Peter Lamborn Wilson

Scholar of Sufism and Western Hermeticism and (under the pseudonym Hakim Bey) a well-known radical-anarchist social thinker. His books include Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights, 1993) and Escape from the Nineteenth Century and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1998).

• Religion

Global Uprisings 

Global Uprisings is an independent news site and video series dedicated to showing responses to the economic crisis and authoritarianism. Since 2011, Brandon Jourdan and Marianne Maeckelbergh have been travelling, researching, and making documentary films.

Their short films detail social movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US. Their films cover strikes and demonstrations in the UK, the large-scale housing occupations and street mobilizations in Spain, the various general strikes, protests, and factory occupations in Greece, the revolution in Egypt, the Gezi Park uprising in Turkey, the 2014 social explosion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the revolt against austerity in Portugal, and the occupy movement in the United States.

• activism,
• public space,
• video activism,
• street protest,
• occupy,
• tactical research

Christian Fuchs

Chair in Media and Communication Studies
Uppsala University
Department of Informatics and Media Studies

Oleg Kireev

Oleg Kireev (born 1975) - art- and mediacritic, editor and curator, writer, critic and activist, founder of the Ghetto collective, Moscow. Participated in a number of media-political campaigns ("Against all parties", 1999) and actions ("Barricade at Bolshaya Nikitskaya", May 1998). Author of articles on art and politics in the Russian and international press ("Novaya gazeta", "Nezavasimaya gazeta", "Flash art", "Siksi", "Mute"

• urban intervention,
• criticism

Dutch Protest Museum 

ARTPLAY, Small Hall, Moscow, Russia
Dates: October 23rd - November 6th, 2013

In the second half of the 20th century, anarchist artists from PROVO, feminist movement Dolle Mina, Amsterdam squatters and media activists influenced Dutch state politics and changed public opinion with their sensational actions. What were they fighting for and what has become of activist art today? The exhibition tells the story of creative protest movements in the Netherlands from 1960s till 1990s, when those movements flourished, and also includes pieces by contemporary artists working with political themes today.

• art,
• tactical media,
• activism

Michael Seemann

Michael Seemann studied Applied Cultural Studies in Lüneburg. Since 2005 he is active on the internet with various projects. He founded twitkrit.de and Twitterlesung.de ('reading Twitter'), organized various events and runs the popular podcast wir.muessenreden.de. In 2010 he began the blog CTRL-verlust, about the loss of control over data on the internet. In 2014 he published Das neue Spiel after a successful crowdfunding campaign. Now he blogs at mspr0.de and writes for various media like Rolling Stone, TIME online, SPEX, Spiegel Online, c't and the DU magazine. He gives lectures on whistleblowing, privacy, copyright, internet culture and the crisis of institutions in times of Kontrollverlust.

• network cultures,
• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• surveillance

Dave Oswald Mitchell

Dave Oswald Mitchell is a writer, editor and researcher camped out at the intersection of the economic and ecological crises.

• activism,
• info-activism

Gergory Sholette

Gregory Sholette is an artist, activist and author based in New York. 

• art,
• activism,
• theory,
• economics

In memoriam: Oleg Kireev 

On Friday April 3, 2009 we received the terribly sad news that our friend and ever inspiring colleague Oleg Kireev from Moscow had died, apparently as a result of suicide. We are left behind as friends and colleagues, bereaved and puzzled by this dramatic fact. Kireev was a prominent guest in some of the most important projects in the art / media / politics triangle, which we had the honour developing at De Balie. Kireev was a crucial figure in circles of free culture, media activism and the arts in Moscow, one of the most demanding environments for such activity one can think of.

• tactical media,
• Russia

Inke Arns

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 lived in Paris (1982-86), finished school in West-Berlin in 1988, studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988-96) and in 2004 obtained her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia.

• art,
• network cultures,
• net criticism