Valery Alzaga
Danny Butt
Teun Castelein
Chaos Chen
Anthony Davies
Danielle van Diemen
Mieke Gerritzen
Donna Ghelfi
Rosalind Gill
Hendrik-Jan Grievink
David Hesmondhalgh
Brian Holmes
Michael Keane
Paul Keller
Aphra Kerr
Rogerio Lira
Geert Lovink
Sebastian Luetgert
Luca Martinazolli
Elisabeth Mayerhofer
Monika Mokre
Justin O’Connor
Marion von Osten
Merijn Oudenampsen
Matteo Pasquinelli
Angela McRobbie
Andrew Ross
Ned Rossiter
Joost Smiers
Christoph Spehr
Barbara Strebel
Minna Tarkka
Su Tong
Annelys de Vet
Valery is a labor organizer and a social justice / migrant rights
activist. She has worked for 8 years in the Justice for Janitors Campaign throughout the U.S. and recently coordinated the London cleaners’ campaign for a living wage. She is currently working as a global organizing coordinator throughout Europe focusing on low income workers in the service sector. Valery has extensive training and community organizing experience. She has been involved in the Zapatista and global economic justice movements in the U.S., Mexico and Europe for 10 years. She studied International and Development Studies at the University of Denver and the Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Internazionali in Rome. She works and resides in Hamburg, Germany.
Danny Butt is a consultant in new media, culture, and development, and Partner at Suma Media Consulting. He was founding director of the Creative Industries Research Centre at Wintec, New Zealand. He is on the working editorial committee for the Digital Review of Asia Pacific, and an associate member of The ORBICOM International Network of UNESCO Chairs in Communications. www.dannybutt.net
Teun Castelein (1980, Roelofarendsveen) graduated in 2002 at the School of the Arts Utrecht with a research on ghetto town ‘Hoogvliet’ that led to a feel good branding campaign for its citizens. Since that time he is fascinated by the methods and effects of branding. In his work he focuses on the interaction between architecture and branding. Now that we live in ‘brandspace’ he is creating spatial design strategies that play with this fact. At this moment Castelein is -as a MA student- selling the façade of the Sandberg Institute Building for artvertisement.
www.sandberg.nl/artvertising
Chaos Y. Chen founded CHAOSPROJECTS Visual Thinking in Beijing in 2005, which is a curatorial atelier that focuses on knowledge production in the marginal area between boundaries, both cross media and cross national border. She was the chief curator in the Millennium Art Museum (Beijing, China) where she initiated the OpenForum. Prior to this, she consecutively worked at the Beijing Art Museum, The Asia Society, Academy of Art & Design of Tsinghua University, and later, collaborated with Kunst-Werke Berlin and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She is a contributor to the publications Reading (Beijing), Economic Observer (Beijing), Blueprint (London) and others. Born in Shanghai, she holds a degree in Art History from the Nanjing Academy of Art. She was awarded the Henry Luce Scholarship (1998) and the RAVE Scholarship (2001). She was a jury member for CENTRAL Contemporary Art Award (Cologne, Germany, 2004).
Anthony Davies is a London based writer, organiser and independent researcher. He has been involved with numerous self-organised and ‘artist-run’ initiatives, from Posterstudio and Copenhagen Free University to the more recent Flaxman Lodge. In the late 1990s along with Simon Ford he developed a series of critical debates on art and economy, the figure of the culturepreneur, and new paradigms for corporate-cultural networking culminating in the text ‘Culture Clubs’, published in Mute (2000). He has also written on art, the creative industries and corporatisation for a wide range of other publications including Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst, Metropolis M and Documents.
Danielle van Diemen received an MA-degree in law and sociology from the University of Amsterdam (1993). In 1996, she started Ph.D research on gender dimensions of early Internet development. She was involved in research projects on how Internet affects women and elderly people. In the past ten years, she carried out user and market research for the Amsterdam based Internet company Lost Boys Danielle published articles on how GUIs stimulate creativity and on the commercialisation of early Internet applications. Currently, she is running an intranet for neighbourhood mediators.
Mieke Gerritzen was born in Amsterdam. In the early nineties Gerritzen was one of the first designers involved in the development of digital media in the Netherlands. She makes designs for all media and works with many different designers, writers and artists. She has a couple of successful publications on her name: Catalogue of Strategy, Everyone is a Designer, Mobile Minded and Next Nature. Gerritzen is head of the design department Sandberg Institute, the post-graduate design course in Amsterdam. Gerritzen is founder of All Media Foundation. Mieke Gerritzen received many prizes and gives lectures and presentations worldwide.
