Currently I am Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where I have been teaching media history, digital culture, and media theory since 2004. I also serve as director of the Program in Visual Studies that includes faculty from Film & Media and from Art History. Previously I taught at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (in the departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and in English), and at Bard College (where I also taught at the Eastern Maximum Security Prison in upstate New York). Over the past half decade, I was interviewed about new media on Fox News, on CNBC Africa, and in various North American and German newspapers. I have served as visiting professor at Tainan National University of Art in Taiwan, at the South California Institute of Architecture (Sci_Arc) and at Otis College of Art in Los Angeles, and at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I am the author of Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and edited Medium Cool, a collection on contemporary media theory (Duke University Press, 2002: Southern Atlantic Quarterly 101:3). I received a doctorate with a dissertation on media theory and European intellectual history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and previously worked as a Research Fellow at Konstanz University and studied at the University of Stirling and Bonn University. During as well as in between my high school, college and graduate school years, I worked as a musician, journalist, webdesigner, translator, and stockbroker. As a graduate student, I received recognition as Outstanding Faculty at UC Santa Barbara in an annual vote among resident undergraduates. I have received Fellowships from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the DFG (German National Science Foundation), and from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since the early 1990s, I was on the forefront of exploring the culture of the Internet, and received several awards for websites. In 2000, I was interviewed by Newsweek about Internet politics, and Artforum plugged my sites as early as 1998. I have served as a jury member for electronic arts organizations for a decade now (from ISEA 8, 1997 to perthDAC, 2007). I co-founded two online journals (Foreign Body, Fieldwork - both now defunct) and serve on the board of another, Culture Machine.

More recent updates: I don't blog any more (and the blog lists the reasons why), but I have accounts on too many social networks to list them here (find me in yours). And I try not to think about my other dormant domain names. I happily team-teach a year-long course on computer games as art, technology, and culture at UCI in the first-year integrated program sponsored by the Dean of Undergraduate Education. - Since coming to UCI, I have organized a number of international conferences - on Pacific Modernities and Museum Studies, on Digging, Gaming, and Texting, on Text & Image, and on models of Defense in the critical media arts.