Biographies

Geert Lovink 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 andfibreculture. 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)

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Her most recent books include Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke 2009) and Blog Theory (Polity 2010). Verso will publish her newest book, The Communist Horizon, in 2012. She is the co-editor of the international electronic journal of contemporary critical theory, Theory & Event.

D.E. Wittkower (Ph.D Vanderbilt) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Old Dominion University. His work focuses on the application of value theory (ethics, aesthetics, and social/political philosophy) to technology and popular culture. He has edited books on Facebook, the iPod, Monk, and Philip K. Dick, and has written articles and book chapters on topics such as friendship online, copyright in ebusiness, Radiohead and the culture industry, the unforeseeable prominence of cuteness in online culture, Fullmetal Alchemist and the moral foundations of economics, the phenomenology of audiobook listening, the genre of detective stories as social criticism, loyalty in the workplace, and interdisciplinary research methodology. He also freelances for Speakeasy, culture blog of The Wall Street Journal, and has recorded a dozen audiobooks that have been downloaded over sixty thousand times. Current projects concern self-presentation on social networks, a phenomenology of the cellphone, and the #OWS movement.

Josephine Bosma is a writer and critic. Her work mostly focuses on net art, sound art and net culture. Josephine is an author in the Institute of Network Cultures’ Studies in Network Cultures book series with her book, Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art (April 2011). Josephine Bosma lives and works in Amsterdam. http://www.josephinebosma.com

Thomas Cheneseau began his multimedia projects in the Workshop Interactive Research at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Since he appropriates through its projects the new territories of artistic expression: the web 2.0, virtual worlds and social networks, where he made many series of screenshots and interactive environments. He has presented his work at conferences at the Virginia Commonwealth University (US), at the European School of Visual Arts in Poitiers (FR), at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (FR), and participated in the Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011 (IT). He is one of the creator and curator of the SPAMM (SuPer Art Modern Museum), a new Museum 2.0.

Walter Langelaar is a dutch artist based in Rotterdam, where he also works as programme director for the media studio of WORM, Institute for Avantgardistic Recreation. The projects from this studio (a.k.a. ‘moddr_’) aim to critically reflect upon our contemporary media landscapes via artistic production and theoretical discourse.

Tobias Leingruber (@tbx) is an artist and “new media” communication designer (Dipl.-Designer (FH), Merz Akademie Stuttgart). His work is exploring and exposing the mutual impacts of networked communication technologies to human society, in the belief to contribute to a positive design of it’s future. As an advocate for freedom on the web he has worked with many artists and organisations such as the F.A.T. Lab, Artzilla.org, Silicon Sentier and the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox). He’s active in the internet start-up and art scene. His latest projects include FB Resistance and Mozilla Demoparty. His work has been exhibited on galleries and home computers worldwide and featured by mainstream media such as the NY Times, LA Times, Wired, Spiegel, 3sat(TV) or Liberation.fr.

Alessandro Ludovico is an artist, media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine since 1993 and was awarded with a “Honorary Mention” for Net.Vision at Prix Ars Electronica 2004. He’s one of the founders of the Mag.Net (Magazine Network of Electronic Cultural Publishers organization). He also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. He has ben guest researcher at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara. He was among the authors of the Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks (Google WIll Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook)

Olia Lialina was born in Moscow, graduated from Moscow State University as a journalist and film critic. She is widely recognized as a pioneer of the Internet art scene and was the founder of The First Real Net Art Gallery and The Last Real Net Art Museum. Lialina writes on New Media, Digital Folklore and Vernacular Web. Blogs about Geocities archive and Car Metaphors.
Since 1999 Professor at Merz Akademie, leader of the New Media program. http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html

Lonneke van der Velden is a PhD student at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and teaches at the department of Mediastudies (University of Amsterdam). Her PhD research focuses on digital surveillance and technologies of activism. She currently explores how to do internet studies with digital methods, with special attention to social networking platforms.

Raoul Boers lectures in Content Management and Digital Culture at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences, School of Design and Communication. He studied Arts and Sciences at Maastricht University and e-Business strategy at Ohio University. He has been involved in the development and roll-out of Dutch and British e-government projects and is a former new media consultant to Amnesty International, Dutch section.

Ñusta Nina lectures in Information and Media Law at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences, School of Design and Communication. She has worked as a legal counsel for TomTom International and was a contributor to the European Film Gateway Project, in this capacity she reported to the European Commission on the copyright situation in Europe regarding audiovisual content and digitization. Ñusta holds a MA in International and European Law and a MA in Information Law.

Arnold Roosendaal LLM MPhil studied Dutch Law and obtained an LLM in Law and Technology and completed a Research Master Programme ( MPhil). Currently, Arnold is a PhD Candidate at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT), Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Next to that, he is partner at Fennell Roosendaal Research and Advice. He has a great interest in law and technology and the implications of technological developments on society. In his research he specifically looks at implications for individuals, often by analyzing effects on privacy and autonomy of the individual. Arnold has participated in several international research projects and has written several international publications. Next to that, he regularly participates in conferences as a speaker or panelist.

Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Information Law. Before joining the Institute for Information Law he worked in the music industry for many years. Frederik also studied six months at Hong Kong University, and worked at SOLV attorneys, a law firm dedicated to technology, media and communications. His research concerns behavioural targeting and European data protection regulation. Building on insights from behavioural economics, his research explores how privacy could be protected more effectively in the context of behavioural targeting, without unduly restricting individual autonomy. He published several articles on privacy and the internet.

Seda Gürses is a researcher working in the group COSIC/ESAT (http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/) at the Department of Electrical Engineering in K. U. Leuven, Belgium. Her topics of interest include privacy technologies, participatory design, requirements engineering, feminist critique of computer science, and online social networks. She is the coordinator of the interdisciplinary project “Security and Privacy in Social Networks” (SPION) supported by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT) in Belgium. In the past, she has participated as a researcher in two EU projects “Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services” (TAS³) and “Global Identity Networking of Individuals” (GINI) where she contributed with research on privacy and security requirements engineering.You can find more information about her dwellings here: http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/~sguerses

Caroline Nevejan
is an independent researcher and designer focusing on the implications of technology on society. Having been involved with interdisciplinary projects for over 20 years, she speaks a variety of professional languages. She has been initiator, conceptualizer, producer, manager and director of local, national and international work. Currently she is Visiting Fellow at the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems group at theVrije Universiteit van Amsterdam (iids.org), Research Fellow at 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 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.

Korinna Patelis has been researching the sociocultural structures of new media for nearly 15 years. She read Philosophy and Politics at Warwick University and has a Masters in Media and Communications, from Goldsmiths College. Her PhD, supervised by J. Curran and completed at Goldsmiths in 2000 was on the Political Economy of the Internet, which is also the subject of her early publications. Korinna has been working in new media as well as teaching new media for more than a decade mostly in Greece, and joined the Department of Communication and Internet Studies at the Cyprus University of Technology, as an assistant professor in September 2009. Her research interests currently focus around the web’s commercial taxonomy, the representational structures of web sites and the power of social media. Her research is interdisciplinary and struggles with methodological issues arising from approaching software as culture. Her current writing explores social media as social text using the example of Facebook. Attempting to refashion a radical political economy perspective in new media research, the politics of the internet as well as its regulation lie at the heart of Korinna’s research interests in and outside the academy.

David M. Berry is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media (Associate Professor in Media Studies) in the department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University, UK. His books include, the forthcoming Critical Theory and the Digital (due 2012), The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011), and Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008). He is co-author of Libre Culture (2008), and editor of Understanding Digital Humanities (2012). David’s research covers a wide theoretical area including media, culture, political economy, media/medium theory, software studies, actor-network theory, the philosophy of technology, and the computational turn in arts & humanities and social sciences (digital humanities/computational social science).

Anne Helmond is PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative, the new media PhD program at the Department of Media Studies, University
of Amsterdam. In her research she focuses on software-engine relations in the blogosphere and cross-syndication politics in social media. She also teaches new media courses in the Media Studies department and blogs about her research on http://www.annehelmond.nl.

Carolin Gerlitz is PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London, a visiting lecturer in Sociology and a post-doctoral researcher. Among her research interests are economic sociology, digital culture, social media platforms, measurement and value, topology, branding and feminist theory. Carolin is also an associate member of the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam.

Ganaele Langlois is Assistant Professor in the Communication Program at the University of Ontario, Institute of Technology and Associate Director at the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media (www.infoscapelab.ca). Her research interests are influenced by software studies and Autonomia. She has a forthcoming co-authored book on Online Politics 2.0 with Greg Elmer and Fenwick McKelvey that will be published by Peter Lang. Her articles have been published in Culture Machine, Fibreculture, New Media & Society, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.

Harry Halpin is a postdoctoral research associate at MIT and Team member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the Technology and Society Domain, where he is the lead for social media and identity. His energies are currently focussed on a unified cross-browser Javascript Cryptography API, but he hopes to see progress on standardizing the Federated Social Web soon. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the l’Institut de recherche et d’innovation at Centre Pompidou, where he is working on a book on philosophy and the Web under the supervision of Bernard Stiegler. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in data-mining, and is author of “Social Semantics” (2012). In his spare time, he enjoys the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life.

Fascinated by Internet chat, Carlo v. Loesch/lynX contributed to IRC. Realizing it had reached its technical and political limits, he embarked on a journey to find the holy grail of communication protocols.Around 1995, Internet business took off. Carlo developed content management systems and content delivery networks for sites such as stern.de, zeit.de, spiegel.de. Contemporaneously he published the drafts for a federated protocol called PSYC. Business using PSYC took off rightaway, so open source release was delayed. That’s when a software by the name of Jabber appeared and grabbed the Internet’s imagination.Back then servers were safe and sniffing other people’s messages was unethical. Today Carlo has aimed for a better holy grail.

