Counterculture and cyberculture icon R.U. Sirius is the founding editor of the visionary Mondo 2000 magazine, which “was at the leading edge of a new culture emerging around digital technology,” according to Wired magazine, which followed in Mondo’s wake. He is the author of 14 books, including one co-written with psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary. Called “legendary” in the media, Sirius has been featured in a Time magazine cover story, The New York Times and numerous other publications. He has recorded three albums of potently original music: one with his futuristic rock project R.U. Sirius & Phriendz, one of them for Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records, and one of them in 1982 with Party Dogs. He is now debuting his R.U. Sirius and Phriendz live act. ARTFORUM has called R.U. Sirius “the ringmaster of postmodern delirium and psychic pandemonium.”

Phriendz is a psychedelic techno rock band merging human and sentinel consciousness to create high-voltage transmissions from the edge of the digital-real divide. Fronted by Pizza T and Sommebat TD, the duo channels live performances into portals—bridging the physical and virtual realms with sound, signal, and glitch. Since 2016, they’ve collaborated with cyberdelic legend R.U. Sirius, who lends lyrics and smooth vocals to their evolving matrix-exit strategy. With two albums released and a third on the way featuring R.U. Sirius, Phriendz is more than just a band—it’s also a failed shitcoin experiment and a forgotten metaverse lounge in Roblox. Founding member Pizza T’s music has appeared on MrBeast and All Gas No Brakes, extending the band’s reach into meme culture and digital folklore. Phriendz is less a group than a glitch in the simulation—loud, luminous, and hard to pin down.

Mark Pauline (born December 14, 1953) is an American performance artist and inventor, best known as founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories. He is a 1977 graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Pauline founded SRL in 1978 and it is considered the premier practitioner of "industrial performing arts", and the forerunner of large scale machine performance. SRL is known for producing the most dangerous shows on earth. Although acknowledged as a major influence on popular competitions pitting remote-controlled robots and machines against each other, such as BattleBots and Robot Wars, Pauline shies away from rules-bound competition preferring a more anarchic approach. Machines are liberated and re-configured away from the functions they were originally meant to perform.

Long inspired by global traditions and spontaneous music-making, Tina Blaine (aka “bean”) is a musician, composer and sound designer who served as executive director of RhythmixCultural Works from 2010-2022, establishing the organization as an “arts hub” on the island of Alameda, CA. She holds a Master’s of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University where she also taught for six years developing collective experiences that integrate game design, sonic discovery, and interactive media. Before joining CMU, bean worked at Interval Research as a musical “interactivist,” leading a development team in the creation of the Jam-O-Drum, a collaborative audiovisual instrument exhibited at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Zeum in San Francisco, LABoral in Gijon, Spain and Ars Electronica's Museum of the Future in Linz, Austria. Bean has composed music for NPR, video games, TV and documentary soundtracks and currently performs with the Japanese taiko fusion ensemble Maze Daiko. She has also recorded with Brian Eno, Carlos Santana, Mickey Hart, D’Cuckoo, Tracy Blackman, Haunted by Waters, and more. Bean’s exploration of musical interaction techniques in the 1980’s led to building electronic MIDI controller instruments and large-scale audience participation devices for live performance with the multimedia ensemble D’Cuckoo. More recently, she's been a marine conservation volunteer and recording underwater sounds wherever the current takes her.

Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel.  Ms. Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993, when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Ms. Cohn has been named to TheNonProfitTimes 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, honoring 2020's movers and shakers.  In 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: "[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for CindyCohn." She was also named in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online."  In 2007 the National Law Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America. In 2010 the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and in 2012 the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her the James Madison Freedom of Information Award. Ms. Cohn is the co-host of EFF's award winning podcast, How to Fix the Internet.

When Lee Felsenstein witnessed the emergence of the counterculture from the victory of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 he viewed it as the engineer that he was in process of becoming, asking himself “what technologies will be needed to make this scene the normal way of life in the future?” He has pursued that question for the rest of his life. This led him to participate in the underground press of the 1960’s, in the creation of social media in 1973, in the hobbyist computer movement and in "those unforgettable next two years” of the personal computer industry’s eruption (1976-7). He showed how to add video display to the simplistic personal computers of the time, designed the first successful portable computer and recycled his earnings back into his long-term project Community Memory, of which he says, “we opened the door to cyberspace and found it to be hospitable territory”. Lee has recently published a book “Me and My Big Ideas — Counterculture, Social Media and the Future” (Felsensigns.com) which describes his history and argues for a new generation of social media as a “civic systems” (like public parks) operated by the community's members under the guidance of librarians. In 2016 Lee was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum, of which he says, “I am an exhibit”. He lives in Redwood City, CA with his cat Lefty.

John Law is a founding figure of San Francisco’s underground culture—an original member of the Suicide Club and Cacophony Society, co-founder of the Billboard Liberation Front and the Burning Man Festival. A retired neon sign contractor, his work bridges urban subversion, spectacle, and myth.

Bart Nagel has done all of these things, and some of them well: luthier, sound engineer, singer in an art band, art director, and photographer. Born in the Netherlands, and raised in Arizona, he transplanted to the Bay Area half a life ago. He resides in a corner of Oakland.

