Society of the Query
Geert Lovink (moderator)
Yann Moulier Boutang
Matteo Pasquinelli
Teresa Numerico
David Gugerli
Digital Civil Rights and Media Literacy
Caroline Nevejan(moderator)
Joris van Hoboken
Ippolita
Alternative Search 1
Eric Sieverts (moderator)
Matthew Fuller
Cees Snoek
Ingmar Weber
Art and the Engine
Sabine Niederer (moderator)
Lev Manovich
Daniel van der Velden
Christophe Bruno
Alessandro Ludovico
Googlization
Andrew Keen (moderator)
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Matin Feuz
Esther Weltevrede
Alternative Search 2
Richard Rogers (moderator)
Florian Cramer
Antoine Isaac
Steven Pemberton
Conference Crew
Shirley Niemans (Concept)
Margreet Riphagen (Project Manager)
Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff (Producer)
Michael Stevenson (Host)
Society of the Query
Geert Lovink (moderator), founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007). Email: geert [at] xs4all.nl.
Yann Moulier Boutang is a socio-economist. He teaches intellectual property rights and political economy at the University of Technology of Compiègne and contemporary culture at the High School of Arts and Design (Saint-Etienne). His fields of research are slavery, migrations, labour, firms and long run transformations of capitalist system. He runs the Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES (38 issues since 2000). This review is investigating new forms of critical thinking and culture. He is also member of the editorial board of the Serie Traces (published in English, japanese, corean, chinese) and Subjectivity (Palgrave). His last book Le capitalisme cognitif, (Amsterdam Publisher, Paris, 2007 and 2008) is forthcoming in 2010 at Polity Press. Email: Yann.Moulier-Boutang [at] utc.fr or Yann.Moulier-Boutang [at] esadse.fr
Matteo Pasquinelli, is a writer, curator and researcher at Queen Mary University of London. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (NAi/Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), edited the collection Media Activism (2002) and co-edited C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). He writes frequently at the cross of French philosophy, media culture and Italian post-operaismo. Since 2000 he has been editor of the mailing list Rekombinant. Together with Wietske Maas he developed the art project Urbanibalism and lives in Amsterdam.
Teresa Numerico, (PhD in History of Science) is lecturer in logic and philosophy of science at the University of Rome, where she teaches history and philosophy of computer science and epistemology of the new media. Among her publications are: a book in Italian on Alan Turing and Machine Intelligence (FrancoAngeli, 2005) and a book on search engines, Web Dragons (with I. Witten and M. Gori, Morgan Kaufmann, 2007). She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship during 2004–2005 in the UK. Her research interests include philosophy of computer science, social informatics, ethics, and the politics of telecommunication technologies.
David Gugerli, is professor for the history of technology at ETH Zurich. His books deals with the history of large technical systems, with mapping and nation building, and with the history of science and engineering in the 19th and 20th centuries. Recently, he has published a thought-provoking essay on the cultural history of the search engine (Suchmaschinen. Die Welt als Datanbank, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2009).
Digital Civil Rights and Media Literacy
Caroline Nevejan (moderator) is an independent researcher and designer focusing on the implications of technology on society. Having been involved with interdsiciplinary projects for over 20 years, she speaks a variety of professional languages. She has been initator, conceptualizer, producer, manager and director of local, national and international work. Currently she is visiting fellow with the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems group at the Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam (iids.org), research fellow with the PrimaVera Program for Research in Infomation Management, associate with Performing Arts Labs (UK) (pallabs.org) and member of the Dutch Council for Culture and the Arts. Her research interest is focused on the design of presence and the design of trust in social interactions between people, in organizations and in larger social and political structures. She uses methodologies from the social sciences as well as from the design discipline. Having a profound theoretical interest she finds it a challenge to bridge knowledge, insight and skills between different domains. When ‘making things happen’ in a design process she is convinced this only works when people involved contribute.
Joris van Hoboken, is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the implications of freedom of expression for the regulation of search engines. He is an expert in search engine law, Internet privacy law, the legal liability of internet intermediaries and internet censorship an graduated cum laude in Theoretical Mathematics (2002) and Law (2006). Until 1 September 2006, he worked successively as a paralegal at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and as a co-director of Bits of Freedom, a Dutch digital civil rights organization, which he helped to relaunch as a board member in August 2009.
Ippolita is a research group made by reality hackers, a server and a community of writers. It is a crossroads to share tools and competences between digital languages and writings languages. As collective identity, Ippolita also writes copyleft books: /Op//en non è Free /(Elèuthera, 2005, italian) and /Luci e ombre di Google/ (Feltrinelli, 2007; french, spanish and english versions), free copyleft download from ippolita.net. K. is a member of Ippolita who is mainly interested in collaborative writings as way to tune up conviviality, technologies to partecipate into creation and sharing of imaginaries, identities, tools for the practice of everyday life.
