Tori Abernathy is an artist and organizer whose research explores rent, education, the city, finance, and labor. She has cooperatively founded RECESS, The Walking School, Portland Renters’ Assembly, Portland Tenants United, Future Working Models, Transition to a Perpetual Parade (TPP) and other initiatives. Unifying her interdisciplinary practice is a commitment to the political efficacy of imagining through the arts and allied fields. Her work is focused on producing encounters capable of trading myths of scarcity for realities of abundance.
Virginia Alvarez is a lawyer specialized in Compliance and Financial Economic Crime, with work experience in different European countries. As a member of the NGO Transparency International and of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), she is an advocate for transparency, accountable governance, corporate and social responsibility as well as sustainability.
Panayotis Antoniadis (co-founder of Nethood) has an interdisciplinary profile with a background in the design and implementation of distributed systems. He holds a PhD on the economics of peer-to-peer networks and a post-doc on policies for the federation of shared virtualized infrastructures. Antoniadis is currently active in the organization of various interdisciplinary events that aim to bring together researchers, practitioners, and activists from various fields around the participatory design of hybrid urban space with a focus on wireless and peer-to-peer technology.
Ileana Apostol is a researcher of spatial production in the information age and she co-founded Nethood. To provide citizens with the right to the hybrid city, she engages with interdisciplinary teams, and proposes a dialectical take on urban research and design pedagogy inspired by Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production. Before undertaking research on a full-time basis, Apostol taught urban planning and design at California Polytechnic University, at University of Southern California, and at the University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest.
Steyn Bergs is an art critic and a researcher currently working as the co-editor-in-chief of Kunstlicht, Journal for Visual Art, Visual Culture, and Architecture. He is conducting his PhD research on commodification, value and reproduction in digital artworks at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He previously worked as media and research coordinator for Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, and has written for Metropolis M, Stedelijk Museum’s Global Collaborations platform, and Open!, among others.
Anne Breure is the artistic director of Veem House for Performance, which is a performance arts venue that facilitates the development of performance and discourse in Amsterdam. She received her MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London and graduated from the Theater School in Amsterdam with the project Het Gele Huis. Together with Anoek Nuyens, Marijke Hoogenboom and Lara Staal she forms the Transitiebureau, which is hosted by the Amsterdam University of the Arts. For the Transitiebureau she organized the Cultural Parliament of the Lowlands and the Agenda, a series of sector-wide conversations about concerns in and from the performing arts field.
Ruth Catlow is an artist and curator working with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. Catlow is co-founder and director, with Marc Garrett, of Furtherfield, an artist led organization for labs, debates and exhibitions around critical questions in arts, technology and society. Furtherfield’s Art Data Money program seeks to develop new economies and a commons for arts in the network age. Catlow recently made a short film with Pete Gomes about the Blockchain called “Change Everything For Ever”. Catlow is named by the Foundation for P2P Alternatives in their list of 100 women Co-creating the P2P society.
Bindu De Knock is a lawyer, specialized in copyright law. She represents clients in the music and entertainment industry, the art world, the creative industries and producers of consumer products (fashion and design). She is the author Noot voor Noot, an introduction to music law, and is a columnist for DJ Mag and Interface Magazine. She lectures at music conferences such as the Amsterdam Dance Event as well as at the international SAE Institute, where she also obtained a diploma in audio engineering.
Dan Diojdescu holds an MA in Cultural Management and a MBA with Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His work experience encompasses marketing and communication (brand management, city marketing or customer behavior) as well as and more extensively financial service (financial analysis, due diligence, risk management). His research interest in the governance of commons, economy and society and alternative finance led to the development of teaching modules and workshops centered around sustainable lifestyles, governance and civil (dis)obedience. He has been working for, among others, Boston University, the Hague University, Bank Austria and the Bank of Scotland.
Alex Foti is an Italian activist. He works on precarity, urban ecology and radical ideas of Europe. He was active in the EuroMayDay network and wrote Anarchy in the EU: pink, black, green movements in the Great Recession (2009). He also co-authored the “Middlesex Declaration of the European Precariat” in 2005 and the “Act 4 Radical Europe” manifesto in 2007.
Max Haiven is a writer and an assistant professor in the division of Art History and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada. His research focuses on the financialization of society and culture, social movements, and the radical imagination, politics, and economics of culture. He is author of Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (2014), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Alex Khasnabish, 2014) and Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2014).
Austin Houldsworth is a researcher within the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. He is the co-founder and curator of the ‘Future of Money Design Award’, a competition created to inspire new thinking around monetary development. After graduating from the RCA in 2009, he gained employment as a designer for HD+R in London, contributing to the conception and realization of various large scale installations for the architect Usman Haque. Houldsworth also continued to develop his own practice, including the world’s first prototype fossilisation machine named ‘2 Million and 1 AD’ for the Tatton Park Biennial.
Dmytri Kleiner is the author of The Telekommunist Manifesto, and a contributing artist to the “Miscommunication Technologies” continuing series of artworks in collaboration with the Telekommunisten Network. “Miscommunication Technologies” address the social relations embedded in communications technologies by creating platforms that don’t quite work as expected, or work in unexpected ways.
Richard Kohl is a Blockchain Business Architect and board member of The Bitcoin Foundation of The Netherlands. He is also the founder of Bitcoin Wednesday, the pioneering conference series on the digital currency revolution, as well as the Bitcoin startup PikaPay. A veteran of the tech sector, he previously worked for the Dutch Ministry of Traffic and Telecommunications, British Telecom and Computer Sciences Corporation. He was also a book editor of popular tech and scientific books for Random House in New York. He discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and realized its potential immediately.
