Department Organization

As an organization with diverse functions, we carry out our mission through a number of Offices and
Bureaus. These are organized into major program areas, and headed by an Under Secretary or other
official.

Office of the Secretary

The Secretary, as head of the US Department of Art and Technology and chief media arts advisory for the Federal Government, represents the United States in aesthetic and cultural matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested. The Secretary appears in person to represent the Government before the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress in cases where the visionary aspirations of the avant-garde is of exceptional gravity or importance to the nation.

Secretary Randall M. Packer

Calling him "a man of great integrity, a man of great judgment and a man who knows the arts," President George W. Bush announced his decision to nominate Randall M. Packer to serve as Secretary of the United States Department of Art and Technology on November 12, 2001. Upon confirmation by the Senate, Packer pledged to renew the war on cultural poverty, reduce the incidence of a one-way exchange of information between an active agent and a passive recipient, and combat discrimination so no American feels outside the field of aesthetic inquiry of the contemporary media arts.

Packer was born in San Jose, California, on January 23, 1953. He began his career as a sound and media artist and founded Zakros InterArts, a nonprofit arts company originally established in San Francisco. His ability to work with artists of all disciplines prompted his colleagues in the nonpartisan interdisciplinary arts to collaborate on seminal productions of experimental and sometimes confrontational music-theatre. San Francisco Magazine rated him as “a bright light on the new media horizon… performing neglected works that fit into no recognizable category,” New Media Magazine described him as exploring “the latest in multimedia wizardry,” while Washington DC’s Citypaper credited him with “documenting, inspiring, and exploring the emergence of a hi-tech utopia.”

In 1999, the eve of the new millennium, he moved to the nation’s capital to promote the transformative potential of art and technology, assembling the “Telematic Manifesto” for ZKM's Net_Condition exhibition, a participatory, collectively-generated Net Document that articulates a vision for the future of Telematic Art as a socio-cultural force in the 21st Century.” As a media arts scholar – dedicated to combating cultural poverty, increasing the quality of media arts education, reducing passive art, and safeguarding the historical legacy of artists and engineers – Packer co-authored a definitive text on the history of multimedia, “Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.” Packer worked closely with colleague Ken Jordan, and an assortment of theorists, engineers, artists, sociologists, and experts in a myriad of fields, developing strategies to counter the medium’s lack of definition and context. It was the result of this effort that garnered Packer the nomination from President Bush as the first Secretary of the US Department of Art and Technology.

Secretary Packer is committed to confronting artistic constraints by leading the US Department of Art & Technology free from conservative aesthetics, defined by revolutionary practices, and dedicated to upholding the visionary aspirations of the avant-garde. He will make certain that the Department fulfills its utopian promise and honors its radical heritage, not only by articulating the visions of the past, but by supporting the advancement of all American media artists embracing the integration of art and technology as the artistic reality of the 21st century.

Offices and Bureaus of the Department

Under Secretary for the Office of Artist & Homeland Insecurity
Jeff Gates -Artist, Head of New Media Initiatives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, ArtFBI, Washington, DC

Minister of Culture
Jack Rasmussen - Executive Director, di Rosa Preserve Art & Nature, Napa, CA

Under Secretary for Domestic Affairs
Phyllis Hecht - Art Director & Web Manager, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Chief of Protocol
Alice Denney - Founder, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC

Under Secretary for the Bureau of the Aesthetic Hyperculture
Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) - Artist and musician

Under Secretary for the Bureau of Cultural Transformation and Paradigmatic Shifts
David Ross- Executive Director, Beacon Cultural Project, Beacon, NY

Deputy Undersecretary
Robert Atkins - Independent Art Critic, New York

Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary
Steve Dietz - Curator of New Media, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Director of Communications and Chief Information Officer
Ken Jordan - Director, The Art Council, New York

Head of the Office of General Counsel for Legislation and Regulation
Hamilton Hauck - Attorney at Law, San Francisco

Deputy Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Protection & Immunization
Against Mediation & Alienation
Lynn Hershman - Artist, San Francisco

Under Secretary of the Bureau for Shredding and Remixing Government Information
Mark Napier - Artist, San Francisco

Under Secretary for International Affairs
Vibeke Sorensen - Artist, University of Southern California, School of Cinema-Television

Under Secretary for the Office of Virtualization
Pierre Lévy - Philisopher, Quebec University at Montreal

Director of the Office of Freedom of Speech
Mark Amerika - Artist, Founder, Alt-x, Boulder, CO

Director of the Office of Political and Economic Insecurity
Abe Golam - Info-Shaman and Politician, Electrosphere

Director of the Office of Micro-Technology and Virtual Realities
Kevin Teixeira - Co-founder, Artmuseum.net

Director of the Office of Strategy & Subversion
David Crandall - Editor, LINK, Baltimore

Director of the Office of Language & Editorial Freedom
Susan Higman - Head of Publications, Detroit Institute of Art

Director of the Office of Robotics and Telepistomology
Ken Goldberg- Artist and Professor of Industrial Engineering

Director of Creative Freedom and Utopian Aspiration
Tiffany Shlain- Founder and Director of the Webby Awards