Ms. Ghelfi is Program Officer in the Creative Industries Division, Office of Strategic Use of Intellectual Property for Development, at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Her principal responsibilities include, among others, the identification of policies, and assessment of needs and working practices of the creative industries worldwide in order to formulate and develop projects and programs to facilitate their optimal use of the intellectual property system. Other activities include the coordination with, and assistance to national authorities and professional bodies in using intellectual property in the creative industries as a tool for economic growth, trade and development, including assistance in collecting data and developing methodologies for measuring the economic and social impact of the creative sector.
Rosalind Gill is a senior lecturer in gender and media at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is editor of The Gender Technology Relation, Taylor & Frances (with Keith Grint) and author of Gender and the Media, Polity 2006. Her current research is on three areas: work in new media and cultural industries (especially web design), changing masculinities, and representations of gender in relation to feminism and postfeminism. She has a grant with Andy Pratt and Volker Spelthann as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s major E-Society programme, and has also done research for the Institute of Network Cultures on Web-working in Amsterdam. She is currently writing a book about discourse analysis.
Hendrik-Jan Grievink (1977) lives and works as a designer in Rotterdam. His particular interests concerning design are populism, modernity and contemporary image culture. Grievink asks himself how designers – as supposed ambassadors of the new – can relate to the demanding needs of a hypermodern society. He combines a both journalistic/theoretical and practical research-based approach with a clear visual language. Writing and performance are essential elements of his practise. Grievink writes for Archined, the dutch architecture site and is connected to the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.
David Hesmondhalgh is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Media Studies at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. His main areas of interest are the cultural and creative industries, cultural and media policy, including copyright, music, society and culture. David is the main convenor (with Jason Toynbee) of CRESC’s conference on Media Change and Social Theory. In 2006 David and his collegue Dr Sarah Baker began a two-year research project on Creative Work in the Cultural Industries, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This compares the organisation of creative work in three industries: music, television and magazine journalism.
Brian Holmes is an essayist, translator and political activist whose Ph.D. studies in Romance Languages at the University of California at Berkeley encouraged him to abandon the sterile career the American academic for the rather more interesting instability of freelance curiosity in Europe. He is a member of the editorial committees of the journals Multitudes (Paris) and Brumaria (Madrid/Barcelona), writes frequently for Springerin (Vienna) and Parachute (Montreal), and considers capitalism not to be eternal. He is the author of the book Hieroglyphs of the Future: politics & art in a networked era (Zagreb: WHW/Arkzin, 2003) and of a lot of stuff that you can find by looking around on the Internet.
Michael Keane is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. His research on creative industries focuses on its internationalization and its applicability to East Asia cultural and media environments. This research, a component of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Internationalising Creative Industries, China, the WTO, and the Knowledge-based Economy, also explores how government policy impacts on the development of cultural services in China, particularly in the context of China as an emerging service economy. The project focus on four areas: media, advertising, tourism, and education (MATE). Michael Keane publishes regularly in leading international journals.
Paul Keller heads the Public Domain programme of Waag Society in Amsterdam. This programme researches and discusses the legal and social aspects of the network society. He is co-public project leader for Creative Commons Nederland. For Creative Commons he has worked extensively on attempts to make Creative Commons licensing compatible with the collective rights management practices of Collecting Societies in the music sector. Paul Keller is a board member of iCommons an international organisation that supports open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world. www.waag.org, www.creativecommons.nl, www.icommons.org
Dr Aphra Kerr was a Research Associate in Media Policy at the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland, from Sept. 2004 until Sept 2005. She now works as a lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her book the Business and Culture of Digital Games:gamework/gameplay was published by Sage in 2006. She has been published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, the Irish Communications Review, Convergence, New Media and Society and Culture, Media and Society. She has worked on a number of European research projects including Strategies of Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society (SIGIS), Social Learning in Multimedia (SLIM) and Science and Technology Policy in Less Favoured Regions. She runs gamedevelopers.ie, a networking and information resource for the game development community on the island of Ireland.
