The authors
Kristina Andersen is a maker and researcher based at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. She works with electronics and games to create unusual objects and experiences. She holds an MA in Design, an M.Sc in Virtual Environments, and was a research fellow at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She is currently working on a series of black boxes with interactive behaviours as a part of her ongoing obsession with ‘naïve electronics’. She has taught and mentored at institutions like DasArts, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academie and hosted numerous informal workshops in strange locations.
Frank Barknecht is a writer, software developer and sound/code artist living in Cologne, Germany. Since 2005 he is part of GOTO10, an international collective of media artists, musicians and coders devoted to using and promoting Free Software in their work, which was founded in France originally. His favorite weapon of mass creation is the software "Pure Data" written as open source project by Miller Puckette and many others. He is involved in the "Pd scene" since around 2001, where he is supporting new users through the Pd mailing lists and helps maintain the central code repository.
He wrote a handful of Pd objects like the popular fluid~ soundfont synthesizer for Pd, but most of the time he concentrates on developing libraries of Pd patches, so called abstractions. These include the preset handlers Memento and SSSAD, the instrument collection RRADical, and a port of Karlheinz Essl's Realtime Composition Library for Max/MSP to Pd. During 2007 he was a fellow at the Soundlab of the Academy of Media Arts KHM in Cologne.
Tom is an art school educated artist, self taught programmer, experimental musician and academic. He has been practising in the field of digital and interactive media for over 10 years across a wide range of projects. Some of this creative output includes work for the Tate, internationally exhibited art installations, commercially published music projects, downloadable software and academic writing.
His current work investigates the ways in which digital environments change our perception and treatment of space, time and material. His projects focus on several aspects of this culture such as: schizophrenic and multidimensional reconstructions of data, interventions and distortions of existing digital spaces, generative construction of content and the life of digital objects. Tom works as both a programmer, performer and participant within these virtual spaces.
http://www.thinkinggames.co.uk
Florian Cramer is a researcher in comparative literature and aesthetics, a writer and activist in the field of computer culture and free software in relation to experimental arts, and the course director of the Media Design M.A. programme of Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam. Recent publications: Exe.cut[up]able Statements: Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts [book, forthcoming in 2008], Sodom Blogging: Alternative porn and aesthetic sensibility, Texte zur Kunst, no. 64, For us it's not an error - Interview with jodi.org, in: Neural, no. 28. Most of his writings are online at: gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc
Phil Chandler, Technical Manager, folly (2006-2008)
Phil's background is in IT, engineering and digital communications, having worked in the not for profit and commercial sectors in the UK and Africa. He has extensive experience managing multi-platform networks, combining Linux, Netware, Windows and Mac systems. He has designed and built email, web, data storage and streaming servers and managed domain name infrastructures. He has in-depth knowledge of TCP/IP and other networking technologies, and tutors for the Open University in digital communications.
Phil has a particular interest in free and open source software (FLOSS), and its potential to place powerful tools in the hands of those who would otherwise be unable to afford them. He has worked closely with, and championed the work of GOTO10, an artists' collective developing the innovative pure:dyne Linux distribution aimed at providing an easy to use but extensive suite of performance-focused multimedia software.
Olga Goriunova is a scholar and a curator in the fields of digital media arts and cultures, based in Moscow. She currently teaches digital art, sociology of art and media theory in Moscow City University and Moscow State University of Humanities and has recently completed her Ph.D. 'Art Platforms. The constitution of cultural and artistic currents on the Internet' in Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki. She is a co-organizer of Readme software art festivals (Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus, Dortmund) <http://readme.runme.org>; a co-organizer of software art repository Runme.org and an author of numerous publications on digital art and aesthetics, software cultures, Russian Internet, and various other topics.
Kathryn Lambert, Creative Director, folly
Kathryn provides artistic leadership for folly and influences the organisation's strategic development. As Creative Director, she is responsible for setting the artistic vision and managing the programme team to deliver an ambitious and cutting edge programme of work. She is particularly passionate about developing online arts provision, exploring new modes of distribution and developing arts participation online.
Kathryn is also a board member of Digital North (http://www.dn.digital-division.co.uk/), a young Media Arts Development organisation for the North of England. Kathryn has a background in funding and the commercial sector having previously worked as Media Arts Officer for Arts Council England, North West and as a practitioner within the field of New Media.
Key artistic projects have included: Forest of Imagined Beginnings (2007), f.wish (2006), Infrasense (2004-06), Distance Made Good (2004), Grow Your Own Media Lab (2005 - 07), Digital Artist Handbook (2006 – present)
Olivier Laruelle is a London based developer and designer working for a small creative agency. He taught himself programming over the past 4 years using processing and actionscript. He has a keen interest in exploring the relation between sounds and graphics. As part of this, he often performs with musician Chun Lee as Cracktux. Both are part of Openlab, a collaboration of artists who engage themselves in the aesthetics and politics of Free and Open Source Software Culture.
Thor Magnusson is an Icelandic musician/writer/programmer working in the fields of music and generative art of all kinds. He is currently working on a PhD at the University of Sussex where his research is focused on the semiotics of computer music interfaces, human-machine interfaces and the sociology of programming computer music. He teaches courses on computer music and algorithmic and interactive systems in the University of Sussex Music Informatics course and the Sonic Arts course of Middlesex University. Thor is mainly interested in improvisation, live performances, installations and audio software production. He is a co-founder and member of the ixi audio collective and with ixi he has written various musical software and given workshops and talks in institutions all over Europe on the design and creation of digital musical instruments and sound installations.
Since 1998 Nicolas Malevé, multimedia artist, has been an active member of the association Constant. As such, he has taken part in organizing various activities to do with alternatives to copyrights, such as Copy.cult & The Original Si(g)n, held in 2000. He has been developing multimedia projects and web applications for cultural organisations. His research work is currently focused on information structures and collaborative mapping.
