map me if you will seminar – presenters’ bios

Baruch Gottlieb is a Canadian artist and researcher living in Berlin. Trained as a filmmaker, Gottlieb’s work -theoretically, speculatively and practically- explores ground principles of the materiality of digital media, the materiality with which all digital media may be made, taking diverse and convergent forms such as: permanent and ephemeral public installations, stage and public performance, writing and video.
http://g4t.info
http://gratfortech.blogspot.com
http://i-mine.org

Graham Harwood (UK) is a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London; he has lived and worked together with Matsuko Yokokoji since 1994. Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa) were co-founders of ‘Mongrel’ (1996-2007) –an artist group whose pioneering projects usually combined working with marginalized peoples and cultural minorities. YoHa’s graphic vision, technical tinkering, has powered several celebrated collaborations; in 2008 along with Richard Wright they produced ‘Tantalum Memorial’, a telephony based memorial to the people who have died as a result of the coltan wars in Congo (Transmediale’s First Prize, 2009). Continuing to articulate the relations between power, art and media, YoHa produced ‘Coal Fired Computers’ in 2010 with Jean Demars for AV Festival and the Discovery Museum. The work responded to the displacement of coal production to distant lands like India and China after the UK miners’ strike in 1984/85 and the complexities of our reliance on fossil fuel and especially on how coal transforms our health as we have transformed it. YoHa’s current activity involves research initiative into potential uses of National Health Service datasets for collaborative art project that reflect on wellbeing and open data as new technologies of power.
http://yoha.co.uk
http://mongrel.org.uk
http://mediashed.org
http://scotoma.org

Kari A. Hintikka (FI) is an Internet researcher, foresighter, concept designer and occasional Internet artist. He joined the Net subcultures in the late 1980′s and since then he has participated in the organization of several digital media festivals in Finland, including ISEA’94 and MuuMedia; has made and participated in several interactive Internet artworks, including Nettielämää (1996) and Hakut naulaan -websodic (2000). Hintikka has published over twenty books and reports; his newest collaborative publications are ‘Open Data Guide’ (in Finnish, 2010) and ‘Somus -research report’ (2011). He is working on his PhD thesis about collective intelligence and netcrowds at the University of Jyväskylä, and his current project is composing industrial spagetti-western music.
http://www.ubiq.fi
http://www.julkinendata.fi

Brian Holmes is a freelance art and cultural critic living in Paris and Chicago. He completed a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, was the English editor of publications for Documenta X in 1997, then got involved in the counter-globalization movements and collaborated with activist-artists such as ‘Ne Pas Plier’, ‘Bureau d’Études’, ‘Makrolab’, ‘Hackitectura’ and the ’16 Beaver Group’ -where he and Claire Pentecost staged a series of self-organized seminars on art and geopolitics under the name ‘Continental Drift’. In Chicago he works with a collective of artists and researchers known as ‘The Compass’, dedicated to exploring the “Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.” In Los Angeles he has recently collaborated with a self-organized education project called ‘The Public School’, for seminars devoted to the University of California budget crisis. Over the past fifteen years Holmes has been a contributor in both French and English to a large number of web venues, artists’ publications, exhibition catalogues, magazines and journals including Multitudes, Springerin and Open. He lectures in museums, universities and self-organized spaces across Europe and the Americas. He is the author of three books: ‘Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art & Politics in a Networked Era’ (Zagreb: WHW, 2002); ‘Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering’ (New York: Autonomedia, 2007); and ‘Escape The Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society’ (Eindhoven and Zagreb: Vanabbemuseum/WHW, 2009). He was awarded the Vilém Flusser Prize for Theory at Transmediale in Berlin in 2009.
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com

Theun Karelse (NL) has been a member of FoAM since 2005 and is the initiator of Boskoi and IforAE. He has been projecting (wildly and mildly) speculative ideas on paper since birth. From an early interest in theoretical physics, perception and superpowers he followed a trajectory passing through the fields of hagiography with a drawn guide to levitating christian saints, a study of proprioception in the context of geometrical physics, and research into the history Paleolithic media and of wearable safety solutions. Within FoAM, Theun has been active as an illustrator, food designer, prototyper and taker of naps.
http://fo.am/boskoi
http://www.boskoi.org
http://augmentedecology.posterous.com
http://boskoi.posterous.com/