Rogério Lira is a graphic and interaction designer living and working in Amsterdam. He was born in São Paulo, Brazil, where he studied fine arts. Travels took him to southeast Asia, where he designed for Channel [V] in Hong Kong and later to Brussels and Amsterdam, where he graduated at the design department of the Sandberg Institute. Rogério Lira has since then established his own design studio in the centre of Amsterdam and is now a member of the selection committee of the Funds for the Visual Arts, Design and Architecture in Amsterdam and teaches at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design. From his cross-cultural perspective, he is particularly interested in the role of design in defining the identity of different social groups and in stimulating contact between these groups. He currently researches the interaction between people, their bodies, the public space and digital media. His blog: www.latenightpool.com
Geert Lovink media theorist, critic and author of Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks, My First Recession and The Principle of Notworking. He worked on various media projects in Eastern Europe and India. He is a member of the Adilkno collective (Cracking the Movement, The Media Archive) and co-founder of Internet projects such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. He is founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures which is part of the Interactive Media School at Amsterdam Polytechnic (HvA) and associate professor at the Media & Culture department, University of Amsterdam. In 2005-2006 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (Routledge New York, 2007). His blog: www.networkcultures.org/geert
Sebastian Luetgert was born in Bielefeld and lives in Berlin. He works as a writer, programmer and artist and has been participating in exhibitions since 1996. Recent projects include magazines like The German Issue, Starship and Auseinander, websites such as rolux.org; ‘a potential network for the advancement of the critical minorities’ and several videos. He is part of the Copyleft-movement and has set up a server for theoretical and literary texts.
Luca Martinazolli is an Urban Planning MA candidate at UCLA. After a business degree in art management at Bocconi University, he studied cultural planning for one year with Franco Bianchini in Leicester. He worked for a year at A.S.K., a new reseach center on creative industries and cultural management at Bocconi University, studying the relationship between economics and culture, doing consultancy for cultural policies at a local level and feasibility plans for a couple of new museums. He moved to Los Angeles to do critical studies of cities and regions with Ed Soja and AJ Scott. His focus is the relationship between economic devolopment and the creative industries. During an economic geography seminar on creative cities with AJ Scott, he has started to investigate the porn industry in Los Angeles.
Elisabeth Mayerhofer is a free-lance researcher and lecturer in Vienna/Austria. Her main research interests are Creative Industries, cultural labour markets and gender equality in the cultural field. Currently she is managing director of IG Kultur Österreich, a lobby organisation for independent cultural centers in Austria. She is member of the Austrian Society of Cultural Economics and Policy Studies (FOKUS). In this context she is actually tackling the question of political representation of creators – what kind of organisation would be adequate?
Monika Mokre is Deputy Director of EIF, the Institute for European Integration Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and chairwoman of FOKUS, the Austrian Association for Cultural Economics and Policy Studies. She is a member of eipcp, european institute for progressive cultural policies and lecturer at the Universities of Innbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. Her main research areas are European Democracy and Public Sphere, Cultural Politics and Financing of the Arts, Media Politics and Gender Studies.
Dr. Justin O’Connor has recently obtained a professorship at the University of Leeds. He is programme leader for the Masters in European Urban Cultures www.polis-web.net, co-chair of Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service www.cids.co.uk, on the North West Regional Creative Industries ‘Think Tank’ and co-convenor of Forum on Creative Industries, the UK’s leading network of academics, consultants and policy makers in the field of cultural and creative industry policy www.foci.org. He is currently writing a book – Creative Industries and the City – for Sage, and developing a research agenda on cultural industry discourses in Russia and China.
Marion von Osten works as an artist, author and curator. The chief interests of her projects are the changed conditions of the production of cultural work in neo-liberal societies, technologies of the self and the gouvernance of mobility. Theoretical and artistic approaches mix in her work and are brought together mainly through the medium of the exhibition, publications, installations and film productions in her co-operation with other cultural producers. Since 2006, Marion is professor for artistic practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. From 1999 – 2006 she was professor and researcher at the Institute for the Theory of Art and Design & Institute for Cultural and Gender Studies, HGK Zurich and lecturer at Critical Studies Program, Malmö Art Academy. From 1996-1998 she worked as a curator at Shedalle Zurich. She lives in Berlin.
Merijn Oudenampsen (1979, Amsterdam) is animator of the critical platform Flexmens.org. He has been involved in organising political projects and debates around flexibility and precarity, such as the PrecairForum in 2005 – www.precairforum.nl – and a Mayday symposium at de Balie in 2006. He has written on gentrification, the vicissitudes of being a paperboy, zero tolerance and postfordism. At the moment he is writing his thesis on creative city branding, entrepreneurialism and gentrification in Amsterdam.
Matteo Pasquinelli (1974, Italy) is editor of Rekombinant www.rekombinant.org and author of the book Media Activism (Rome: Derive Approdi, 2002). He has been involved in several projects around net activism and cultural jamming (from Luther Blissett to Telestreet). In 2005 he co-curated the Art and Politics of Netporn conference at the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam www.networkcultures.org/netporn. Usually nomadic, currently he is an university researcher and gonzo journalist based between London and Barcelona.
