Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media.  He was the Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies program (ISIS) at Duke University from 2001 to 2004 and Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah College of Art and Design from 2004 to 2007.  In 2007-8 he was Senior Researcher at the UCLA Art | Science Center and Visiting Scholar at the California NanoSystems Institute.  He is currently Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam and serves on the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University, Austria.

Shanken has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was formerly chair of the Leonardo Education Forum and a member of the College Art Association Education Committee and has served as an advisor to the Media Art Histories conference, ISEA, the journal Technoetic Arts, and the Leonardo Pioneers and Pathbreakers project. He has conducted extensive research on the theory, practice and pedagogy of Roy Ascott, a pioneer of cybernetic and telematic art, and on the work of art critic Jack Burnham, including the Software exhbition Burnham curated in 1970.

Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and technology in the 1960s, methodology and historiography, art-science collaboration, and the cultural implications of cybernetics, robotics, and biotechnology.  Shanken is editor of a collection of Ascott's essays from 1964-2000, entitled, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (University of California Press (2003) and author of Art and Electronic Media, forthcoming from Phaidon Press (2009). 

Edward Shanken's personal website

Robert Adrian, "Art and Telecommunication: The Pioneer Years, 1979-1986"
Roy Ascott Wikipedia Entry
87 Top Bad Predictions About the Future
Future Shock - 2 min. videoclip from the 1972 documentary on mind, drugs, electrostimulation