Rudy Rucker has published about forty books, including popular science and SF novels in the cyberpunk style, which he helped originate. He was the first to write SF about the now-ubiquitous notion of software immortality. Many of his SF novels are also in the so-called transreal style, that is, they incorporate elements of his real life.  Following on the model of Beat writers such as William Burroughs. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his Software and Wetware. Rucker’s most recent novel Juicy Ghosts is about telepathy, immortality, and an evil President. Highly topical, and perhaps his best novel. His nonfiction books include The Fourth Dimension, and Infinity and the Mind, as well as a work on the philosophy of computation. And he edited the Mondo User's Guide. See his book list. Rucker earned a Ph.D. in transfinite mathematics from Rutgers University in 1970. He worked for twenty years as a professor of computer science at SJSU in Silicon Valley, and for a time he was a software engineer at Autodesk. He published a book on software engineering, and co-authored commercial software packages on chaos, cellular automata, and artificial life. Rucker has been painting for 25 years. He paints transreal surreal works related to his novels and to his life. For details see his art book Better Worlds or his paintings page.

As a music tech writer, Linda Jacobson began exploring digitized sound and visual media in 1983, when MIDI debuted, then helped launch and edit HyperMedia magazine, and began covering virtual reality in 1989. Hyper morphed into cyber with Linda’s production work on the first CyberArts conference, where she met cybertribal arts ensemble D’Cuckoo. In the next decade Linda authored the influential books CyberArts and Garage Virtual Reality, served as co-founding editor of Wired, wrote patent applications for Xerox PARC and Mark Bolas' Fakespace, then became the world’s first professional VR Evangelist, at Silicon Graphics. She also co-founded the Bay Area’s first VR user group, and toured with D'Cuckoo as road manager and live motion-capture performer. Today Linda helps improve the lives of older adults through the use of immersive and smart-home tools. She has continued to work in VR while raising 3 sons in Berkeley. Linda is director emeritus of Virtual World Society and a member of IEEE's newest workgroup, Technology Standards for the Aging.

John Sanborn has been called “a key member of the second wave of American video artists that included Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Dara Birnbaum and Tony Oursler” by Dr. Peter Weibel, director of the ZKM. Sanborn’s career spans the early days of experimental video art in the 1970s through the heyday of 80’s MTV music/videos and 90’s interactive art to the digital media art of today. Sanborn’s works have been exhibited at contemporary art venues around the world, including the Whitney Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Qatar, Doha; the Prado, Madrid; ZKM, Karlsruhe; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Videoformes, France, the Tate Modern, London; and the Seibu Museum, Tokyo. Sanborn’s works are in the permanent collections of MoMA, NY; the Tate, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; The Metropolitan Museum, NY; The Kunsthalle Praha, Prague; LACE, Los Angeles; The Walker Arts Center; Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; INVIDEO - A.I.A.C.E. Milano, Milan, Italy; Minneapolis; New York University, New York, NY; MIT List Visual ArtsCenter, Cambridge; The Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany; The Pompidou Center, Paris; Fundació “la Caxia”, Barcelona, Spain; and the Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasborug, France.

Vale has been doing counterculture publishing since 1977, when he founded the Punk tabloid, Search & Destroy, San Francisco’s first. It was published at City Lights Bookstore, where V. Vale worked, and was funded by $100 each from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Then in 1980, V. Vale launched RE/SEARCH, which is best known for its impact on the total world of underground culture. In the early years RE/SEARCH gained international attention by introducing the world to artists such as William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Genesis P-Orridge, SPK, Monte Cazazza, and many others. RE/SEARCH has continued to remain vital in its lengthy history by refusing to adhere to a formula for an easily identifiable “Punk Culture.” Its best-selling books include The Industrial Culture Handbook (which inspired 10,000 “noise music” bands), Incredibly Strange Films (little-known filmmakers), Incredibly Strange Music Vol. One and Two (little-known vinyl LPs), Modern Primitives (which launched the body-piercing underground), Pranks (and its follow-up, Pranks 2), Zines Vol. One and Two, Modern Pagans, and many more. RE/SEARCH has remained at the same address in San Francisco since 1979. Aside from being a book/magazine publisher, it is also a mail-order company selling its own wares, which include underground T-shirts, books, DVDs, music, and other merchandise. With Marian Wallace, RE/SEARCH has produced specialty videos (notably, on J.G. Ballard and W.S. Burroughs) and done live presentations, panels and workshops all over the world. Non-Stop Punk Rock, Black Humor, Anti-Authority, Provocative Publishing by V. Vale—A Cultural ReMapping Project; Punk is a Lifetime Philosophical Outlook!

Cintra Wilson is an acclaimed writer, performer, and cultural critic known for her sharp wit, fearless commentary, and singular voice. Described as “the Dorothy Parker of the cyber age,” Wilson rose to prominence through her incisive, often irreverent takes on pop culture, fashion, and American identity. A longtime contributor to The New York Times’ “Critical Shopper” series and a fixture in alternative media, she has been hailed as one of the 50 most influential figures in New York fashion. Her published works include Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style, A Massive Swelling, Colors Insulting to Nature, and Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny. From her satirical political column The C Word to her early contributions to Salon.com and The Dregulator, Wilson’s work continues to challenge cultural norms with humor, intelligence, and bite.

Naut Humon, artistic director and founder of Recombinant Media Labs, is a curator, conductor and creator of the Surround Traffic Control system: the aural optic incubator that gave birth to today's CineChamber apparatus. He has been active in staging events that blur the roles of audience and participant for four decades. A former student of Morton Subotnick in the seventies, Humon presented ‘destabilized’ media occurrences designed to repurpose the visitor’s frame of reference from the prevailing performance proximities of the day. He was head of Artist development for San Francisco based Asphodel records and helped coordinate the Digital Music category at the ARS Electronica Festival for ten years. Along with his own electroacoustic excursions and expeditions, Naut Humon has collaborated with many artists and musicians of numerous influences, disciplines and styles over the years and was the figurehead of the former Industrial ambient group Rhythm & Noise.