ATB : Books & Biomes
VWBPE 2023 Above the Book
Presented: March 24, 2023
Hosts: Bernhard Drax, Cat Sparks
Bernhard Drax / SL: Draxtor Despres
Bernhard Drax aka Draxtor™ is an Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award winning documentarian.
Since 2007 he has produced more than 400 mini-documentaries on the subject of creative diversity and inclusion through virtual worlds via his “Drax Files World Makers” series on YouTube in the past 13 years.
A former news director at a NPR affiliate in California and graduate of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Munich, Germany, Draxtor in 2018 released the feature documentary “Our Digital Selves” about disability and place-making in virtual worlds for the National Science Foundation.
Another collaboration with the NSF and the University of California at Irvine, “Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times”, was released in 2022.
Draxtor is a Linden Lab contractor, producing weekly videos for the official Second Life social media channels, as well as the host of the Second Life Book Club.
He is currently developing a short film based on Tlotlo Tsamaase’s novella “The Silence of the Wilting Skin” and a full-length documentary feature about the life of jazz great Toni Harper.
After 23 years in California, Draxtor lives with his wife, son and dog in Munich, Germany.
Cat Sparks
Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning Australian author, editor and artist. Career highlights include a PhD in science fiction and climate fiction, five years as Fiction Editor of Cosmos Magazine, running Agog! Press, working as an archaeological dig photographer in Jordan, studying with Margaret Atwood, 80+ published short stories, two collections – The Bride Price (2013) and Dark Harvest (2020) and a far future novel, Lotus Blue (2017). Calvaria Fell, a shared world collection with Kaaron Warren, will be published by Meerkat Press in early 2024. Other interests include climate activism & photography.
Her PhD comprising of the exegesis The 21st Century Catastrophe—Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction, and the short story collection: Capitalocene Dreams: Dark Tales of Near Futures is available here: https://espace.curtin.edu.au/handle/20.500.11937/70516
More about Cat Sparks:
Website: http://www.catsparks.net/
X: https://twitter.com/catsparx
