Biographies

Gülsen Bal
Gülsen Bal (was born in İzmir, Turkey) is based in London and Vienna. Bal, the founder of Open Space, aims to create facilities for contemporary creative practice concerned with contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new approach with its visual arts and educational program. She has also recently developed a new program Critical and Curatorial Investigations for Masters Degree at TU Wien. Bal has exhibited, curated, published articles and participated in talks in various places and venues in the U.K. as well as in Europe and Turkey.
http://www.art-axis.org/

Caterina Davinio
Caterina Davinio, writer and multimedia artist, Caterina Davinio is a pioneer of Italian digital art and computer poetry in 1990. Creator in 1998 of Italian “Net-poetry” with the web site Karenina.it, an experimental on line/ off line project that combines together art, poetry, criticism, and telemathic communication as material of art. Her work refers to Fluxus, Situationism, happening, and concrete poetry. Her projects have been exhibited in many countries, several times in the Venice Biennale (since 1997). Other exhibitions: Athens Biennial (2007), Biennale of Sidney (Online Venue 2008), Biennales de Lion (1999 and International Kiosk 2007), Biennale de Paris (2004). Caterina Davinio operates in numerous fields of experimental art, such as: video, computer art (still and animated), digital visual poetry, digital photography, on line performances and events, computer printings. Among her publications: Color color (novel, Campanotto, Pasian di Prato – UD, 1998), Techno-Poetry and Virtual Reality (It – Engl., essay, Sometti, Mantova, 2002).
http://xoomer.alice.it/cprezi/caterinadav.html

Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at Aalborg University and an interaction designer at Hoist where he creates online collaboration software. Andreas created his first video commenting system in 2004. In his spare time, he likes to escape the computer world by taking photographs with vintage 35mm cameras.
http://www.solitude.dk

Kylie Jarrett
Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia at the Centre for Media Studies, responsible for teaching modules on digital media and research skills, as well as for coordinating the Multimedia degree. Her research interest is critical analysis of commercial digital media, in particular those emerging forms referred to as Web 2.0. Her doctoral study investigated the discourse of consumer empowerment in the field of e-commerce, using semiotics and sociolinguistics to explore this representation. Since completing her doctorate at the University of South Australia in 2003, she has used aspects of this method to analyse other commercial websites such as eBay and YouTube.

Sarah Kesenne
Sarah Kesenne is an art historian working in Brussels for a documentary platform www.soundimageculture.org. She teaches art theory courses in a Belgian art academy in Hasselt (BE) and at Delft University (NL).

Mehmet Ali Köksal
Mehmet Ali Köksal is a lawyer and legal expert in Information Communication Technologies. He is interested in legal issues regarding digital environment and working at Köksal & Genc law firm. Köksal is a board member of Turkish Informatics Association.

Martin Koplin
Martin Koplin is director of the M2C Institute for Applied Media Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Bremen, Germany, that was founded in 2007. He worked as media artist and as a scientific researcher in the field of digital media and eCulture. He works on mobile media research and development projects. He studied Media Communication, Cultural Studies, European Labour Sciences and Fine Arts in Bremen, has two M.A.s. Koplin is working his PhD in Computer Sciences “The Actual-Visual / The Virtual-Concrete / The Performative-Spacual”.
http://m2c-bremen.de/
http://netzspannung.org/cat/servlet/CatServlet?lang=de

Michael Liegl
Michael Liegl teaches Sociology and Gender Studies at University of Mainz. His areas of interest are in Urban Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Gender Studies, the Sociology of Music, and Qualitative Research Methods. In 2008 he completed and defended a PhD with the title: Share(ing): The urban creative self and the dispositifs of community. An ethnographic study on technologic and acoustic sociation after the Internet.
http://www.soziologie.uni-mainz.de/FB02/hirschauer/171.php

Dan Oki
Dan Oki is Croatian/Dutch visual artist and a filmmaker. In his work he works with mediums of film and video, installation, computer art, web and performance.  He has been teaching video and computer art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Split and has been guest lecturer at various Institutes and Art Academies in Europe. His works have been shown in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Oki lives in Amsterdam and Split.
http://www.videopool.org/catalogue/artists/?id=265

Aras Özgün
Aras Özgün is a media scholar/artist living in New York. He studied political sciences and sociology in Ankara and media studies in New York. He is now teaching graduate courses related with media theory and digital media practices at Media Studies Department of The New School. He produced many experimental video and digital media works.
http://www.pyromedia.org/smoke/?page_id=21

Dominic Pettman
Dominic Pettman is an Associate Professor in the Culture and Media Department, Eugene Lang College, New School for the Liberal Arts. He has previously taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Geneva, the University of Amsterdam, and the Integrated Digital Media Institute, Brooklyn Polytechnic. He is the author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (SUNY, 2002), Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (AUP, 2004 – with Justin Clemens), and Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (Fordham, 2006).
http://www.blackjelly.com/pettman

Başak Şenova
Başak Şenova is a curator and designer based in Istanbul. She has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing national and international projects and curating exhibitions. She is the editor of art-ist 6, Kontrol Online Magazine and one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of ctrl_alt_del and Upgrade!Istanbul. Currently, she is lecturing at the Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University. She has recently appointed as the curator of the Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009.
http://nomad-tv.net/bs_pub.html

Brittany Shoot
Brittany Shoot is an American writer and media consultant based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has an MA in Visual and Media Arts from Emerson College and co-curates online video projects including art collective DVblog.org and the Lumiere video project.
http://dvblog.org
http://videoblogging.info

Vera Tollmann
Vera Tollmann (1976) lives in Berlin, and works as an independent curator and writer. Vera studied Cultural Studies in Hildesheim and Liverpool. She worked as a researcher for the Video Vortex conference which took place in January 2008 in Amsterdam. Her recent exhibitions are: Your latest trick at JET, Berlin and Nachvollziehungsangebote (Comprehensive Offerings, with Sophie Goltz) at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna in 2007, Katastrophenalarm (Catastrophe alert, with Sophie Goltz, Christine Heidemann, Anne Kersten, Ingo Vetter) at NGBK, Berlin in 2008 and Talkmasters [Screening Programme with video art on YouTube] at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe in July.
http://www.transmediale.de/en/node/1018
http://www.vimeo.com/3719942

Michael Verdi
Michael Verdi has been heavily involved in the development and evangelism of videoblogging since 2004. He is the co-author of Secrets of Videoblogging and co-creator of the videoblogging tutorial site, Freevlog.org. In addition he was one of the organizers of Vloggercon, a videoblogging conference; Have Money Will Vlog, a community funding experiment; Show In A Box, a videoblogging community focused on advanced blog and video technology; and NODE101, an open source media center. He has extensive experience working with teams distributed around the world including the citizen journalism project Alive In Baghdad. Michael maintains his personal videoblog a www.michaelverdi.com and he blogs about virtual worlds, filmmaking, machinima, video and related technology at reports.graymattergravy.com. Currently he is a Creative Director at Millions of Us, a company that specializes immersive brand marketing through virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and social media.