2. He writes on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technological practices, the philosophy of consciousness and information, internet politics, and the future of humanism. His book Information is Alienated Experience is forthcoming from Basic Books. Thomas Y. Levin teaches media and cultural history and theory at Princeton University, where he is an associate professor in the German Department. Currently on leave in Amsterdam as curator-in-residence at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, he is working on a study of the origins of "synthetic sound" and a larger project on the aesthetics ofsurveillance. Robert L. Mace is currently the deputy program manager for the MIRES (Mission Rehearsal) Program for Anteon Corporation, Falls Church, Virginia. (MIRES supports the U.S. Navy’s Mission Rehearsal Program, Tactical Operational Scene (TOPSCENE).) Mace retired from the Navy in 1994 after completing 21 years of combined Army and Navy operational service with the 82nd Airborne Division, Reconnaissance / Surveillance Forces U.S. Pacific and Mediterranean Fleets, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Michael R. Macedonia is chief scientist and technical director at the U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM). As such, he is responsible for the planning, development, coordination, and direction of a comprehensive program that provides the full spectrum of commercial and defense technology support for an $800 million per year enterprise. Following his military service, Macedonia became the vice-president of the nonprofit Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics, Inc. (CRCG) in Providence, Rhode Island. Macedonia then joined the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia. He also contributed to the National Academy of Sciences report entitled "Virtual Reality: Scientific and Technological Challenges," detailing the further networking and communications research needed to continue the development of virtual reality systems. He is the co-editor of "Projects in Virtual Reality, for IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications." Ira C. Magaziner is currently president of SJS, Incorporated, a business strategy consulting and investment firm. A former senior advisor to President Clinton, Magaziner coordinated the U.S. Government’s strategy on electronic commerce and the emerging digital economy. He also supervised the development of the President’s strategy paper "A Framework For Global Electronic Commerce" released in July 1997, and coordinated the interagency team to implement the strategy. This effort led to a declaration signed by 132 nations to refrain from imposing customs duties on electronic commerce; agreements supporting a market-driven approach to electronic commerce with the European Union, Japan, Australia, and other nations; a law to put a three-year moratorium on new and discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce; an international treaty to protect intellectual property on-line; legislation making it possible to conduct official transactions electronically; funds to challenge the nation's research community to develop the next generation Internet; a law to protect the privacy of children on-line; an effort among companies representing a large share of the Internet traffic to set privacy guidelines for the Internet; a privatization of the Internet's domain name and routing systems; and initiatives to improve the security and reliability of cyberspace. William L. Nash (Major General, US Army, Retired) is the director, Civil-Military Programs for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, DC. In 1998, he was a fellow and visiting lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Major General Nash was commanding general of the United States Army’s 1st Armored Division from June 1995 to May 1997. In 1996, he was the commander of Task Force Eagle, a multinational division of 25,000 soldiers from 12 nations charged to enforce the military provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mark Pesce of the University of Southern California is an internet visionary and cocreator of Virtual Reality Mark-up Language (VRML). As a lecturer and teacher, Pesce has educated people around the world to the power and potential of VRML. Pesce was the corecipient of Meckler’s Market Impact Award for Virtual Reality, and he was recently named one of Network Computing’s Most Influential People in Networking. For his work on WebEarth, which creates a real-time VRML model of the planet, Pesce received an Honorable Mention from the Ars Electronica Foundation. John Phillip Santos is a program officer for the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts, and Culture Program. As such, he has direct programming responsibility for the Foundation’s Media Projects Fund, an initiative involving new media technologies. Santos is a filmmaker, producer, journalist, and writer whose work examines the intersecting issues of media, religion, and identity. He was the recent producer of From the Airwaves to the Internet, a former executive producer and director of new program development for Thirteen/WNET, and was also a producer of broadcasts on culture and religion for CBS News. Andries van Dam has been on Brown's faculty since 1965, and was one of the Computer Science Department's founders and its first chairman. He is a principal investigator in, and was the director from 1996–1998 of, the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization. His research has concerned computer graphics, text processing, and hypermedia systems, and he has been working for over 30 years on systems for creating and reading electronic books with interactive illustrations for use in teaching and research. He is the co-author of the widely used reference book Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics; and the greatly expanded successor, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. Michael Zyda is a professor of computer science and the chair of the Modeling, Virtual Environments, and Simulation Academic Group at the Naval Postgraduate School. He chaired the NRC report Modeling and Simulation—Linking Entertainment and Defense, and was a member of the NRC committee that generated the report Virtual Reality—Scientific and Technological Challenges. He is co-author of Networked Virtual Environments—Design and Implementation and co-author of Mobile Agents.