Panel Statement n.a.

• Mark Amerika (USA) is the author of many books including the novels Sexual Blood (1995) and The Kafka Chronicles (1993). In 1993, he started The Alt-X Online Publishing Network (http://www.altx.conn). In June of 1997 he launched the GRAMMATRON hypermedia narrative project (http://www.grammatron.com). Exhibitions of his work have appeared or are forthcoming at the Ars Electronica Center,The Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Macedonia and the Portraits In Cyberspace on-line exhibi­tion, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the M.I.T. Media Lab. Recent festivals/conferences he’s participated in include the Duke University Assault: Radicalism In Aesthetics and Politics conference, the Brown University Unspeakable Practices Vanguard Narrative Festival, the Crossings: American Authors Festival in Cologne, and the German Association of American Studies conference on Technology and American Culture in Freiburg. He has an MFA from Brown University where he recently helped design a course called Cyberspace, Virtual Reality and Critical Theory.
• Hilmar Schmundt M.A. (Germany) is editor at Zitty magazine, Berlin, writes for Die Zeit, Die Woche, Die Wochenzeitung, and is co-­editor of the e-zine Softmoderne Online —Elektrobriefe. Together with Stephan Porombka he is the organizer of Softmoderne, an annual electronic literature festival, now in its third year. He studied literature, journalism and geog­raphy in Freiburg i. Br., at UMass Amherst and at John-F.­Kennedy Institute in Berlin.
• Sue Thomas (UK) has just completed her third novel, The f+METf+I Of Desire, which takes place in the unbodied realm of text-based virtuality.The landscape of the book can be found at LambdaM00 #87887. Her first novel, Correspondence, explored the choice to be made between a human or a machine body, and was short-listed for several awards, including the 1992 Arthur (Clarke Award for Best Science Ficton NoveLln her second book, Water, she invent­ed Ruari, a sensual yet wholly inorganic entity. She is editor of the storycollection, Wild Women, and has written for Wired, Geekgirl, and Mute. Course Leader of the MA in Writing and Project Leader of the trAce Writing and Technology Research Project at Nottingham Trent University, England, she will be teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth for the Spring Semester of 1998. “She writes about our machined, manipulated land­scape with bold sensual accuracy. Billed as a ‘roleplay’ as well as a novel, Correspondence is formally inventive with a rich sense of humour.” (Village Voice) “There is an interest­ing surreal quality in Water. Mythic. Although the rules of physics are never actually broken, it feels as if they might be any second.” _LA Times Book Review
• Gundolf  S. Freyermuth‘s writing credits include 3 novels, 8 non-fiction books, and several screenplays. Born 1955 in Hanover, Germany, he studied and taught comparative lit­erature at Free University, Berlin, specializing on media theory and on the history, theory and practice of literary reporting. He also was a reporter and senior editor with TransAtlantik, Stern, and other German magazines. Since 1994, Freyermuth lives on a ranch in the White Mountains, Arizona writing fiction and exploring cyber culture and its effects on traditional media. He is a regular contributor to Spiegel Special, Frankfurter Rundschau, and the online magazine Telepolis. His latest books are Cyberland: Eine Fuehrung Burch den High-Tech-Underground (Berlin 1996), Das war’s: Letzte Worte mit Charles Bukowski (Hamburg 1996) and the novel Bogarts Bruder (Leipzig 1997; writing as John Cassar).