Howard
Slater is a London-based writer and researcher. His texts have appeared
in Datacide,as part of the collaborative TechNet project, and under pseudonym
in Alien Underground, Shimmer and The Techno Connection. He is the editor
of 'Break/Flow'.
Subcomandante Marcos (Date of birth unknown), is the spokesperson for
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a Mexican rebel
movement. In January 1994, he led an army of Mayan farmers into the
eastern parts of the Mexican state of Chiapas protesting against the
Mexican government's treatment of indigenous peoples.
Anonymous (used as a mass noun) is an Internet meme originating 2003 on
the imageboard 4chan, representing the concept of many online community
users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.
It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of
certain Internet subcultures, a way to refer to the actions of people
in an environment where their actual identities are not known.
Michael Benson is a writer, film-maker, and photographer. In recent years he has authored a series of illustrated books with space themes for Abrams, the leading publisher of art books in the United States. His new book, Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, was well in reviewed in The New York Times, The LA Times, and other publications. Benson's Beyond exhibition projects are based on his book Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, which has been published in English, French, German, Spanish, Korean and Japanese. Beyond exhibitions of varying sizes have toured Europe and North America, and limited-edition prints from the Beyond project produced by Benson's company, Kinetikon Pictures, have been acquired by museums and private collectors.
Charles Hirschkind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. In his recent book, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006), he explores how a popular Islamic media form?the cassette sermon?has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. He is also the co-editor (with David Scott) of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad an his Interlocutors (2005). Other publications include "Cultures of Death: Religion, Media, Bioethics" (Social Text 2008), "Cassette Ethics, Public Piety, and Popular Media in Egypt." (Media, Religion, and the Public Sphere, eds. A. Moors and B. Meyer, 2005), "The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary Cairo" (American Ethnologist 2001). His current project is based in southern Spain and explores some of the different ways in which Europe's Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe's Christian civilizational identity. This project has been funded through an award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
ReadPaul Virilio (b. 1932 in Paris) is a world-renowned philosopher,
urbanist, and cultural theorist. His work focuses on urban spaces and
the development of technology in relation to power and speed. He is
known for his coining of the term 'dromology' to explain his theory of
speed and technology. Paul Virilio is of mixed ancestry, being the son
of an Italian father (who identified as a Communist) and a Breton
mother. As a small child in France during the Second World War, Paul
Virilio was profoundly impacted by the blitzkrieg and total war;
however, these early experiences shaped his understanding of the
movement and speed which structures modern society. In order to escape
the heavy fighting in the city, he fled with his family to the port of
Nantes in 1939.
Avaaz.org is a 7-million-person global campaign network that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision-making. ("Avaaz" means "voice" or "song" in many languages.) Avaaz members live in every nation of the world; our team is spread across 13 countries on 4 continents and operates in 14 languages. Learn about some of Avaaz's biggest campaigns here, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
ReadArtist Born 1955, Arad, Romania Based in Amsterdam and Bucharest MA in Art History & Theory. Initial career as art journalist, free lance curator and cultural manager (with the Soros Foundation, Romania). From 1990 involved in various cross media projects independently and within the art duo subREAL. Developer of multi-media projects with V2 Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam. Creative Director for rich media platforms - Lost Boys Interactive, Amsterdam. Contributions to mainstream and alternative publications on internet related topics. Consultant for the Dutch Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Various teaching positions. Lately pursues an independent research on the interplay between citizens and their habitat - the Emotional Architecture.
ReadMedia sociologist and author. Currently he is a visiting
reasearcher at the Research Group on Public Policy for Access to
Information (GPOPAI) at the School for Arts, Sciences and Humanities
(EACH) of the University of São Paulo. He was project lead of the
conference series Wizards-of-OS.org and of the copyright information portal iRights.info, co-founded mikro-berlin.org and privatkopie.net and has published among others: ?Freie Software zwischen Privat- und Gemeineigentum,? Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn 2002.
Ricardo Rosas is a writer, translator and experimental musician. He was
one of the organizers of the Brazilian Tactical Media Lab in Sao Paulo.
He has studied Social Communication and German Studies at Universidade
de Sao Paulo and is currently senior editor of Rizoma (www.rizoma.net),
a web site devoted to activism, tactical media underground culture in
general, net critic, conspiracy stuff and occulture. He writes about
media activism and (anti) pop culture.
(died April, 11, 2007)
Julian Assange, born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist,publisher, and Internet activist. He is the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. Before working with the website, he was a computer programmer and hacker. He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.
Patrice Riemens (born 1950) is a geographer and currently the Fellow of the Waag Society in Amsterdam. He is a promoter of Open Knowledge and Free Software, and has been involved as a "FLOSSopher" (a 'philosopher' of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movements) at the Asia Source and Africa Source camps, held in 2005 and 2006 to promote FLOSS among non-governmental organisations. He is a member of the staff of Multitudes.
ReadBrett Stalbaum is an artist and research theorist specializing in information
theory, database, and software development. A serial collaborator, he
was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998, for
which he co-developed software called FloodNet (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html),
which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the
websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as
the Pentagon. As Forbes Magazine put it "Perhaps the first electronic
attack against a target on American soil was the result of an art
project." For EDT, this was all learned behavior taught by the example
of the Zapatistas. Stalbaum has been part of many other individual and
collaborative projects, and has published widely on digital art, its
context and aesthetics, and location aware media. He is a past editor
of Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE digital media lab.
WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public. Since July 2007, we have worked across the globe to obtain, publish and defend such materials, and, also, to fight in the legal and political spheres for the broader principles on which our work is based: the integrity of our common historical record and the rights of all peoples to create new history.
ReadDaoud Kuttab is a former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University ('07-'08). While at Princeton he taught a seminar on new media in the Arab world. Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and media activists. Born in Jerusalem in 1955, Kuttab studied in the United States and has been working in journalism ever since 1980.
Member of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission
aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular
understandings of events, symbols and history.
www.notanalternative.net
Not An Alternative is a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The organization operates a multi-purpose venue named The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage, where free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations occurs. The space also consists of a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.