THE ART WORK IS NEVER FINISHED
Lena Henningsen works as junior professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Freiburg University. She received her education in Chinese Studies, Political Science and Musicology at Humboldt-University (Berlin), Nanjing Normal University (PR China) and Heidelberg. Her PhD thesis is devoted to an analysis of issues of plagiarism (and the fight against it) in the current literary field (see: Copyright Matters: Imitation, Creativity and Authenticity in Contemporary Chinese Literature, Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010, and „Reich der Fälscher – oder Land der Kreativen? Der chinesische Buchmarkt und (globale) Phänomene der Kreativität“, in: Orientierungen 1/2009, 34-58).
Dirk von Gehlen works as an editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich/Germany. His first book „Mashup – Praise of copying“ was published (in german) in the year 2011. „A new version is avialable“ continues the analysis of the digital copy and its outcome. You can follow him on @dvg at twitter and read his blog von digitale-notizen.de
Inke Arns, curator and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam and obtained her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has curated many exhibitions, has been teaching at universities and art academies, and has lectured and published internationally. Books include Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) – eine Analyse ihrer künstlerischen Strategien im Kontext der 1980er Jahre in Jugoslawien (2002), Netzkulturen (2002), Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel (2004). www.inkearns.de.
POLITICS OF SHARING
Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has co-produced the 3-hour TV documentary Technocalyps with Frank Theys, and co-edited the two-volume book on anthropology of digital society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is currently Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Michel Bauwens is a member of the Board of the Union of International Associations (Brussels), advisor to Shareable magazine (San Francisco) and to Zumbara Time Bank (Istanbul); and scientific advisor to the „Association Les Rencontres du Mont-Blanc, Forum International des Dirigeants de l’Economie Sociale et Solidaire“ (2013-). He functions as the Chair of the Technology/ICT working group, Hangwa Forum (Beijing, Sichuan), to develop economic policies for long-term resilience, including through distributed manufacturing.
R. Trebor Scholz is Associate Professor for Culture and Media at The New School in NYC. Scholz is the editor of several collections of essays including Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, 2012). In 2011, he authored, with Laura Y. Liu, From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City. With Omar Khan and Mark Shepard, he edited the Situated Technologies series of 9 books and, with Geert Lovink, The Art of Free Cooperation (Autonomedia, 2007). His forthcoming monograph with Polity offers a history of the Social Web and its Orwellian economies. Scholz frequently lectures at conferences and festivals and chaired major conferences, including the Internet as Playground and Factory and MobilityShifts (http://mobilityshifts.org). He is the founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity known for its online discussions of critical network culture.
Brigitte Kratzwald is a social scientist and commons activist dealing with the currently arising new forms of collective production and bottom-up strategies of reorganizing the society in a way conducive to both, human beings and our non human environment. She holds lectures and workshops about related issues and published several articles about commons. She is part of the organizing teams of events dealing with social transformation, e.g. the second German Commons Summer School in Thüringen or the Elevate Festival in Graz. She blogs on http://kratzwald.wordpress.com and runs the website http://www.commons.at.
FUNDING THE COMMONS
Olivier Schulbaum realizes projects, where the social uses of ICTs and networking are applied to enhance communication, self-training, social entrepreneurship, and citizens organisation. His work with platoniq has been presented at innovation congresses and digital culture festivals and have been set off in organisations such as the Basque Mondragon Coop and several educational spaces around Europe, Asia and Latin America. Co-Initiator of Bank of Common Knowledge, Youcoop.org, Burnstation, open crowdfunding platform goteo.org…
Philippe Aigrain is a computer scientist and an analyst of the political, economic and cultural stakes of information technology and knowledge governance. He is the CEO of Sopinspace, a company developing free software tools and services for collaboration and participatory democracy. Dr Aigrain is one of the founders of La Quadrature du Net. He is the author of several books and many papers on intellectual rights, digital cultures and the relationship between commons and the economy. His last book, is „Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age“, Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
ZOE.LEELA is fascinated with the creative energy and cultural freedom within the digital sphere. With the strong conviction that creativity is there for everyone, ZOE.LEELA decided to release her debut EP Queendom Come for free on the Cologne-based internet label Rec72.net. Foregoing the stress and limitations of dealing with major labels and distribution, her release made a splash. In her debut album „Digital Guilt“ ZOE.LEELA preferred the use of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license: One can buy the album as a CD or download it and then – non-commercial use provided – share with friends use it in videos or even mix and remix it. ZOE.LEELA strongly criticises a tightening of copyright laws.
