Biographies

Tilman Baumgärtel
Tilman Baumgärtel currently teaches at the College of Mass Communication of the University of the Philippines in Manila. He has contributed to German and international reviews, newspapers and magazines, and his writing has appeared in Die Tageszeitung, Die Zeit, Die Woche, Intelligent Agent, Telepolis, Kunstforum International et al. He studied German Literature, History and Media Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf and the State University of New York. His PhD thesis was a monograph of the German avant-garde film director Harun Farocki. His research focuses on digital culture, media art and independent cinema. In 2006, he organized the conference Asian Edition on media piracy and intellectual property in South East Asia.
www.asian-edition.org

Dominick Chen
Dominick Chen leads Creative Commons Japan. He is JSPS Fellow Researcher at the University of Tokyo and NTT InterCommunication Center. Chen was a member of the International Advisory Board of Ars Electronica 2007, Digital Community. In May 2007, he taught at the Art Initiative Tokyo Making Art Different course on new media and digital politics. Since 2001, he has written various media theories focusing on the notion of ‘media plasticity’ in magazines such as InterCommunication, BT, Eureka, 10+1, ARTiT and Tokyo Art Beat Review. Since 2004, Dominick Chen has directed NTT ICC’s open video archive HIVE. He is currently building an open-ended platform for crossing over artists, engineers and researchers titled DIVVY/dual, while leading research in ‘media prochronism’.
http://hive.ntticc.or.jp
http://pripro.org

Rosemary Comella
Rosemary Comella has been working since 2000 as a researcher, project director, interface designer and programmer at the Labyrinth Project. As part of Labyrinth, she developed the interface for Tracing the Decay of Fiction, a collaborative project between experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill and the Labyrinth team, and she helped direct The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Current of the River, an interactive installation with filmmaker Peter Forgács. She also developed Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, an interactive installation and DVD-ROM, in collaboration with cultural historian Norman Klein and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany. She directed and served as photographer for Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment, an installation and DVD-ROM, including catalog, exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2005. Comella is currently creative director for ‘Jews in the Golden State: A Home-Grown History of Immigration and Identity’, a public on-line archive and museum installation that hopes to illuminate one hundred and fifty years of Jewish history in California through a visually engaging project that invites users to supplement official history with their own histories and memories using text, home movies, photographs and ephemera.
http://jewishhomegrownhistory.com/about.html

Sarah Cook
Sarah Cook is a curator of contemporary art and cofounder, editor and researcher of CRUMB, an online resource for people involved in the exhibition of new media art. She completed her Doctorate in 2004 at the University of Sunderland on the theory and practice of curating new media art and is now a post doctoral fellow, working with EYEBEAM in New York for 2008. Sarah has curated exhibitions and commissioned new media projects for the Edith Russ Haus for Media Art (Germany) The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), BALTIC (UK,) and worked at The Walker Art Center (USA), and at the National Gallery of Canada. She is the co-editor of the publication resulting from the conference Curating New Media she organised in the UK (Baltic, 2002) and has co-authored a volume on curatorial practice with Beryl Graham to be published by MIT Press.
www.crumbweb.org
www.eyebeam.org

Stefaan Decostere
Stefaan Decostere worked in public broadcasting, producing ‘television without television’ in works that used kaleidoscopic language and incorporated formal techniques from video art. In 1999 he founded CARGO, a context in which he could investigate the effect of the new technologies on the ways we develop media. He worked with Paul Virilio, Henri-Pierre Jeudy, Geert Lovink, Arthur Kroker, Rosi Braidotti and Matthew Fuller and recently presented the the installation arena WARUM 2.0 at STUK (Leuven) and V2 (Rotterdam). In a previous edition of Video Vortex he introduced the concept of ‘impactology’, a science of the technics of impact. In the meantime he has expanded this new field of knowledge, in a search to define “impact”, to analyse and chart it, and to study its political consequences.
http://cargoweb.wordpress.com

Jay Dedman
Jay Dedman has continued to find new ways to help independent media creators connect into larger, collaborative groups, for the past ten years. He began as a writer and producer of local news in Cincinnati and Atlanta. After working at CNN International, he became discouraged with the coverage and worked as a freelance journalist in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he first tried to use the Internet to publish video showing how people live in a country at war. Returning to New York, he worked at Manhattan Neighborhood Network. He continued his experiments with putting video on the web until he found that blogging was the perfect distribution method. In 2004, he cofounded the Yahoo Group on Videoblogging and has since collaborated in various online video projects and co-authored the book Videoblogging.
www.jaydedman.pbwiki.com