Alternative Search 1
Eric Sieverts (moderator) is originally a physicist. After ten years of fundamental research on semiconductors, his interests gradually turned towards the field of library & information science. Since 1980 he has been a heavy user of retrieval systems and search engines. Presently he is working at the innovation department of the Utrecht University Library and is teaching information retrieval and information management at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. In his spare time he is editor and columnist of the Dutch magazine Informatie Professional.
Matthew Fuller, is author of a number of books including ‘Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture’ and ‘Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software’. With Usman Haque, he is co-author of ‘Urban Versioning System v1.0’. Editor of ‘Software Studies, a lexicon‘, he is a co-editor of the new Software Studies series from MIT Press. He is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and works at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Cees Snoek, is currently a senior researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab of the University of Amsterdam. His research interests focus on multimedia analysis for video retrieval. He has published over 70 refereed papers, and serves on the program committee of several conferences. Dr. Snoek is a lead researcher of the award-winning MediaMill Semantic Video Search Engine, co-organizer of the annual VideOlympics, and a lecturer of post-doctoral courses given at international conferences and summer schools. Dr. Snoek received a young talent (VENI) grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research in 2008.
Ingmar Weber is a postdoc at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona. He obtained his BA and MA in mathematics from Cambridge University before doing his PhD thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany. His dissertation dealt with efficient data structures for and applications of a more interactive search engine called CompleteSearch. CompleteSearch now provides public search services for DBLP, the largest database of publications in computer science. His research interests include web mining, sponsored search, social networks and efficient algorithms. He is a devoted Couchsurfing member and enjoys doing ultra triathlons.
Art and the Engine
Sabine Niederer (moderator), works as the managing director of the Institute of Network Cultures, a new media research centre based at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, department of Interactive Media. Since January 2008, she is a PhD researcher with the Digital Methods Initiative, at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Mediastudies. She has taught media and design theory, produced various international new media conferences and is curator of new media art project Impakt Online. In 2008, Niederer co-edited the Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Contact: sabine (at) networkcultures (dot) org
Lev Manovich’s books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” He has written 100 articles which have been reprinted in 30+ countries. Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California -San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a Visiting Research Professor at Godsmith College (University of London), De Montfort University (UK) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is currently working on developing Cultural Analytics – a new methodology for the analysis and visualization of patterns in massive cultural data sets.
Metahaven is a studio for research and design based in Amsterdam and Brussels, consisting of Gon Zifroni, Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, working in fields such as graphic design and information architecture. Metahaven has previously created a visual identity for the mini-state Sealand, for research projects around the former House of People in Bucharest, and for the European Internet search engine Quaero. Metahaven has exhibited at a variety of international exhibitions, and at the 2008 Venice Architectural Biennial, Metahaven was represented with a lecture at the Dutch pavilion. In addition to design, research, and writing, Metahaven lectures widely, and its members teach at institutions including Yale University in New Haven, the Academy of Arts in Arnhem, the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and the School of Visual Arts in Valence, France.
Christophe Bruno, lives and works in Paris. His polymorphic work has a critical take on network phenomena and globalization in the field of language and images. He was awarded a prize at the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair with the ARCO new media prize 2007, at the Prix Ars Electronica 2003 and the Piemonte Share Festival in 2007. His work has been shown internationally: Jeu de Paume in Paris, Biennale of Sydney, ARCO Madrid, FIAC Paris, Diva Fair in New-York, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, ArtCologne, MOCA Taipei, Modern Art Museum of the city of Paris, New Museum of Contemporary Art in New-York, Tirana Biennale of Contemporary Art, HMKV Dortmund, Gallery West in The Hague, Vooruit Arts Center in Gent, Share Festival in Torino, Transmediale in Berlin, Laboral Cyberspaces in Gijon, galerie Sollertis in Toulouse, ICC in Tokyo, Nuit Blanche de Paris, Rencontres Paris-Berlin-Madrid. He divides his time between his artistic activity, curating, teaching, lectures and publications. iterature en cosmolalia
Alessandro Ludovico, is a media critic and chief editor of the Neural magazine from 1993. He is the author of several essays on digital culture, and co-edited the ‘Mag.Net Reader’ book series, one of the founding contributors of the Nettime community and one of the founders of the Mag.Net (Electronic Cultural Publishers) organization, teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara and is a research fellow at the Willem de Kooning Academy and also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. With P.Cirio and Ubermorgen he developed ‘Google Will Eat Itself’ (Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica 2005, Rhizome Commission 2005, nomination Prix Transmediale 2006) and ‘Amazon Noir’ (1st prize Stuttgarter Filmwinter 2007, Honorary Mention Share Prize 2007, 2nd prize Transmediale08) art projects.
Googlization
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). He is co-editor (with Carolyn de la Pena) of the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). His next book, The Googlization of Everything is forthcoming in 2010. Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison , Columbia University, New York University, and now is an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and a fellow at both the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.
