Program

Adam is an artist engaged in producing works that investigate power and its presence in the protocols and structures of communications networks. By making signals, packets and protocological rhythms audible or visible, he aims to expose the materiality of the digital network and evade the abstractions that exist between user and machine.

•  adammcfillin.net
•  @ctrlyrown

Veteran activist Alfredo Lopez has been in movements for fundamental change for over a half century. He is a founder of May First Movement Technology and is the organization's movement work coordinator. He is the principle developer of the Technology and Revolution concept.

•  mayfirst.coop
•  @mayfirst

Andreas is an electric bass player, producer, composer and developer. His work consists of both digital and physical environments, spaces, festivals, software or platforms for participants and listeners. The computer itself serves as an artistical, political, social or philosophical medium, dealing with computer culture, machine learning, platform politics or decentralized networks. He studied art history, musicology, media philosophy and computer science in Berlin where he also lives and works.

•  andreasdzialocha.com
•  @adzialocha

Andrew is a software developer based in Toronto. He's currently working on building a digital Memex as well as researching the history of similar projects. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ShopLocket, an ecommerce startup acquired in 2014. When he's not coding, he spends his time on obsessive projects such as attempting to bike on every street in Toronto, taking photos of only doors (instagram: @hyfen), and making voxel art.

•  hyfen.net
•  @hyfen
•  hyfen

Currently based in Berlin and Kyiv, Geocinema consists of art historian Asia Bazdyrieva and filmmaker Solveig Suess. With Geocinema they consider planetary-scale sensory networks – cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites – as a vastly distributed camera, each running through their own sets of scales and temporalities while producing terabytes of raw data. While taking cues from these networks, the episodic documentary project looks to such infrastructures of earth-sensing data as forms of cinema. Geocinema as a practice began during The New Normal 2018 with Alexey Orlov, at Strelka Institute Moscow. Their upcoming episode takes the Chinese-led Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) as a starting point, to be released Spring 2020.

•  geocinema.network

Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She works on the reformulation of hegemonic time narratives as they collapse in the face of speculation: philosophical, financial, legal, futural, etc. Her work has appeared in the Tate Modern Artists’ Cinema Program; Berlinale Forum Expanded; Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva; Toronto International Film Festival; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; Beirut Art Center, and Mercer Union, Toronto; among others. Noorizadeh is a founding member of BLOCC (Building Leverage over Creative Capitalism), a research and education platform that proposes pedagogy as strategy, to alter the relationship between Contemporary Art and the planetary phenomena of urban renewal and social cleansing. Her current research examines the intersections of finance, Contemporary Art and emerging technology, building on the notion of “Weird Economies” to precipitate a cross-disciplinary approach to economic futurism and post-financialization imaginaries. She is pursuing this work as a PhD candidate in Art Practice+Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

•  baharnoorizadeh.com

Ben is an electronic musician and sound artist from Toronto, Canada. Working fragments of field recording and found sound into music that slips in and out of generic idiom, McCarthy’s output is rangey and prolific. McCarthy won the Dora award for Outstanding Sound Design and Composition in Independent Theatre in 2019, while his sound design for videogames has shown at the Venice Biennale, 2018, Amaze Berlin, 2019, and Mayworks’ Nightshift, 2019. His podcast Precariat Content explores art as labour through interviews with working artists such as Kent Monkman, Jordan Tannahill, and Maria Chavez.

•  paleeyesmusic.bandcamp.com

Biyi is an archiver living in Rotterdam. Currently enrolled in Experimental Publishing Masters course in Piet Zwart Institute.

•  channelchannel.site
•  onebigear

Brett is a Chicago-based artist, designer and instructor making aural, sculptural and cartographic explorations of the electromagnetic spectrum. He is currently an adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, teaching courses in tactical media, electronics, robotics and biological communications.

•  brettbalogh.com
•  @brettbalogh
•  giantmolecules

Brett is a New York-based artist whose practice involves an exploration of the future for workers. His work spans writing, photography, experimental/documentary video, performance and installation. Wallace is also the founder AMAZING INDUSTRIES – an R&D startup-as-artwork that demystifies the future of work and advocates for workers in the digital age. His work has been shown at Silas Von Morisse Gallery, New York, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, Reshaping Work, Amsterdam, Satellite Art Show, Miami, NURTUREart, New York and has been reviewed and mentioned in The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, artnet, Artslant, Hyperallergic and WHITEHOT magazine. Wallace is currently a member of NEW INC, the world's first museum led incubator created by the New Museum.

•  brettwallace.com
•  @brett_wallace
•  amazingind

Cecylia is a developer on the anti-censorship team at Tor Project and spends most of her time working on projects of digital resistance against state control. She is also interested in reducing the alienating affect of technology, and spent some time exploring the possibilities of local networks as a part of the UnMonastery Zagori test lab.

•  torproject.org
•  @CecyliaBocovich

Corey works and studies as a Masters student in the English department at Simon Fraser University on the unceded Coast Salish territory of Vancouver, BC. His current SSHRC funded project investigates the rise of the online community Incel through psychoanalytic and critical theory lenses, paying special attention to the enframing of memes as cultural capital for the Incel. Corey also enjoys snowboarding, writing, playing music, and being a cat-dad.