Under Secretary of the Office of Immersion & Interactive Dada
Marc Lafia - Independent Artist

Director of the Office of Utopian Ideals & Visionary Aspirations
Irena Rogovsky - Product Marketing Manager, Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA

Under Secretary of the Bureau for Rhizomatics, Community & Generative Data
Alex Galloway - Artist, Director of Content & Technology, Rhizome.org, New York

Director of the Office of Emerging Technologies & Digital Aesthetics
Mark Tribe - Artist, Founder & Executive Director, Rhizome.org, New York

Under Secretary for the Bureau of High Concept
Peter Walsh - Writer, Founder and Editor, LINK, New York

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Blurring of the Real & the Virtual
John Young - Independent Computer Music Specialist, Bethesda, MD

Assistant Secretary for Legislation & Congressional Affairs
David Baime - Director of Government Relations, American Association of Community Colleges,
Washington, DC

Assistant Secretary of the Bureau for the Conservation and Preservation of the Suspension of Disbelief
Amy Pastan - Independent Writer & Editor, Washington, DC

Deputy Secretary of the Bureau for Archiving Old Media & Anachronistic Ideologies
Joan Freedman - Director, Digital Media Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Director of the Office of Excessive Verbiage & Official Ceremonies
Douglas Robertson - Accountant, US Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC

Under Secretary for the Bureau of Reality
Billy Klüver - Engineer, Founder and Director, EAT (Experiments in Art & Technology), Berkeley Heights, NJ

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Conservation and Preservation of
Immersion & Tele-Musical Experience
Neil Rolnick - Composer, iEAR, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

Envoy Plenipotentiary to the European Union and Latin America
William Gilcher - Media Projects USA/Canada, Goethe-Institute Washington, DC.

Under Secretary for the Preservation of the Avant-Garde
Laura Coyle - Curator of European Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Director of the Office for Haut Cuisine and International Culinary Arts
Peter Pastan - Chief Chef and Owner, Obelisk Restaurant and 2 Amys Restaurant, Washington, DC

Director of the Office for Transparency, Space and Light
Walter Kravitz - Artist, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing, George Mason University

Under Secretary for the Bureau of the Inner World
Judith Harris - Poet, Assistant Professor of English , George Washington University

Director of the Bureau for the Investigation of Tyrranical Consensual Hallucinations
Peter Ludlow - Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Michigan

Director of the Office of Therapeutic Television & Affordable Health Insurance
Peter Decter - Critic, curator and cultural historian, School of the Visual Arts, New York University

Under Secretary of the Bureau for Eco-Art and Environmental Survival
Sant Khalsa - Artist, Professor of Art, California State University, San Bernardino

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Office of Artistic Reform of Technological Systems and Materials
Deborah Kennedy - Artist, Professor of Art, California State University, San Bernardino

Under Secretary for the Dissemnination of Overt Information
Kathy Brew - Producer, Curator and Writer, Faculty of the School of the Visual Arts, New York University

Under Secretary for the Agency of Telematics, Informatics, and Robotics
Edward Shanken - Executive Director, Information Science + Information Studies, Duke University

Director of the Bureau for the Dissemination of Metastructures and Media Metaphors
Patrick Lichty - Experimental Media Arts Researcher

Under Secretary of the Bureau of the Intermedium Between Life and Mortality
Richard Dana- Artist

Director of the Office of the National Regulatory Commission on Illusion & Fakery
Glenn Marcus - Independent Documentarian, Adjunct Professor of Communications at Johns Hopkins University

Under Secretary for Free Cultural Distribution and the Disintegration of Borders and Boundaries
Fran Ilich - Author and Editor, DeleteTV

Under Secretary of the Bureau for Communications Beyond the Corporeal
Victoria Vesna - Artist and Chair, UCLA Design | Media Arts

Director of the Bureau of Pharmakogeographical Surveying
Trace Reddell - Artist and Assistant Professor, School of Communications, University of Denver

Director of the Joint Chiefs of Sound Warfare and Peer-to-Peer Defense
Rick Silva - Artist and Musician

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Transformation of Western Civilization
Charles Lane - Tenor

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Transformation and Radicalization of Corporate Culture and Militarism
Andy Deck - Activist Artist

Under Secretary of the Bureau for Surveying the State of Art and the Medial State of Mind
Kristine Stiles - Art Theorist and Associate Professor, Duke University, Art & Art History

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Transformation of Reality
Yauger Williams - Artist and Assistant Professor, Visualization Lab, Texas A & M

Under Secretary of the Bureau for the Integration of Art & Science
Roger Malina - Astrophysicist and editor, Chairman of the Board, Leonardo Journal

Minister of Projections
Robin Bell -VJ and video artist

Minister of Installations
Gregory Kuhn - Composer and Installation Designer

Operations Center

The Operations Center (S/S-O) is the Secretary's and the Department's communications and crisis management center. Working 24/7, the Operations Center monitors system distributions, excessive industry hype, prepares briefings for the Secretary and other Department principals, and facilitates communication between the Department and the rest of the world in the form of Web cams, listserves, and on-line bulletin boards, The Operations Center also coordinates the Department's response to aesthetic and technical crises and supports relevant art-theoretical arguments, software revisions, and other crisis-related activities.