Nathalie Maréchal is a PhD candidate in communication at the University of Southern California and a senior fellow at Ranking Digital Rights, a global research and advocacy project that encourages information and communication technology companies to respect their users’ rights to free expression and privacy. She frequently speaks at academic and activist conferences about digital rights, internet policy, freedom of expression, and privacy.
Renzo Martens is the artistic director of the Institute of Human Activities (IHA), a research project developed at the KASK – School of Arts in Ghent. The goal of the IHA is to prove that artistic critique on economic inequality can redress it, not symbolically, but in material terms. Martens is a member of the Worlf Fellows program of Yale University and he lectures at institutions such as the University of Oxford, Goldsmiths University of London, and the London School of Economics. He gained recognition with the film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, on labor conditions in Congo, which was screened worldwide.
Jens Martignoni is a cooperatives and currency researcher working on community currencies, commons-based economic models and game design for networks and cooperatives. Co-founder of Nethood, he is doing a PhD about cooperatives and currencies at Cologne University, Germany. He also serves as a lecturer for management at the Swiss Distance University for Applied Science. He is also engaged in the discussion about ethical banking and the future of finance in Switzerland.
Dan Mihaltianu is concerned with the social, political and transcultural sides of phenomena. He has been contributing for a long time to and has been the chief editor of Arta Magazine Bucharest. He taught at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design between 2001 and 2007 and he was a guest professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal between 2008 and 2009. Since the 1980s, his work has been exhibited internationally in major art events, museums, art centers, and galleries. He has received a number of prizes, stipends and residencies throughout his career.
Niederer Sabine heads the research department of the School of Design and Communication at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she founded the Citizen Data Lab in 2014. Before this, she worked at the Institute of Network Cultures, running programs such as A Decade of Web Design, Video Vortex and Urban Screens. In 2016, she obtained her PhD with the Digital Methods Initiative at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, with a dissertation titled ‘Networked Content Analysis: The Case of Climate Change’.
Johannes Ponader, Author, actor and director, lives and works in Berlin. He has been working on the topic of basic income for more than 15 years. Between April 2012 and May 2013, he was the political director of the German party “Die Piraten”. In 2014 Ponader and a team of other activists founded the “Agency to Overcome Capitalism”. For their first project, they set up the platform “Mein Grundeinkommen” with the purpose of raffling year-long basic incomes to randomly selected people. They are currently also seeking to abolish Hartz-IV welfare cuts with the campaign “Sanktionsfrei”.
Patrice Riemens is a geographer, and a culture and internet activist, who advocates the use of free and/or open source software. Riemens is a member of the Dutch hackers club “Hippies from Hell”.
Arthur Röing Baer is a designer and writer. His work includes Commune, a distributed ownership model for urban logistical infrastructures, and Quicksand, a lecture series on the possibility of politicality within contemporary design. He holds a Bachelor in Visual communication from the Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm and a Masters in Design from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
Emily Rosamond is a Canadian artist, writer and educator. She completed an Art PhD at Goldsmiths, London, in 2016, where she held a Commonwealth Scholarship. Her doctoral work focused on character as a prominent, speculative, representational logic of personhood in an era of predictive analytics. Rosamond is a lecturer in fine art theory at the Arts University Bournemouth, England. Previously, she was a lecturer in fine art at the University of Kent and an associate lecturer in fine art critical studies at Goldsmiths.
Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and associate professor for Culture & Media at The New School, New York City. He frequently presents on the future of work, solidarity, and the internet to scholars, lawyers, activists, designers, developers, union leaders, and policy-makers worldwide. His book Uber-Worked and Underpaid (2016) develops an analysis of the challenges posed by digital labor and introduces the concept of platform cooperativism as a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance. This concept is explored further in his latest co-authored book Platform Cooperativism (2016).
Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner and the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (2013). He works on financial reform, alternative finance and economic activism with a wide range of NGOs, artists and students, and writes for publications such as The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine, Aeon and CNN.com.
Cassie Thornton works under the title of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED), She uses dance, writing, visual art, hypnosis, experimental research, tours and radio to protect the unknown and reveal debt as a source of solidarity. Her work investigates and reveals the impact of governmental and economic systems on public affect, behavior, and the unconscious, with a focus on debt and security. Thornton received a MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jeroen Van Loon is fascinated with the (lack of) impact of the internet in society. He holds a BA in Digital Media Design and a European Media MA. He gave two TEDx talks in 2012 and 2014, was nominated for the Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award, won the European Youth Award and was awarded the K.F. Hein Art Grant. In 2015 and 2016 he presented his works An Internet and Cellout.me in his solo show ‘Beyond Data’ at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. While his early work focused on contemporary digital culture, he is now exploring its future.
Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, explorer, technologist and Luddite. He is currently Curator of Digital at the Serpentine Galleries, and is the Co-Director of LIMAZULU Project Space, as well as a Near Now Fellow and an initiator of unMonastery; an open-source secular monastic order.
Henry Warwick is an artist, composer, writer, and associate professor in the RTA School of Media at Ryerson University in Toronto. He has a BFA in Visual Systems Studies from Rutgers University (MGSA), an MFA from Goddard College in Interdisciplinary Art, and a PhD in Communications from the European Graduate School in Switzerland. He has exhibited internationally and has recorded many albums of electronic music. He is the author of The Radical Tactics of the Offline Library.
Koos Zwaan is associate professor in Media, Culture and Citizenship at the Inholland University of Applied Sciences. His research interest include popular music and popular culture, the music industry and new media. He recently published a volume entitled The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures (with Linda Duits and Stijn Reijnders, 2014). He is also the secretary for the Benelux branche of the IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music).
Exhibition “No Hidden Costs” Max Dovey, Juan David Galindo, Peter Gomes, Javier Llorett, Daniela Medina Poch, Arthur Röing Baer, Steve Rowell.