About the Interlocutors

Kal Spelletich has been exploring the interface of humans and machines for 25 years, using technology to put people back in touch with intense, real-life experiences. His work is interactive, requiring participants to enter or operate his pieces, often against their instincts of self-preservation. He probes the boundaries between fear, control, and exhilaration by giving his audience the opportunity to operate fascinating and often dangerous machinery. Spelletich’s work has been included in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions including the De Young Museum, SFMOMA, The Exploratorium Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has exhibited internationally in Namibia, Germany, Croatia and Austria. He is represented by the Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco.

Karen Marcelo has worked for Frogdesign, Intel Research, and Xerox PARC, among others. She is Survival Research Labs’ Tele-Obliteration Engineer and founder of dorkbot San Francisco, where “people doing strange things with electricity” can share their projects with each other. Karen has also collaborated with notorious Australian performance artist STELARC, working on his Prosthetic Head. Over the years she has worked on ubiquitous computing environments, 3D authoring tools, 3D visualizations, and the first civilian-developed telerobotics control systems for lethal machines. Currently she is doing flame choreography and coding behavior for a motorized flamethrower-wielding industrial robot arm at Survival Research Labs.