Biographies

Paula Van Beek
Paula van Beek is a New Zealand born artist dedicated to creating original performative artworks that question and complicate representations of female subjectivity. Within an expanded performance practice she is investigating self-surveillance, identity in public/private spaces, and the ‘performance of self’ that is reflected in contemporary selfie culture. Her work as been presented in theatres, galleries, pop up cinemas and online spaces. As a current Masters research candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s School of Art she has presented her research at the 6th Mobile Innovation Network Australasia symposium and the Aesthetics and Agency symposium on expanded photography. Paula is passionate about expressing the complexity of creating meaningful representations of self in this high-speed hyper-connected digital age. Website

Katherine Behar
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist whose works exploring gender and labor in digital culture have appeared throughout North America and Europe. The Pera Museum in Istanbul presented her 2016 survey exhibition and catalog,Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry | Veri Girişi. In 2014, her solo exhibition and catalog, Katherine Behar: E-Waste, premiered at the University of Kentucky before traveling to Boston Cyberarts Gallery. Since 2005 she has collaborated with Marianne M. Kim in the performance art duo Disorientalism. Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, coeditor of And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, and author of Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity. She holds an MFA in combined media from Hunter College, an MA in media ecology from New York University, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is based in New York and is assistant professor of new media arts at Baruch College, CUNY.

Simon Boas
Simon Boas is a socially engaged data artist. He has created multimedia projects for Oregon Public Broadcasting, Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, Root Division, Nisus Gallery, the Everett Daily Herald, KEZI, The Santiago Times, and FLUX Magazine. He is currently a MFA candidate in the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he investigates the theme of permissions at the intersection of technology and personal life. Website.

Natalie Bookchin
Natalie Bookchin is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is exhibited and screened widely including at MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, the Whitney Museum, and the Tate. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and most recently a NYSCA Individual Artist Fellowship, a NYFA Opportunity Grant, and a NYSCA/MAAF award. Her most recent work Now he’s out in public and everyone can see premiered at Cinema du Reel at the Pompidou in Paris in March 2017 where it received Special Mention. Her film Long Story Short premiered at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and won the Grand Prize at Cinema du Reel in Paris in 2016. Bookchin is a professor of Media and Associate Chair in the Visual Arts Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016). She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2015). She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, ACLS and American Academy of Berlin Fellow, and she has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She is also the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; she has been the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate.

Biella Coleman
Gabriella (Biella) Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarship explores the intersection of the cultures of hacking and politics, with a focus on the sociopolitical implications of the free software movement and the digital protest ensemble Anonymous. She has authored two books, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which was named to Kirkus Reviews’Best Books of 2014 and was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the American Anthropological Association. Her work has been featured in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes. Committed to public ethnography, she routinely presents her work to diverse audiences, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, and has written for popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Slate, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Huffington Post, and the Atlantic. She sits on the board of Equalitie, The Tor Project, the Advisory Board of Data and Society,and the Social Science Advisory Board of the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Fabio Cristiano
Fabio Cristiano is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, Lund University (Sweden) as well as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kenyon Institute – Council for British Research in the Levant in East Jerusalem. His research interests lay at the intersection of IR, cyberwarfare and critical theory. He’s currently finalizing his thesis on Palestinian cyberwar and hacking, engaging with the concept of jihad to explore how sovereignty and subjectivity are reproduced in relation to virtuality. Other areas of interest are war simulations, gaming, cyber-diplomacy and internet as human right. Fabio also teaches and convenes various courses on IR theory, war theory, Israel/Palestine, development studies, and digital pedagogy in Lund.

Jodi Dean
Jodi Dean is the Harter Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY where she teaches contemporary political and media theory. She is the author or editor of 12 books, most recently: Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke 2009), Blog Theory (Polity 2010), The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), and Crowds and Party (Verso 2016).

Marco DeSeriis
Marco DeSeriis is Marie Curie Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and Assistant Professor in the Program of Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University. His book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) examines the contentious politics and the struggles for control of shared aliases from the early nineteenth century to the age of networks. Deseriis’ current research project an alyzes the political values embedded in the affordances of a new generation of decision-making software and their use within European parties such as Podemos, the Five Star Movement, and the Pirate Parties. Deseriis’ writings have appeared in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Theory & Event, Radical History Review, Critical Communication/Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication,Culture Machine and Subjectivity. He is also the co-author of Net.Art: L’arte della Connessione (Shake, 2008) the first Italian book about Internet Art.

Emilio Distretti
Emilio Distretti holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Politics of Representation from the School of Art and Design, Portsmouth (UK). His research interests are multidisciplinary with a strong emphasis on new materialism, comparative colonial histories, geography, and theories of space. Emilio’s current research explores representation and transformation of deserts as colonial spaces. His work investigates two case studies of desert colonization and their cultural and historical convergences around the dream to “make the desert bloom”: Fascist Italy colonization of the northern Sahara in Libya and the Zionist colonization of the Negev. Emilio is also the Head of the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices Program at Al Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences in Abu Dis, Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as Research Fellow at the Kenyon Institute – Council for British Research in the Levant in East Jerusalem.

Francisco Gonzalez-Rosas
Francisco Gonzalez-Rosas is a Chilean mixed media artist. His work is located at the intersection of sound, video and performance, exploring questions on representation, identity, gender, race and sexuality. More specifically, in their connection to technology and digital media. He is currently based in Montreal, Canada. Website

Antonia Hernandez
Antonia Hernández is a Chilean Montréal-based visual artist and PhD candidate in Communication at Concordia University, Canada. Mixing media practice and theoretical research, her interests involve the domestic side of digital networks, maintenance practices and the laboring of affect. Website.