Thomas Elsaesser
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor in the Department of Media and Culture and Director of Research Film and Television at the University of Amsterdam. His essays on European cinema, film history and media archaeology, American cinema and contemporary media theory have been translated into over 15 languages and published in over 200 collections. Authored books include Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (1996), Weimar Cinema and After (2000), Metropolis (2000), Studying Contemporary American Film (2002, with Warren Buckland), Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino (2002), European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Terror und Trauma (2007) and Filmtheorie zur Einführung (2007, with Malte Hagener).
http://home.hum.uva.nl/oz/elsaesser
www.fachinformation-filmwissenschaft.de/autor/elsaesser.html

Philine von Guretzky
Philine von Guretzky has a media design background and has extensively been working in film and media related projects since 1997. Since 2004 she has been involved in developing the online gallery tank.tv, an inspirational showcase for innovative work in film and video. Dedicated to exhibiting and promoting emerging and established international artists, tank.tv acts as a major online gallery – a platform and archive for contemporary moving images. The gallery published its first DVD in June 2007, Fresh Moves: New Moving Images from the UK.
http://tank.tv

Helen Kambouri
Helen Kambouri completed her PhD on migration and national identity in Greece in 2005 at the London School of Economics. Since 2004 she has been employed as a research fellow at the KEKMOKOP institute – Panteion University-Athens, where she has conducted research on different aspects of migration policies, processes and practices, with particular emphasis on gender. She has published articles on space, time and social movement strategies and more recently an article on Derrida’s notion of hospitality entitled Hospitality and the Reception of the Stranger” (Sygxrona Themata).
www.re-public.gr/en/?p=83

Patrick Lichty
Patrick Lichty is a conceptual intermedia-artist working in activist art, retrotech, digital minimalism, alpha revisionism, and experimental video, among others. In addition, he is an editor, curator, writer, musician, and engineer. He is editor-in-chief for Intelligent Agent Magazine.
www.intelligentagent.com

Matthew Mitchem
Matthew Mitchem is a PhD candidate at The European Graduate School in the Media and Communication division. His research interests are in contemporary philosophy, new media and Critical Internet Studies. In 2005 he co-produced a documentary entitled A Cold Day in DC, about the people and events surrounding the protests to George W Bush’s second inauguration. Since 2006 he has been the principle administrator of multitude.tv, a website aimed at facilitating a community of digital media artists, activist, critics and scholars in collaborative video productions.
www.mitchem.org

Dan Oki
Dan Oki is a Dutch-Croatian film maker and visual artist, living and working in Split. His artistic work ranges from exhibitions of visual art and video installations to feature length art cinema. His work focuses on hybrid artistic forms, visual narrative and experimentation. Oki is associated professor for film and video art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Split and at the Film Academy in Zagreb. He has taught at various Institutes and Art Academies in Europe.
www.videopool.org/catalogue/artists/?id=265

Tatiana de la O
Tatiana de la O entered to the free software world from the independent media, www.indymedia.org. Developing alternative comunication platforms and free tools for edition, manipulation, hosting and sharing video have been her goals since then. She is also a VJ and produces free video loops, and writes documentation about real time video manipulation and streaming with free software tools. She believes that media shouldn’t be something done by a separated group of people, but a set of practices on all political action groups. Right now she is working with streaming platforms in giss.tv, an autonomous/empathic/free platform for streaming, and also in indymedia and other related free media projects, like ‘r23.cc’ or ‘horitzo.tv’.
http://delcorp.org/abbadingo
http://giss.tv
http://r23.cc
http://horitzo.tv

Ana Peraica
Ana Peraica graduated in art history and philosophy from the University in Zagreb and was awarded laureate in art theory at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. She attended ASCA PhD courses between 2001 and 2004 and was awarded UNESCO ifpc and BKVB awards. She is a freelance curator and theorist, mostly engaged with video and new media and publishes regularly in the Austrian magazine Springerin. In 2007 she curated the international project Woman at the Crossroad of Ideologies and co-moderated the Leonardo ISAST mailing Yasmin list discussion on The Technology and Women Liberatio. Peraica is the author of Victim’s Symptom for the Lab for Culture and moderated a round table discussion on the topic for the conference Mutamorphosis in Prague, celebrating 40 years of Leonardo magazine.
www.spiritus-temporis.com/ana-peraica