Angela McRobbie is professor of communications at Goldsmiths University of London. Her most recent book is The Uses of Cultural Studies (Sage, 2005). Angela McRobbie is currently running two key research projects. The first of these, the New Cultural Economy, studies the pathways and distinctive working lives which have emerged around the cultural and creative industries. This research combines what used to be called the ‘sociology of work’ with elements emerging from youth and subcultural studies with reference to cultural production, and ‘mixes’ these with the conceptual vocabulary emerging from ‘network society’ (Castells) and ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault). Angela has also recently been involved in a number of debates in feminist theory. Her most recent publications in this area are in Feminist Media Studies 2004 and Feminism After Bourdieu.
Andrew Ross is Professor of American Studies and Director of the
Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade–Lessons from Shanghai: Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor; No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs; and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. He has also edited several books, including No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights
of Garment Workers, and, most recently, Anti-Americanism.
Ned Rossiter is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media) in the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and leads the CMR’s ‘Digital Cultures’ research strand. Ned has published numerous papers and is co-editor of Politics of a Digital Present: An Inventory of Australian Net Culture, Criticism and Theory (Melbourne: Fibreculture Publications, 2001) and Refashioning Pop Music in Asia: Cosmopolitan Flows, Political Tempos and Aesthetic Industries (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). He is also a co-facilitator of fibreculture, a network of critical Internet research and culture in Australasia. His book Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions will be published later this year by NAi Publishers.
Joost Smiers is professor of political science of the arts at the Utrecht School of the Arts, the Netherlands, and formerly visiting professor, Department of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA, Los Angeles. He has written, lectured and researched extensively in the area of decision-making in cultural matters worldwide, on new visions of creative and intellectual property, copyright and the public domain, on freedom of expression versus responsibility, and on cultural identities. His books include Arts Under Pressure: Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of Globalization (London 2003, Zed Books).
Christoph Spehr is a political theorist, editor, author and organizer. He works for the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation at Berlin (the political foundation of the German Left Party) and as a free lecturer and author. His essay “Free Cooperation” will be published shortly in Scholz and Lovink (eds.), The Art of (Online) Cooperation, Autonomedia 2006. Collaborative video work with Jörg Windszus includes Time Is On My Side, On Rules and Monsters, and others. He is organizer of the conference/festival series Out of this world – Science-Fiction, Politics, Utopia and contributes to the HKWM project (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism).
Barbara Strebel initiated artcast.info, a podcast on culture and innovation since 2005. She studied Cultural Antropology and art history at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and audiovisual design at the Artschool of Basel, Switzerland. She carried pioneer work for the net.art scene in Switzerland – already in 1994 the internationally connected pioneer was running a network point of thing.net (ISP/ BBS) in Basel. She initiates platforms and events on internetculture and net.art and, in the last ten years, has collected experiences in art related network communities.
Minna Tarkka is director of m-cult, www.m-cult.org, centre for new media culture in Helsinki. She has been involved in setting up several organisations and educational programs of media art and design. She was programme director of ISEA’94 symposium and professor at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design in 1996-2001. At m-cult, she has carried out projects to document and communicate practices of media culture and is currently establishing a new production environment to Helsinki in collaboration with media, arts and civil society groups. Her research and writing aims at a critical study of new media, participation and governmentality.
Su Tong is the founding executive director of the Beijing-based Creative in China Industrial Alliance, www.ccia.net.cn. This organisation is a non-profit company operating under the umbrella of Asia-Pacific Research Society, itself a think-tank associated with the Ministry of Information Industry. Su Tong and his organization have been involved in several creative cities campaigns and their designs have found support within the Beijing Municipal government. The Creative in China Industrial Alliance has also been engaged on several Beijing Olympics promotions. One of these is an image database called Beijing Explorer, an online photo exhibit of Beijing that allows residents to contribute their impressions of culturally significant sites.
Annelys de Vet (1974) explores the role of design in relation to the public and political discourse. Next to her work for clients like Thames&Hudson, Droog Design, KPN, Rijksgebouwendienst, de Appel art space and Art Amsterdam she has published several books. ‘The subjective atlas of the EU, from an Estonion point of view’ shows new images for Europe designed by students in of the artschool of Tallinn. The ‘Subjective atlas of the Netherlands’ (BIS publishers, 2005) was made with students of the Design Academy Eindhoven, who created objective maps and images from subjective points of view. The publication aims to influence the way of perceiving national identity. ‘The public role of the graphic designer’ (2006) investigates the responsibility of graphic designers in the realm of cultural representation. In addition De Vet teaches at the Design Academy Eindhoven and is the initiator of the ‘(Con)temporary Museum Amsterdam’. For more information see: www.annelysdevet.nl