Biographies

Video Vortex 6 Amsterdam | bios | timetable | conference program | workshops | practical info | credits | tickets


Dr. Ebru Baranseli graduated from Hacettepe University, FADA, Graphic Design Department, in 1996. Started MFA in Anadolu University, ISS, Graphic Design Department and graduated in 2003 with the thesis “The Study Of Graphic Design Projects And The Presentation Advantages In Interactive Environment ”. In 2009, she graduated from the Ph.D. program in Anadolu University, ISS, with the thesis “Graphic Language Developed By Information And Communication Technologies And The New Extensions Of Graphic Design”. She now works as an instructor in the Graphic Design Department in FFA, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey, where she also works as a digital activist against internet censorship in Turkey.

José Miguel Biscaya, born in Lisbon in 1973, is a mixed-media artist living and working in Amsterdam. He graduated from the Sandberg Institute where he received his Master’s degree in Fine Arts. His work has been shown in numerous international group exhibitions and festivals, including EMAF, IMPAKT, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Madrid/Berlin and POP-UP Lisboa. He has co-curated and produced several shows, including Volume, Hiscox Art Award, Stranger Exhibition, Media Art Friesland’s Media Art Competition and the City One Minutes Lisbon. José co-founded the Mobile Institute in Brussels. He is currently working on a new series of video works, a landscape study dealing with perception and the unconscious. www.jmbiscaya.com


Natalie Bookchin is an artist whose video installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation, and explore the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world. Exhibited widely, her work has been included at PS1, MASS MoCA, the Generali Foundation, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA LA, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants, including those from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim, the Rockefeller, California Community Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, a COLA Artist Fellowship and most recently from the Center for Cultural Innovation. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the internet at CalArts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana . She lives in Los Angeles where she is co-Director of the Photography & Media Program in the Art School at CalArts. http://bookchin.net/

Josephine Bosma is a writer and critic. She publishes interviews, reviews and texts in various books and magazines, both on and offline, since 1996. Her work mostly focuses on net art, sound art and net culture. Josephine is the next author to publish as part of the Institute of Network Cultures’ Studies in Network Cultures book series with her forthcoming publication, Nettitudes: On a journey through net art (April 2011). Josephine Bosma lives and works in Amsterdam. http://www.laudanum.net/cream/definition.html, http://laudanum.net/bosma


Maarten Brinkerink works as a project manager in the R&D department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He holds an MA in New Media and Digital Culture from Utrecht University, and specializes in the distribution of cultural content using digital media. He is an open content enthusiast, amateur content producer and musician. At Sound and Vision he lead the Open Images project, an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse. In his spare time Maarten is a board member of the Dutch Wikimedia Chapter, where he coordinates collaborations with GLAM-institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). http://maartenbrinkerink.net/

Vito Campanelli lectures on the theory and technology of mass communication at the University of Naples-L’Orientale. He is a freelance curator of digital culture events and co-founder of MAO – Media & Arts Office. His essays on media art are regularly published in international journals. His most recent publication Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society was published as part of the INC’s Studies in Network Cultures series.(Institute of Network Cultures of Amsterdam/NAi Publishers Rotterdam, 2010). http://www.vitocampanelli.it/


Andrew Clay is Principal Lecturer in Critical Technical Practices in the Department of Media Technology at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, and has published articles on crime and masculinity in British cinema. He is currently researching and publishing on the theory and practice of online film with particular reference to YouTube social media sharing practices and new media developments such as open source cinema and post-television web video. He has adopted a number of social media tools in teaching and explores the pedagogical potential for hands-on experience of digital technologies in the study of media technology.


Dagan Cohen studied environmental art at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He worked as a visual artist and creative entrepreneur before joining advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi in 1995 as art director. Fascinated by the impact of the Internet on how we communicate, he shifted his focus from mass media to interactive media working as creative director for a number of advertising and marketing companies before becoming executive creative director of Draftfcb Netherlands in 2006. He has won numerous national and international awards for interactive projects, including two Cannes Cyber Lions. Besides his work in advertising, Dagan teaches occasionally at the Rietveld Academy and is director of Upload Cinema, an organization that brings the best videos of the web to the big screen.


