Merja Pu­usti­nen works as artist, cu­ra­tor, re­searcher, lec­turer and pro­ducer. She is based in Espoo, Fin­land. She has a back­ground in sculp­ture, video and in­stal­la­tion art. She has stud­ied phi­los­o­phy and so­ci­ol­ogy at Helsinki Uni­ver­sity. Since 1993 she has col­lab­o­rated with in­ter­ac­tive media art per­for­mances, net­work pro­jects and in­stal­la­tions in col­lab­o­ra­tion with her part­ner Andy Best. They were amongst the first on­line web artists, and dur­ing the mid to late 1990’s worked with vir­tual multi­user 3D worlds on the in­ter­net. With their com­pany Meet­fac­tory they de­vel­oped a 3D multi­user com­mu­nity plat­form and vir­tual pet or tam­agotchi for mo­bile phones. They now con­cen­trate their artis­tic ac­tivites on large scale in­stal­la­tions and in­ter­ac­tive works. Merja Pu­usti­nen is com­plet­ing her PhD re­search on in­ter­ac­tive media art at the Acad­emy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. She is par­tic­u­larly in­ter­ested in com­bin­ing art, ar­chi­tec­ture and in­ter­ac­tive com­puter and sen­sor tech­nolo­gies to recre­ate phys­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ences and el­e­ments of play for the end user within the in­sti­tu­tional frame­work of art.