Moderators

Mario Diani
Matthew Fuller
Geert Lovink
Noortje Marres
Sebastian Olma
Richard Rogers
Reinder Rustema
Warren Sack
Jan Simons

Mario Diani is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento and Visiting Research Professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He has published extensively on social movements and social networks, including Green Networks (Edinburgh University Press 1995), Social Movements (with D della Porta, Blackwell 1999 and 2006), and Social Movements and Networks (co-edited with D McAdam, Oxford University Press 2003).

Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of ‘Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software’, ‘Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture’ and editor of the forthcoming ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic, and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures. Since January 2004, Geert is appointed as senior researcher/associated professor at Amsterdam University (HvA/UvA). He is the organiser of conferences, festivals and (online) publications and the founder of numerous Internet projects, such as www.nettime.org and www.fibreculture.org. He recently published the books Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-2006 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced StudyWissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (Routledge New York, 2007).
Contact: geert(at)xs4all.nl
For more information: www.laudanum.net/geert.
Geert’s weblog: www.networkcultures.org/geert

Noortje Marres works as a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her current research focuses on climate change and the role of non-human entities as mediators of public involvement. In 2005, She received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, for her thesis “No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics.” Her recent work has been published in Making Things Public (MIT Press, 2005), Reformatting Politics (Routledge, 2006) and Nongovernmental Politics (Zone Books, forthcoming). She is an editor of two Dutch journals, Krisis and De Gids.

Sebastian Olma studied Political Science, Sociology and Philosophy at Leipzig, Rutgers and Binghamton. He wrote a Ph.D.-thesis on organisational mutations in contemporary capitalism (“Vital Organising: Capitalism’s Ontological Turn and the Role of Management Consulting”) at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College. A regular contributor to ‘Theory, Culture & Society’ as well as ‘Mute Magazine’ he has published on Vitalism, Autonomist Marxism, and questions of temporality and creativity in contemporary capitalism.

Richard Rogers is Head of New Media at the University of Amsterdamand Director of the Govcom.org Foundation, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler network mapping software. His is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), editor of Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web (Jan van Eyck, 2000) and author of Technological Landscapes (Royal College of Art, 1999). The topics of his current research projects include Internet censorship, U.S. media reform and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

ReindeR Rustema, born in 1972, is a teacher in media in the Media & Culture department at the University of Amsterdam. He was involved in the Digital City in 1994 and similar projects for a public domain on the internet. In 1999 he published an essay on the reality-tv show ‘Big Brother’ and the significance of ‘live’ versus ‘video’ on television. He is a Ph.D. candidate with a research on DIY-video distributed through the internet.

Warren Sack is a media theorist and software designer. He has exhibited work at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York City; and, on the Artport website of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Warren earned his B.A. from Yale College and his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. He currently teaches in the Digital Arts & New Media M.F.A. program and in the Film & Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr. 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: Amsterdam University Press, 2007.