Florian Cramer, born in 1969, is director of the Piet Zwart Institute and head of the research programme Communication in a Digital Age at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, Netherlands.


Patrícia Dias da Silva is a PhD Fellow in Social Sciences at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and a member of LabCMO, Université du Québec à Montréal. She received her BA in Communication Studies from the New University of Lisbon, and her MA in Communication, Culture and Information Technologies from ISCTE-IUL, a Portuguese institute reputed for its research centers. After undertaking a more policy-oriented research on citizen engagement and information and communication technologies, her current work focuses on participation practices regarding online video, and YouTube in particular, both bottom-up and top-down. She is also currently collaborating in international research projects dedicated to the social studies of technology, focusing mainly on online public participation.


Constant Dullaart, born in 1979 in the Netherlands, is a Berlin-based artist/curator who works primarily on and with the world wide web. During his residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam he curated several events in the surrounding city, such as the periodically held Lost and Found evenings (with his final event in the New Museum, NYC), Contemporary Semantics Beta in Arti et Amicitiae, and Versions in NIMk (Netherlands Media Art Institute). His work is shown internationally in places such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Art in General and MWNM galleries in New York, the ICA in London, and NIMk, de Appel, W139, the Stedelijk Museum, Ellen de Bruijne projects, and Gallery West in the Netherlands. Dullaart lives/works in Berlin and Amsterdam. http://www.constantdullaart.com/


Arjon Dunnewind studied at the Utrecht School of Arts. In 1988 he organized the first Impakt Festival, which has since grown into a full-sized organisation that runs multiple programmes related to media art, with Dunnewind as the festival director and artistic director. Apart from Impakt, Arjon produced KabelKunst and Vizir, TV series about video art and experimental film from 1994 till 1997, and has curated programmes and exhibitions for places such as Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires in Argentina. He worked as an advisor for the Dutch Film Fund in the Research & Development department, and is now an advisor to the TAX fund for innovative music videos. He regularly gives guest lectures at Dutch art academies and is an experienced member of juries at festivals and events.


Sandra Fauconnier (1973) is an art historian specialised in (new) media art. She holds an MA in Art History from Ghent University, Belgium, graduating with a thesis about internet art (1997). She first worked as an educational technologist at Ghent University. Since 2000, she has been involved in several media art archives and collections. She was archivist for V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media until 2007, responsible for the development of metadata models and terminology resources for V2_’s media art documentation. Sandra currently works for the collection and mediatheque of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, where she describes NIMk’s distribution collection and works on terminology and dissemination. She also regularly writes and lectures about media art.


Carlos García Moreno-Torres is an intern at the Institute of Network Cultures, focusing on production and communication, particularly around the Video Vortex project. He was born in Granada and studied at Universidad Europea de Madrid obtaining a degree in technical engineering in telecommunications (specializing in sound and image). His current adventure takes him to Amsterdam where he is about to complete a 5-year degree in audiovisual communication, and has been involved with Urban screens projects of the MediaLAB including the U-turm project.


Sam Gregory is the Program Director at WITNESS, the leading global organization training and supporting people to use video in human rights advocacy. He has worked extensively with human rights activists, particularly in Latin America and Asia, integrating video into impactful campaigns. In 2005, he was lead editor of “Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism” (Pluto Press), and is currently leading WITNESS’ ‘Cameras Everywhere’ initiative on ubiquitous video. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, from where he graduated with a Master’s in Public Policy. He was formerly on the Advisory Board of the Tactical Technology Collective, and is on the Advisory Board of Games for Change.


Mél Hogan is currently completing her research creation doctorate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Her research documents defunct, stalled, and crashed online video art repositories within a Canadian cultural context. Hogan is part two of two of the BRUCE video art duo, and a media activist. She is the founder of nomorepotlucks.org and sound technician and co-host for the radio show Dykes on Mykes. Hogan is also on the Board of Studio XX.  www.melhogan.com


Nuraini Juliastuti is a co-founder and director of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, an organization concerned with experimental approaches to cultural issues and advancing them into a wider critical movement through popular education practices. She lives and works in Yogyakarta.