NEW COLLECTIVE AUTHORSHIP
Ewen Chardronnet, is an author, artist, film maker and curator based in Brittany, France. He has been engaged in various collaborative art & research works such as Bureau d’Etudes, Makrolab, Spectral Investigations Collective or World-Information.Org. He published in 2001 „Quitter la Gravité„, the french anthology on the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. In 2003, he received with the Acoustic Space Lab collective the Leonardo New Horizons Award for their project around the conversion of a former soviet giant radiotelescope in Latvia. Ewen Chardronnet is published in many books and publications and is co-founder of the science & technology philosophical journal, The Laboratory Planet. He’s been involved in several performance art projects with Soopa Collective and others. He’s currently working on a series of book publications with architecture & art publishing house HYX (editions-hyx.com) and is involved in directing essay films.
Jonathan Uliel Saldanha is a researcher and composer and a founding member of the art and music platform SOOPA, a visual and sound laboratory as well as cultural producer based in Porto, curating sound and music cycles since 1999. Uliel operates sonically in the projects HHY & The Macumbas, U.S.S., Fujako, and Mécanosphère, among others and develops theatre sound projects under the name Beast Box having. In 2012 he co-curated the program SONORES – sound/space/signal for Guimarães European Capital of Culture. Under his own name or with other formations Uliel shares projects and has performed with: Raz Mesinai (Badawi), Steve Mackay (The Stooges), Mike Watt, Adrian Sherwood, Rafael Toral, DJ Scotch Egg and countless others.
Femke Snelting is an artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is member of Constant, a Brussels based association for Art and Media. Femke co-initiated the design- and research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and is currently coordinating the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a network of four European medialabs that investigates the many interrelations between tools and practice. In this context, she collaborates with Medialab Prado (Madrid) on the 2013 edition of Interactivos?: Tools for a Read-Write World.
Daniel García Andújar is a visual media artist, activist and art theorist from Spain that lives and works in Barcelona. Since 1996 he works within the framework „Technologies To The People“. One of the TTTP activities is the construction of the vast „Postcapital Archive“, a multimedia proposal in process — that not only allows user consultations but also copying and even modification. It has expanded in successive exhibitions, workshops and interventions in public space carried out in Oslo, Santiago de Chile, Bremen, Montreal, Istanbul, Dortmund, Madrid, Valencia, Girona, Gijón, San Jose and others. This work been shown around the world, most recently at the Venice Biennale.
NEW INTERMEDIARIES
Jamie King has a background in writing and academia, a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Southampton, was editor at Mute Magazine and a writer for ITN. He is a Founder & CEO of VO.DO, a media distribution, crowdfunding and attention-sourcing network. It currently reaches an audience of around 1m and raise around $30,000 per-film in direct audience sponsorship. A BitTorrent Inc.’s resident Media Evangelist, travelling the world extolling the benefits of P2P distribution for filmmakers, producers and funders. Producer of the STEAL THIS FILM series, which has been downloaded over 6m times via P2P, the film played its part in the emergence of discussions around new models for distributing cultural works online. VO.DO focuses on realising the benefits of free-to-share culture for emerging creators.
Marcell Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute – mi2 and net.culture club MAMA in Zagreb. He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits, started Skill sharing regular informal meetings of enthusiasts in mama + Skill sharing’s satellites g33koskop, ‚Nothing will happen‘ and ‚The Fair of Mean Equipment‘. Marcell participated in many collborative artistic projects, was one of the organizers of summer camps „Otokultivator“ on island Vis, Regularly runs workshops, runs Wonder of technology/Čudo tehnike at Faculty of Media and Communication and at Jan Van Eyck in Maastricht works on Ruling Class Studies.
Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, educator, and advisor working at the intersection of culture, media, and technology. He was head of the media and technology program of De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam (1999 – 2011). He taught theory of interactive media and technological culture for a variety of academic institutions, and was a scientific staff member of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Recent publications include The Book of Imaginary Media (2006), Delusive Spaces (2008). Next to an extensive series of festivals and public events he was project leader for the practice based research trajectory „The Living Archive“ at De Balie and currently is Editor in Chief of the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for Tactical Media practices worldwide.