Dmytri Kleiner creates miscommunication technologies, including deadSwap, Thimbl and R15N. He is the author of the Telekommunist Manifesto and can be followed at http://dmytri.info

Michael Rogers is an open source hacker and researcher whose love-hate relationship with the internet isn’t healthy for either of them. He worked at LimeWire until its demise and recently finished a PhD in the design of censorship-resistant networks.

Lorea arises from an informal collective of people concerned about security and privacy issues on the social web. Since 2009 this developer community has grown and is now formed by virtually all kinds of people inhabiting various online networks. Hence, amongst Lorea developers we don’t speak about service “users” but of “inhabitants” of a transformative project: several thousand people who knowingly use our networks, many of them active in IT development , server maintenance, error reporting and solving, documentation, project support and dissemination. Lorea survives daily via the work of a community which organises by means of an online version of a democratic people’s assembly. It is based on mutual cooperation, promoting free culture and social innovation.

James Vasile has been a free software user, advocate and hacker since the mid 90s, when he discovered GNU/Linux. As Executive Director of the FreedomBox Foundation, James leads the effort to design and distribute a low-cost personal server that will protect people’s privacy, security and anonymity in their digital lives. James is also Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center and serves on the board of Open Source Matters and Brave New Software. He has contributed to numerous free software projects. James’s writings and code are at jamesvasile.com. He tweets/dents as @jamesvasile.

Coralie Vogelaar(1981) is a conceptual artist and designer. She graduated from the Sandberg Institute in 2007 and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie. Vogelaar is responsible for projects like MyPolarIce*, in which she sold 18.000 year old polar ice as a souvenir in a special store at the Museumplein in Amsterdam. History is Yours!**, a DIY shirt printing generator with random text and image combinations from world history, Dearest Tinkebell, a book in which anonymous hate mail senders are revealed with their photo’s, telephone numbers and adresses. Masters of Rietveld, an huge image encyclopedia of more than 3000 images ordered by image rhyme and The Photoshop, a fictional stock photo book with – staged by herself – cliché esthetic newspaper photos.

Jan-Christoph Borchardt is information designer, user researcher and activist for free culture, free software & an open web. He improves the user experience of free & open source web applications, now mainly as Design Dictator for the Unhosted project. Previously he did the interface & interaction design for ownCloud and started libreprojects.net, a directory of free software web applications.

Oliver Leistert is a media researcher. His main research interests are mobile media, social media, surveillance media, and protest media. Currently he finishes his thesis “mobile media and dataveillance” as a research fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies, CEU, Budapest. Together with Theo Röhle he recently co-edited “Generation Facebook“,the first collected volume of critical media studies about Facebook in German.

Philipp Budka is PhD candidate and part-time lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. He is interested in media technologies, information and communication technologies, indigenous media, transnationalism, social and cultural theory, ethnicity, production and transfer of knowledge and ethnographic methods. He has been doing work in a variety of fields such as northwestern Ontario, Canada, several internet environments and the University of Vienna. In Canada he has been working with K-Net, one of the world’s leading indigenous internet service providers, to analyze sociocultural practices in relation to internet media technologies.

Stefania Milan (stefaniamilan.net) is a postdoctoral fellow at The Citizen Lab and the Canada Center of Global Security Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. She received a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute. Her first monograph, “Emancipatory Communication Practices and Social Movements”, will be published in 2012. Her research interests include networked collective action, radical internet activism, and the interplay between digital technologies and society. Currently she is investigating the impact of social media on collective action and dissent. She lives on Algonquin Island, on Lake Ontario.

Max Schrems Student at the University of Vienna, School of LawResearch assistant at the University of Vienna, School of Law Exchange semester at Santa Clara University, CA, USA Speaker of the group “europe-v-facebook.org”

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Among other things, Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project (http://octotrike.org) and the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (http://const.is). She lives mostly in airports and occasionally in New York and London.

team

Margreet Riphagen has been project manager at the Institute of Network Cultures since August 2008 and produced Winter Camp 09. She graduated in 2000 in Integrated Communication Management at the Hogeschool of Utrecht. She worked as a producer at Waag Society for a few years after which she moved to Media Guild, a not-for-profit organization that fosters innovative starters in the field of new media and ICT. After setting up Media Guild, she left to work on Blender, a 3D open source animation suite. For Blender, she was co-producer of Big Buck Bunny (Peach open movie project) and produced an open game. Aside from working as project manager at the INC, she now coaches Interactive Media students at Amsterdam University of Applied Science. Margreet Riphagen is also involved in MediaLAB Amsterdam, a creative, interdisciplinary workplace where inquisitive students and researchers collaborate on innovative interactive media ideas.

Marc Stumpel is a new media researcher, blogger and (intern) producer -for the Unlike Us Amsterdam event- at the Institute of Network Cultures. He holds a MA degree in New Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam (2009-2010). His main research interest is the antagonism within the political and economic dimensions of digital culture, especially in relation to social media. Being a privacy/user-control advocate, he is concerned with the development of alternative social networking spaces and techniques. He is involved in the FB Resistance project and has written his master’s dissertation the Politics of Social Media, focussing on control and resistance in relation to Facebook.

biographies

team