As a toddler, Ashiq Jahan Khondker was often left unattended in the computer labs of the University of Pittsburgh, where he drew pictures of Batman with a turtle, on Dr. Logo. He has since been based in Singapore, Santa Cruz, CA, New Brunswick, NJ, Philadelphia and New York City, leaving behind a cookie-crumb trail of various works of light, sound and language. He is currently a New Media Master’s student at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and contributes regularly to the program’s research blog.

Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker, living in LALALand – home of stars, dreams, 3D movies, and leathery orange skin. His interests are rooted in TODAY’S problems: short battery-life, bad reception, premature cyber-ejaculation, slow load times, “this economy,” faulty renders, AMERIKA, superstitions, et al. His previous features are 0s & 1s and Skydiver. He is currently working on a melodramatic reenactment of the struggle to hold onto his classic, 1990 Honda Accord; it is called Smog Days.


Koen Leurs is a PhD student in Gender Studies at the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University (NL). He holds a master’s degree in Media Studies from Utrecht University with a minor from the National University of Singapore. He participates in the interdisciplinary project Wired Up, Digital Media as Innovative Socialization Practices for Migrant Youth. His dissertation addresses how Dutch-Moroccan migrant youth use digital media to create a space of their own at the crossroads of cultures of origin, glocal youth cultures, and cultures of immigration. He also works on issues of education and knowledge for the MIG@NET, Transnational Digital Networks, Migration and Gender project. His research is informed by feminist technoscience, new media theory, postcolonial/intersectional thinking and mixed methodologies.


Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007). http://networkcultures.org/geert


Andrew Lowenthal is the co-founder and General Manager of EngageMedia, a video sharing, free software and skills building initiative focused on social justice and environmental issues in the Asia Pacific. Andrew has been working in the field of media and technology activism since 1998. He got started with video activists Access News in the late nineties before working with Melbourne Indymedia for six years. From 2006-08 he worked with the UK based Tactical Technology Collective as their participatory media project lead, editing the NGO-in-a-box series of free software packages and the more recent Message-in-a-box.


Born in Germany, Anja Masling now lives and works in Amsterdam. She works with video and sound, graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Audiovisual Arts in 2004 and finishing her Master of Fine Arts degreet at the the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2006. Currently she works on different video art projects and with photography. http://www.anjamasling.de


Rachel Somers Miles
works on projects and publications for the Institute of Network Cultures. She moved from Toronto to Amsterdam in 2008 to attend the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Master’s program at the University of Amsterdam, solidifying her interest in the theory and politics of archiving, and continuing to stoke her interest and involvement in (new) media arts/digital culture. She also obtained a Master’s degree in Media Studies from Concordia University, Montréal. Exploring the different media arts and digital culture hubs of the Amsterdam-area, Rachel was an intern and then employee of the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) in the preservation and collections department, and also worked at Virtueel Platform as a researcher for ‘Project Observatory’.


Ben Moskowitz works for the Mozilla Foundation and is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He served as the director of the Open Video Conference and led the 2009-2010 iCommons video policy project.


Sabine Niederer works as the managing director of the Institute of Network Cultures, a new media research centre based at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Department of Interactive Media. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies, as part of the Digital Methods Initiative. She has taught media and design theory and produced various international conferences focusing on new media. Niederer has co-edited the Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (2008), and the Urban Screens Reader (2009) and is the curator of new media art project Impakt Online.


Merijn Oudenampsen is a freelance researcher. His main research interest is Dutch populism. Till 2009 he was connected to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, investigating populism as part of the project Design Negation. At the moment he is working on a book on populism and symbolic politics. He studied political science and sociology at the UvA in Amsterdam, has written and still writes regularly on the politics of urban development and has been involved in organising several conferences and initiatives around flexbilisation.