Emma Quinn
Emma Quinn has been interested and involved in media arts since 1996 when she studied MA Digital Arts at Middlesex University. She has subsequently worked as Content Manager for the Mind Zone at London’s Millennium Dome Experience, as well as organising exhibitions with the art group Spore, including sQuawl at the Oxo Tower and White Noise in Brick Lane. Following a period working with the artists’ group Soda, Emma joined the ICA in 2005 where she is now Director of Live and Media Arts. Her recent commissioned and curated live installations include Flock (February 2007) and Theo Jansen’s Strandbeesten (June 2006), performances such as Quartet and the re-enactment The Death of Peter Fechter. Future projects include Ray Lee’s Force Field and Fiddian Warman’s Neurotic.
http://soda.co.uk/team/profile/emma

Florian Schneider
Florian Schneider is a filmmaker who has been involved in a wide range of projects that deal with the implications of postmodern border regimes on both a theoretical and practical level, over the past ten years. He is one of the initiators of the campaign Kein Mensch ist Illegal at documenta X in 1997 and subsequent projects such as the Noborder Network and the online platform kein.org. He developed and co-organized several events, including Makeworld (2001) and Borderline Academy (2005). Currently Schneider is working on Imaginary Property, a series of texts, films and video installations researching the question: “What does it mean to own an image?” He has lectured at museums, galleries, art academies and conferences worldwide. Since 2006 he has taught art theory at the art academy KIT in Trondheim and he is a member of the PhD program “research architecture” at Goldsmiths College, London.
http://imaginaryproperty.com/user/4
http://imaginaryproperty.com/blog/4
http://kein.org

Tom Sherman
Tom Sherman is an artist and writer and professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University in central New York. He has represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, performs and records with the group Nerve Theory, and received the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art in 2003. His most recent book is Before and after the I-Bomb: an Artist in the Information Environment (Banff Centre Press, 2002).
http://vpa.syr.edu/directory/tom-sherman
http://loibner.cc/layout/projects/nerve_theory
www.fusemagazine.org/indexS.php

Jan Simons
Jan Simons is Associate Professor in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on cinema, photography, new media theory, and game theory. His research focuses on the processes of convergence and divergence brought about by new media. His latest book is Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema. (Amsterdam University Press, 2007).
http://jaasi.blogspot.com
www.mlgk.nl

Valentin Spirik
Valentin Spirik is a writer, director, editor and 3D animator using the open-source software Blender. After graduating from the London International Film School in 1993, he worked as an editor and made the feature film Vincent (44 min., ‘96/’03). Since 2005 Spirik has focused on short format video works for online distribution, with a special interest in video remix culture. He maintains the P2P Audiovisual Guide for the P2P Wiki.
www.indiworks.wordpress.com
www.indiworks.blip.tv

Tal Sterngast
Tal Sterngast is a visual artist and freelance writer, living and working in Berlin. She holds a BA in Photography from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem and a Meisterschüller in Film, UdK, Berlin. Sterngast is the Berlin correspondent for Israeli art magazine Studio and has worked as camera woman for several documentary productions in Europe. Her web videos include a weekly video column for Netzeitung, and a monthly video column for fluter.de.
www.netzeitung.de
www.fluter.de

Thomas Thiel
Thomas Thiel studied Cultural Sciences and Aesthetical Practice in Germany and France. He has (co)organized several independent art projects, exhibitions and lecture series concerning contemporary art and new media. Since 2004 he has worked as a curator for the ZKM: Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. He curated several video exhibitions, such as video/text, Screening War – On the Representation of War in Video Art and video/economy. With Gerhard Johann Lischka he produced the DVD edition art_clips.ch.at.de and recently co-curated the media art exhibition MindFrames Media Study at Buffalo 1973-1990 with Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel. In 2007 his video/film program Freedom of Expression was shown at Telemar/Oi Futuro (Rio de Janeiro) and at the Goethe Institut (Salvador da Bahia).
www.zkm.de
http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$4763

Andreas Treske
Andreas Treske graduated from the Munich Film Academy (HFF) in 1992. Since 1998, he has been taught courses in new media, video production, and visual communication design at Bilkent University in Ankara and works as an editor, filmmaker, and media artist. In 2005 the feature length documentary Takim Böyle Tutulur was screened in over 50 cinemas in Turkey.
http://bilkent.academia.edu/AndreasTreske