Aymeric Mansoux has taken part in many artistic experiments based on the internet and the emergence of networks, and considers any form of data to be a new clay that can be used to develop autonomous artistic processes. His most recent projects include the mysterious packets toolkit, the 0xA band, the digital artlife Metabiosis project, the pure:dyne GNU/Linux live distribution for media artists and ongoing theoretical research into tools, online communities and digital autonomous processes.
Valentina Messeri studied Philosophy of Technology and has been living in Spain since 2002. She started to self-teach and research GNU/Linux systems and applications, multimedia in specific, to complete her theoretical formation and ethical point of view, and became technologist. She thinks it's possible to practice ethics using Free Software as a tool.
She is an advanced GNU/Linux user and video-maker since 2003. She is an expert in video streaming, teaches multimedia and works freelance in post production and live audio/video streaming [Wsf, Ministerio Cultura (Brasil), Sapi (Venezuela) and more...]. She is an active member of several collectives ( giss.tv, riereta.net, r23.cc, etc...) and collaborated with institutions such as Hangar (bcn), laLaboral(gijon), Medialab (Madrid) etc. She is also an active member of the Cinelerra community and collaborates with most of the important Free Software working groups and projects (cultura libre, dyne, etc...).
Iman Moradi is a Designer and Educator currently lecturing in Multimedia Design in the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. His previous work has included looking at ways of augmenting the user experience in academic libraries with the features present in social software. As a researcher, he is well known for his work on the Glitch Aesthetic and he occasionally advises artists on the technical implementation of their concepts which fall under the domain of interface design, web programming and physical computing.
Eleonora Oreggia is a media artist born in Milan and based in Amsterdam. She received a Master Degree with honor in Philosophy from the University of Bologna (DAMS), with a thesis in Semiotics of Art. She worked few years as editor and researcher at Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NIMK) in Amsterdam, and she is currently Researcher in Design at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Jon Phillips is an open source developer, artist, writer, educator, lecturer, and curator with 13+ years of experience creating communities and computing culture. His involvements with mixing culture and software development have been shown internationally at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (2006), Sun Yat-Sen University (2006), Desktop Developers Conference (2005), SFMoMA (2004), University of Tokyo (2004), Korea’s KAIST (2004), UCLA Hammer Museum, UC-Berkeley’s 040404 Conference (2004), USC Aim Festival IV (2003), and the ICA London (2002). He is a core Open Source developer on Inkscape, a scalable vector graphics editor and on the Open Clip Art Library, and is writing/producing a book, “CVS: Concurrency, Versioning and Systems.” Currently, he is visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute in the Design+Technology department and is a community developer for the Creative Commons.
Sumit Sarkar is a NorthWest based visual artist, whose character based artwork takes the form of digital and canvas paintings, digital sculpture, and aerosol art. The content of his personal work ranges from the fantastical characters of Sumit’s KrikSix world, to his modern interpretation of the Hindu gods.
Sumit also works as a designer, illustrator, curator and workshop leader, and is involved in various live art events around the UK, from live aerosol art and drawing battles to a live digital painting on the walls of the Royal Festival Hall as part of its Overture reopening festival.
Throughout 2008 Sumit was artist in residence with folly and Lanternhouse International, where he created and exhibited Ananta, expressing his vision of the Hindu religion and spirituality through extraordinary digital animations and robot-like sculptures created using laser technology.
http://www.kriksix.com
http://www.lanternhouse.org/ananta
Tom Schouten is an independent software developer and artist. He has been working with Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) for about a decade, and this has greatly influenced both his work and his thinking. In 2002 he started developing PDP, an image and video processing extension for Pure Data. Later he created Packet Forth, a scripting language for media processing to further explore the interface between artist and computer from a programming language perspective. Recently he entered the physical world, and is currently working on PURRR, a Forth based interactive programming language for PIC microcontroller chips. He uses the tools he develops to create musical and audiovisual performances that investigate (semi-) generative systems. His main focus here is to maximize actuation without sacrificing coherence.
Marloes de Valk is a dutch digital artist, currently based in the UK. She is part of GOTO10, a collective of artists and programmers working in the field of digital art and Free/Libre Open Source Software. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Her work consists of audiovisual performances and installations, investigating machine theater and narratives of digital processes. She is currently collaborating with French artist Aymeric Mansoux on Metabiosis, a project investigating the ups and downs of data packets living in a world of connected ecosystems. From August 2007 until January 2008 she was editor of the Digital Artists' Handbook and is currently working on the GOTO10 publication FLOSS+Art, to be published mid 2008.
Peter Westenberg is a visual artist and filmmaker producing short films and urban interventions, often made in collaboration with local groups. As a member of Constant he engages in open source practices of working with video. Recent works: Uit+Thuis Videomagazijn; a public video workspace and videotheque (Vlaardingen 2004), Language Police; collective research of discriminatory media vocabulary (Witte de With, Rotterdam 2005) Routes+Routines; (un)common walks through (un)public space (Brussels, 2006). Teaching includes the Piet Zwart Institute, postgraduate Institute for Fine Arts in Rotterdam and Artez, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem, Netherlands.
Constant is a non-profit association, based and active in Brussels since 1997 in the fields of feminism, copyright alternatives and working through networks. Constant develops radio, electronic music and database projects, by means of migrating from cultural work to work places and back again.
Simon Yuill is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the main developer on the spring_alpha/SVS project and is involved in helping run a number of hacklab and free media spaces in Scotland including the Chateau Institute of Technology (ChIT) and Electron Club, as well as the Glasgow branch of OpenLab. He has published a number of articles on software art and related issues.