Joanne Richardson, born in Bucharest, Romania, is a video artist and media theorist working at the borders of documentary film, visual art and political activism. She is the editor of a webzine on media activism and of two books on digital culture. She has written essays on the history of the avant-gardes, experimental film and video, net.art, tactical media, free software, intellectual property and the myth of authorship. Her videos reflect an ongoing interest in globalization, nationalism and post-communism, and manifest a critical perspective toward the status of documents, history, and memory. Her work has been presented at the Moscow Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Transmediale, Next 5 Minutes, Neuro Festival, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Hartware Medienkunst, MACBA, Rotor, Ludwig Museum. http://subsol.c3.hu/joanne/home.html


Margreet Riphagen has been project manager at the Institute of Network Cultures since August 2008 and organized Winter Camp 09, Society of the Query and the Wikipedia event. She graduated in 2000 in Integrated Communication Management at the Hogeschool of Utrecht. She worked as a producer at Waag Society for four years. After she worked at Blender, a 3D open source animation suite. For Blender, she was co-producer of Big Buck Bunny (Peach open movie project) and produced an open game. Aside from working as project manager at the INC, she now coaches Interactive Media students at Amsterdam University of Applied Science and teaches the topic Design research. Margreet Riphagen is also involved in MediaLAB Amsterdam, a creative, interdisciplinary work- place where inquisitive students and researchers collaborate on innovative interactive media ideas.


Evan Roth is an artist and researcher based in Paris. His notable projects include L.A.S.E.R. Tag and LED Throwies (Graffiti Research Lab), White Glove Tracking, EyeWriter, Graffiti Analysis and a collaboration with Jay-Z on the first open source rap video. Roth’s work is in the permanent collection of the MoMA (NYC) and has been exhibited widely in the Americas, Europe and Asia, including the Pompidou (Paris), the Kunsthalle (Vienna), the Tate (London), the Fondation Cartier (Paris) and the front page of Youtube. Roth is co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab), a web based, open source research and development lab. To find Roth’s work online, just google “bad ass mother fucker”.


Bart Rutten is an art historian, specializing in film and video art. Since 2008 collection he is curator for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was part of the content team of The Temporary Stedelijk. Before that, Rutten worked at the Stedelijk Museum of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, from 2005-2008, where he curated sev-eral group shows and solo’s, and at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk, formally known as Montevideo), from 1998-2005, as head of the presentation department. In addition to his position at the Stedelijk he is a member of several advisory boards, among which the One Minute Foundation. Rutten was also guest lecturer on the subject of the history of video art at several art schools and universi- ties in the Netherlands and abroad and hosts a monthly television item on contemporary art for national television (for the AVRO).


Born in 1967 in Munich, Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, media artist and activist. As a curator, he is concerned with film, documentary formats, and the potential of networked environments. His works always stands in a political context. His central interest lies in transgressing boundaries – between mainstream and independent media, art and activism, theory and open-source technology. Most recently, he initiated and co-curated the multimedia performance project “Dictionary of War” (2005-present). In 2010 he was one of the co-curators of the first edition of the Berlin Documentary Forum. He teaches theory at the Art Academy at the NTNU Trondheim and is an advising researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. At Goldsmiths College, he is working on a doctoral project on the subject “Imaginary Property”.


Teague Schneiter is a media archivist and researcher whose work bridges online video, human rights, and moving image archiving. She is currently working as an Outreach/Archives Consultant for IsumaTV, an online interactive network for Inuit and Indigenous multimedia. Teague completed her Professional MA in Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam in 2010 graduating cum laude with a minor thesis examining the ethics and politics of the presentation of indigenous media online. Before IsumaTV, she worked within the Media Archive and participatory media website (The Hub) for WITNESS, an international human rights video-advocacy organization.


Catrien Schreuder is an art historian and senior educator at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, where she is responsible for the interpretive materials for exhibitions and collections presentations. These materials include wall texts and labels, but also multimedia tours and most recently ArtTube, the museum’s web video channel launched in 2009. For ArtTube she has been involved in concept development, as well as content production as a member of the editing board. As a representative of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, she is part of the Culture Vortex research project of the Institute of Network Cultures. Catrien is also active as an independent art history researcher and writer specialized in post 1960s new media arts. In 2010 she published the book Pixels and Places about video art in public space.


Dr. Strangelove has been writing about the internet since 1990. From an early interest in the internet as a vehicle for scholarly publishing, to founding an internet publishing company in 1993, to writing the world’s first book about internet advertising, to more recent academic books on digital cultural production, Strangelove has explored the internet’s expansion of communicative freedom across a variety of fields. He has played the role of entrepreneur, visual artist, amateur videographer, part-time professor, and occasional new media guru. http://www.strangelove.com/blog/


Ferdiansyah Thajib is a researcher at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His subject interests cover media-technology convergence, anthropology of emotion, and critical sexuality studies. In the recent past he co-organized the local holding of Q! Film Festival in Yogyakarta, and has also collaborated in various projects such as working with EngageMedia as one of the field researchers for the Videochronic publication.


