Person

Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, net critic and activist.

He studied political science on the University of Amsterdam (MA) and holds a PhD at University of Melbourne. In 2003 he was a postdoc fellow at University of Queensland in Brisbane. 2004 he was appointed research professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (interactive media) and associate professor (new media) at the University of Amsterdam. His position was renamed as the Institute of Network Cultures. In 2005 his instute organized four international new media conferences: one on the history of webdesign, one on alternatives in ICT for Development, another on urban screens and the Art & Politics of Netporn. In 2005-2006 he is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, the Centre for Advanced Study in Berlin where he is finishing the third volume of an ongoing research on Internet culture, to be published by Routledge New York..

Lovink was a member of Adilkno, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, a free association of media-related intellectuals established in 1983 (Agentur Bilwet auf Deutsch). From Adilkno the following books appeared: Empire of Images (1985), Cracking the Movement (1990) on the squatter movement and the media, Listen or Die (1992) on free radio, the collected theoretical work The Media Archive (1992 - translated into German, English, Croatian and Slovenian), the collection of essays The Datadandy (1994 - in German) and the book/CD Electronic Solitude (1997). Most of the early texts of Lovink and Adilkno in Dutch, German and English can be found at http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet. Geert Lovink's recent online text archive is: www.laudanum.net/geert.

He is a former editor of the media art magazine Mediamatic (1989-94) and has been teaching and lecturing media theory throughout Central and Eastern Europe. He is a co-founder of the Amsterdam-based free community network Digital City and the support campaign for independent media in South-East Europe Press Now. He was the co-organizer of conferences such as Wetware (1991), Next Five Minutes 1-3 (93-96-99), Metaforum 1-3 (Budapest 94-96), Ars Electronica (Linz, 1996/98) and Interface 3 (Hamburg 95). In 1995, together with Pit Schultz, he founded the international nettime circle which is both a mailinglist (in English, Dutch, French, Spanish/Portuguese, Romanian and Chinese), a series of meetings and publications such as zkp 1-4, 'Netzkritik' (ID-Archiv, 1997, in German) and Readme!(Autonomedia, 1998). From 1996-1999 he was based at De Waag, the Society for Old and New Media where he was responsible for public research. Since 1996, once a year he has been coordinating a project and teaching at the IMI mediaschool in Osaka/Japan. A series of temporary media labs was started in 1997 at the arts exhibition Documenta X in Kassel/Germany called Hybrid Workspace.

In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. 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).