Martin Feuz is an independent researcher with a strong interest in human-information interactions. Specifically, he focuses on exploratory (Web) search and the ways in which such interactions can be meaningfully and experi(m)entially supported. In his recent work, he undertook a critical analysis of Google personal search to render more interrogable and debatable some of the ways in which this surfaces in everyday search behaviour.The findings will be published shortly. Currently, he is a researcher for the Interaction Design department of the University of the Arts in Zurich, focusing on the conception and development of a visual exploratory search engine which is to support design research and educative practices. He has been strongly engaged with Dorkbot Switzerland, Digitale Allmend and Creative Commons Switzerland.
Esther Weltevrede is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the New Media program at the University of Amsterdam. She is Internet researcher and analyst-designer at the Research Program Digital Methods Initiative, which aims to develop novel methods and tools for studying the Web. Since 2007 she is a member of Govcom.org, a foundation dedicated to development of political tools on the Web. Her PhD research is about national web studies. As part of the Digital Methods Initiative, this particular study aims to develop methods with a locative-technical focus.
Alternative Search 2
Richard Rogers (moderator), holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). Current research interests include Internet censorship, googlization, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Web as well as the post-demographics implied by recommender systems.
Florian Cramer, born in 1969, is head of Networked Media Master and communication research programmes at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University.
Antoine Isaac obtained his computer science Ph.D. in 2005, from the University of Paris-Sorbonne for research on the design and use of ontology’s in INA, the French National Institute for Audiovisual archives. He served as a researcher at the VU University Amsterdam and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, focusing on the representation and the interoperability of cultural heritage collections. He is currently involved in the EuropeanaConnect project and the Europeana Thought Lab, where he works on converting and linking existing conceptual vocabularies. He is a member of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment working group.
Steven Pemberton is a researcher at The Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam. The focus of his research is on interaction and how the underlying software architecture can support users. Involved with the Web since the beginning, he organized two workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994, and chaired the first W3C Style Sheets and Internationalization workshops. He now chairs XHTML2 and leads the W3C Forms Activities. He is co-author of many current web technologies, including HTML4, CSS, XHTML, XForms and RDFa. He speaks and writes regularly on the effects of technology design, and for a while had a regular column on Teleac’s science radio program Teleskoop.
Shirley Niemans is a researcher and co-editor for the Society of the Query conference and has been the INC event producer of VideoVortex (2008), New NetworkTheory (2007) and MyCreativity (2006). After graduating from the KABK/Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2002 she worked as a video and sound artist. She has (co-)produced and curated events and art projects ranging from international new media expert meetings to art exhibitions in public space. Currently, she teaches trend analysis and coaches Interactive Media students at Amsterdam University of Applied Science, she co-organizes an art and research program for the Impakt Foundation and is finishing her MA in New Media and Digital Culture at Utrecht University.
Margreet Riphagen, project manager at INC since augustus 2008 and responsible for the production of Winter Camp 09. She graduated in 2000 in Integrated Communication Management at the Hogeschool of Utrecht. She worked atWaag Society as a producer. After three and a half years at Waag Society she switched to the Media Guild, which is a not for profit organization that fosters innovative starters in the field of new media and ICT. After setting up the Media Guild, she left for Blender, which is a 3D open source animation suite. There she was co-producer of Big Buck Bunny (Peach open movie project) and producing an open game. Currently she works at the Institute for Network Cultures managing and producing projects for the INC and coaches Interactive Media students at Amsterdam University of Applied Science. She is also involved in MediaLAB Amsterdam, which is a creative, interdisciplinary workplace where inquisitive students and researchers work together on innovative interactive media ideas.
Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff is a New Media entrepreneur and Web researcher. In 1999 he started working as IT professional at the broadband Internet Service Provider Excite@Home. After working there for over eight years he decided to pursue a study in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. During his study he has been a proud member of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) research group, working together in a strong team of designers, programmers and theorists to develop new Web-specific methods and tools for doing research. Next to several stand-alone projects, he also started up CYBERLIFE, focussing on building Web-applications, sites and tools, Web hosting and doingWeb research. After receiving his Master degree New Media, he is now working for the Institute of Network Cultures as producer of the Society of the Query conference.
Michael Stevenson is lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, where he also earned his Research M.A. in 2008. Research interests include the relationship between early Cyberculture and currentWeb cultures, Web epistemologies and software studies. Each of these is pursued in research for his dissertation, which has as a working title ‘Legacy Systems: Cyberculture, Blogging and Wikipedia.’ Legacy systems, a concept used in computer science to denote systems that have been superseded but remain prominent through their wide use, is repurposed here to investigate the ways in which contemporary Web formats discursively and technologically sustain core concepts of cyberculture as it developed in the 1990s. Stevenson has worked previously on a range of new media and Web projects with Govcom.org, the Institute of Network Cultures, Paradiso/de Balie and Mediamatic.