Annelies Termeer works as a project coordinator in the Digital Presentation department of EYE Film Institute Netherlands. She joined EYE (then the Netherlands Filmmuseum) in 2008 in the Communication department and gradually shifted focus towards the web. She now manages several projects that open up EYE’s beautiful film collection online, like Instant Cinema, Celluloid Remix and The Scene Machine. Before EYE, Termeer worked in film production, as press officer at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and as co-director of the Museum Night Amsterdam (n8). Besides her work at EYE, she occasionally writes freelance on new media, art and travel. She holds an MA in Film Studies from the University of Amsterdam.


Andreas Treske is an editor, filmmaker, and media artist living in Turkey. He graduated from the Munich Film Academy, Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film. From 1992 to 1998 he was creative art staff at HFF Munich, with extensive research on applied aesthetics for cinema and TV. From 1998 to 2010 he taught at the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University, Ankara, in film and video production and new media theory, acting as department chair from 2005 to 2010. Since the summer of 2010 he is Assistant Professor at Yasar University in Izmir, Turkey. He’s shown his interactive media works and films at various international exhibitions and festivals, and co-directed the feature length documentary Takim boyle tutulur (Autumn 2005), shown in more than 50 Turkish cinemas. In 2008 he was picture editor of the feature length documentary “Mustafa”, directed by Can Dündar, and organizer of the 3rd Video Vortex conference, in Ankara. http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~treske/


Described once as “frustratingly engaging”, artist Matthew Williamson examines the cohesion between the internet and so-called ‘real life’. While working in a broad range of formats from print to video, websites to electronics, his work is focused on the humorous relationships we forge with our machines. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design and MFA candidate at Syracuse University, Williamson has shown work in Italy, the U.S.A and Canada. http://matthew-williamson.com/


Holmes Wilson is a free software creator and activist for decentralized media distribution. In 2003 he co-founded Downhill Battle, a music activism campaign to remove the major record labels and create a bottom-up music culture. In 2005, Wilson and the Downhill Battle team founded Participatory Culture Foundation to build software for free, open, decentralized video distribution. Their flagship product Miro is a free software, bittorrent-enabled media player with over 9 million downloads. Their new project, Universal Subtitles, aims to make every video on the net subtitle-able by volunteers and enable subtitle lookup/sharing across sites and media players. Holmes is also a co-founder of the open government project Participatory Politics.


Trained as graphic designer Roel Wouters (The Netherlands, Haarlem, 1976), works as an independent designer/director in the field of interaction, media design and film. His interests lie in technological developments that change our media into fluid digital environments and finding design solutions for it. He applies the approach of designing environments, conditions and tools to all kinds of media including dynamic media (web, tools, animation and video) but also to print, installations and performances. Together with Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Edo Paulus he has authored the Conditional Design Manifesto, a manifesto that promotes the idea of designing conditions rather than end results. http://www.xelor.nl

Emile Zile is an artist and filmmaker engaged with the tension between reality and its mediation, the self and its representation, and language and its mutation. Building on a background of single-channel and performative video art, his current research focuses on photographic portraiture with contemporary image-making techniques, site-specific audiovisual performance and the use of the internet as a site for mourning, transgression and revelation. His body of work reflects a bleak humanism and dark wit, in the face of an ever-accelerating culture of image consumption and distribution. Emile received a BFA degree from RMIT Media Arts Melbourne before relocating to Amsterdam in 2007 to commence a MFA degree at the Sandberg Institute. Recent exhibitions and performances include Bring Your Own Beamer Berlin and Athens, Rojo Nova Audiovisual Sessions Sao Paulo Brazil, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Palais Paradiso Amsterdam, F.E.A.V.S. Osaka Japan, Today’s Art Festival The Hague, and the Rietveld Arsenale – 53rd Venice Biennale. http://emilezile.com, http://eurodisney.biz