Primož Kovačič (SL/KE) holds a MSc of Geodesy/Surveying and Geoinformation, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has been working with Map Kibera, Kenya, on participatory mapping projects for the past year. Currently he is leading a participatory mapping and citizen journalism programs in Mathare, Kenya, and working on sustainability and organizational development of the programs in Kibera.
http://mappingnobigdeal.wordpress.com/
http://www.mapkibera.org

Alessandro Ludovico (IT) is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine since 1993. He is co-founder of the ‘Mag.Net’ (Electronic Cultural Publishers organization), has worked as an advisor for the Documenta 12′s Magazine Project, and has ben guest researcher at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Ludovico currently teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara, Italy.
http://www.face-to-facebook.net
http://www.neural.it

Tapio Mäkelä (FI) is a researcher and a media artist based in Manchester, UK and Helsinki, Finland. He is currently an AHRC Research Fellow with department of Creative Technology, School of Art and Design, University of Salford. He is researching social and cultural uses of location based media and environmental interaction and information design. His latest project is Ecocaching, a locative game exploring ecology in cities. Mäkelä is also a co-founder of Marin Association and M.A.R.I.N. (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network), an art, science and ecology research residency and network initiative.
http://tapio.translocal.net

Christian Nold (UK) is an artist, designer and educator working to develop new participatory models and technologies for communal representation. In 2001 he wrote the book ‘Mobile Vulgus’, which examined the psychosomatic history of the political crowd. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2004, Nold has led many large-scale  participatory mapping  projects; in particular his “Bio Mapping” project has been staged in sixteen different countries with more than 1500 workshop participants. In 2009, he edited the book “Emotional Cartography – Technologies of the Self.” For the last six years, Nold has been developing an extensive tool-kit of technologies that blend together human and non-human sensors for local governance. His recent project, launched in 2010, revolves around the ‘Bijlmer Euro’, an experimental currency  which allows people to follow where their money move.
http://www.softhook.com
http://www.bijlmereuro.net

Rybn.org is a multi-field artistic collective based in Paris/Berlin (2000) and specialized in interactive & networked installations, performances and interfaces, by refering as well to the codified systems of the artistic representation (painting, architecture, counter-cultures) as to the human and physic phenomenas (geopolitics, socio-economy, sensory perception, cognitive systems). Their axis of research: the construction of “convergence semantics” through the coupling, the diversion and the perversion of writing and formalization tools connected to communication, information and sensory technologies – networks, data flows, smell, surveillance, audiovisual, interaction, real time.
http://www.rybn.org
http://www.antidatamining.net
http://www.imal.org/StockOverflow/

Wouter Van den Broeck (BE) has been interest in the obscure yet inspiring borderland where art, science and technology meet. During the early nineties he concentrated on the intersection of art and technology, designing and developing the visual and interactive aspects of digital media projects. He founded and ran his own new-media design studio for many years, participated in various artistic projects and gradually developed a fascination for the art of programming. Wouter pursued a Master in Computer Science at the Free University in Brussels in order to refocus on science and technology, after which he joined the language team at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. His research there primarily dealt with the representation, interpretation and conceptualization of meaning by artificial agents with emergent language skills. In 2008 Wouter seized the opportunity to join a team of top-notch physicists interested in complex networks at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy; it was here that his diverse interests and hitherto acquired skills converged, as the design and development of dynamic visualizations of complex phenomena became his specialty, and he increasingly journeyed other parts of that borderland where art, science and technology meet.
http://www.addith.be
http://www.sociopatterns.org
http://www.gleamviz.org

Moderated by:

Dr. Susanne Jaschko (DE), a Berlin based independent curator, author and lecturer. Between March 2008 and May 2009, she was head of presentation and of the artist in residence program at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. From 1997 – 2004 Jaschko was curator, then deputy director of the transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. Next to her curatorial work she has taught on an academic level in Germany and abroad. She regularly speaks at conferences and publishes on themes related to her curatorial practice. She studied art history, history of architecture and linguistics at the RWTH Aachen, Germany. Her doctorate thesis dealt with self-portraiture and self-understanding in GDR painting between 1949 and the 1980s.

Giovanna Esposito Yussif (MX) works as an independent curator an is currently based in Helsinki.