Marguerite Elisabeth Kalhor
Marguerite Elizabeth Kalhor is a Japanese-Iranian-American artist from California. She studied Painting and New Genres at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Digital Arts & New Media. Employing a myriad of media and an array of web tropes, Kalhor characterizes the selfie as the misunderstood, less-interesting sibling of the traditional self-portrait and also critiques social media as an inefficient mode of expression. Website.

Patrick Lichty
Patrick is a conceptual artist, curator, and theorist exploring how netowrked culture shapes our perception of reality, as well as the borders between the digital and the material. He is best known for his work with the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark.

Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the director of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (bitcoins, crowdfunding & internet revenue models) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2012 he was also associate prof. at Mediastudies (MA new media program), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he is professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee) where he supervises PhD students. Email: geert[at]xs4all[dot]nl.

Alberto Micali
Dr. Alberto Micali is associate lecturer at the School of Film and Media of the University of Lincoln (UK), where he lectures on hacking, digital activism and non-representational approaches in media studies. His research transversally moves between media theory, cultural studies and political philosophy with a key interest in the ‘ecosophical’ work of Félix Guattari, hacker cultures and the politics of digital dissent. His PhD dissertation explored the micropolitical dimensions of the contemporary forms of digital media interventionism, offering a non-representational comprehension of the hacktivism of Anonymous.

Sarah Newman
Sarah Newman is a Creative Researcher at metaLAB at Harvard University, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Working primarily in the areas of photography and installation art, her work fuses physical, virtual, and imaginary worlds, exploring perception, human-machine relationships, memory, water, and secrets. Newman holds a BA in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology; she has exhibited work in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Boston, and Berlin, and has held artist residencies in Germany and Sweden. Previous projects engage physical and psychological landscapes, conceptions of time, and privacy in a digitally distributed world.

Teresa Numerico
Teresa Numerico is Associate Professor of philosophy of Science at Uniroma Tre. She was researcher at the University of Salerno (2005-2008) and she holds a PhD. from the university of Bari. She was awarded Leverhulme Fellowship at South Bank University (2004-2005). She coauthored Web Dragons (2007 Morgan Kaufmann) and The Digital Humanist a critical inquiry (2015, Punctum Books). Her work focuses on History and Philosophy of Technology and artificial intelligence. Her current research revolves around a critical perspective on Big Data, algorithms, algorithmic governmentality and Digital Humanities.

Ana Peraica
Ana Peraica is a researcher and lecturer in visual culture and media arts.  She is an author of Culture of the Selfie: Self-Representation in Contemporary Visual Culture (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2017) and Fotografija kao dokaz (Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, 2017-in print). Besides, she is an editor of readers made after large exhibition projects, such as; Machine Philosopher (Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, 1999), Žena na raskrižju ideologija (HULU, Split, 2007), Victims Symptom – PTSD and Culture (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2009), Smuggling Anthologies (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Arts, Rijeka, 2015). Her essays published in cultural magazines as Springerin, Pavilion, Art and Education Papers, and readers by Afterimage, Loecker Verlaag, P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E, were compiled in Sub/versions (Revolver, Split / Berlin, 2009). Peraica is a book reviewer for Leonardo Reviews and a member of Leonardo’s workgroup Artist and Scientist in Times of War. She teaches Media Art Politics and Methodologies of Interpretation in Media Arts at programs of MA Media Art Histories and MA Media Art Cultures, a program by ERASMUS MUNDUS, by University of Danube in Krems, Lower Austria. In addition, she runs a small photo-atelier opened by her grandfather, in Split, Croatia.

Julia Preisker
Julia Preisker is a PhD student in Media Studies at the University of Vienna. Studies of Theatre, Film and Media Studies (BA, 2009 – 2012); Studies of Theatre, Film and Media History (MA, 2012 – 2015) both at the University of Vienna. Since summer term 2016 she is a lecturer at the Institute of Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna. Since October 2016 she is employed at the Research Platform “Mobile Cultures and Societies”. In her PhD thesis she examines the socio-cultural condition of hate speech in the so called ›Social Media‹ through the particular case of the presidential election in Austria in 2016.

Donatella Della Ratta
Donatella Della Ratta is Assistant Professor in Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University, Rome. She has a background in Media Studies with a specialization in Arabic-speaking media. From 2007 until 2011 she lived in Damascus and carried out an extensive media ethnography of Syrian TV series which became the topic of her Phd research, obtained from the University of Copenhagen in 2013. She is a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Copenhagen and at the Annenberg School for Communication, Pennsylvania University ; and an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Donatella has authored three monographs on Arab media, and curated chapters on Syrian media and politics in several collective books. She is a contributor to Italian and international media outlets such as Al Jazeera English, Hyperallergic, Internazionale, il Manifesto. Donatella has a professional experience as a journalist, TV author and producer, and has managed the Arabic speaking community of the international NGO Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org for five years (2008-2013). She has curated several art exhibitions and film programs on Syria, and she is a co-founder and board member of the web aggregator on creative resistance SyriaUntold www.syriauntold.com
She tweets avidily at @donatelladr.

Peter Sarram
Peter Sarram is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at John Cabot University in Rome. He did graduate work and research at Northwestern University and at the Università degli Studi di Milano from where he holds a PhD. His work focuses on visual media and recorded music as spaces of cultural resistance and on their use, as popular media forms, by social movements and subcultures. His current research revolves around practices of the ‘ephemeral’ in media production and consumption and its intersections with media and cultural theory and policy.

Daniel de Zeeuw
Daniël de Zeeuw is a philosopher and media artist/theorist based in the Netherlands. He currently works as a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam (ASCA), writing a dissertation on the politics and aesthetics of anonymity in contemporary media culture, art and activism. He is also co-editor of Krisis, Journal for Contemporary Philosophy and Affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures (d.dezeeuw [at] uva [dot] nl).