•  Trex850

Dan is a queer white-passing descendent of indo-guyanese indenture and founder of blockades.org. they are an opensource hacker with solarpunk tendencies active in autonomous co-operatives, blockchain research/development & big (enough) data analytics. currently building dark crystal, a fun decent(ralised) peer-to-peer utility for securing secrets with friends in cypherspace and an antidote for alienation and cobox. CoBox has been funded by the EU LedgerEU programme and seeks to replace the corporate cloud with a cooperative cloud utilising P2P technologies.

•  dan.blockades.org
•  @dan_mi_sun
•  dan-mi-sun

Danny is a user research and sociologist based in Oakland, California. He volunteers with Tech Workers Coalition, a worker-led, all-volunteer network building working power in the tech industry. He works with Start.coop, a business ownership accelerator, and with a tech collective working with new cooperative platforms worldwide.

•  twitter.com/GetWages
•  @daspitzberg

Elisabetta is a PhD Candidate in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (USA). Elisabetta's work focuses on the relationship between social movements, protest and digital technologies. Her dissertation research explores how contemporary radical leftist activists in Europe and the United States imagine the role of technology in their struggle for social change. She uses creative visual methods to engage activists in thinking critically about technology.

•  elisabettaferrari.net
•  @betty_ferrari
•  betty-ferrari

Born in Iran, a society with stringent regulatory control over all types of communication, Bahram developed a keen interest in understanding how the performance of individual actions could affect the outcome of our social encounter. His practice involves performance, installation, books, ephemera, social media, video and photographs. He received his MFA from the University of Oregon, where he held a teaching position as a Career Instructor of Art for 5 years. Currently he works as an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the Indiana State University since 2019.

•  farhadbahram.com

Georgiy (a.k.a. Mauve) is a freelance software developer working on decentralized and P2P software. He's passionate about the web, and enabling people to own their data, communities, and software. He's currently working at the Dat project on developer experience by building tools to make it easy to work with Dat across environments like the Web and Node.js.

•  ranger.mauve.moe
•  @RangerMauve
•  RangerMauve

Gottfried is an artist, educator and software tool-maker. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

•  gottfriedhaider.com
•  @mrgohai
•  gohai

Grant is a professional network engineer who builds temporary wireless networks for a living.

Hector works at Protocol Labs and leads the IPFS Cluster project, a distributed application using many parts from the libp2p and IPFS stacks.

•  @hecturchi
•  hsanjuan

Hiba is a new media artist, writer, curator and musician from Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. Her performances and videos concern music, labour and power. She conducts reading groups addressing digital media and workshops with open-source technology. She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queens University, Kingston, Canada. She has presented her work in Chicago, Stockholm, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland.

•  hibaali.info

Jack is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. His research investigates intersections of digital technologies with culture, with a focus on issues related to values, labour, and interoperability. Specifically, he studies how web developers shape the direction of the Internet by creating, contesting, co-opting and compromising with platforms and standards.

•  jackjamieson.net
•  @jackjamieson
•  jackjamieson2

Dr. Jaya Klara Brekke is a critical theorist and political cryptoeconomist and one part of the CoBox project looking to enable a privacy aware p2p cloud. She recently completed a PhD titled Disassembling the Trust Machine, three cuts on the political matter of blockchain, from Durham University Geography department, where she is also currently undertaking a postdoctoral fellowship. She has worked on questions of power and (geo)politics in network infrastructures for the past ten years as a designer, writer and public speaker.

•  jayapapaya.net
•  @jayapapaya
•  jayapapaya

Jennifer is a transnational American Studies scholar, media theorist, essayist, and creative writer. Working at the intersections of politics and poetics, she specializes in visual and public cultures, cultural and social movements, and media and technology studies. Jennifer’s writing can be found in 3:AM magazine, Cedilla Literary Journal (Ç viii, 2014) alongside Amiri Baraka (archived at University of Montana), LA Review of Books, PopMatters, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Salon and more. She also blogs about pre-digital to digital culture and the Experimental Television Center at HASTAC. She can be found in several anthologies and is forthcoming with Clemson University Press. Her arts writing in anthology has premiered at the Frankfurt Book Fair and MoMa PS1.

•  @Histouroborus

Jillian volunteers with NYC Mesh with a particular passion for breaking down social barriers through technology and education. Jillian is an install leader, event organizer, and author of the organization's monthly newsletter. The IRS knows her as an administrator at New York University where she is also a graduate student in business.

•  linkedin.com/in/jillianemurphy

Joanne McNeil is a writer interested in the ways that technology is shaping art, politics, and society. She received the inaugural Arts Writing Fellowship Award for an emerging digital arts writer from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. She is a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Program fellow. She was an Artist-in-Residence and an Impact Resident at Eyebeam. Her book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, is forthcoming.

•  joannemcneil.com
•  @jomc

Kirill graduated from Moscow State University as a Specialist (≅Master of Science) in Physics, with a specialization in computer modelling of optical properties in liquid crystals, in 2010. The word 'computer' turned out to be the most exciting in that phrase for me, so since then I founded and acted as a CTO for my own startup (which flopped), moved to Germany to develop software in SUSE Linux GmbH, and ended up acting as a Head of Security for Parity Technologies.

•  @kirushik
•  kirushik

Lai Yi is an artist and tech worker operating at the intersection of media and movement. She works to promote open data and advance Internet research and policy as Project Director at Measurement Lab. Previously, she worked to defend and promote human rights online with eQualitie. She is a 2019 Artist in Residence at Movement Research and her work has been shown at Movement Research's Fall Festival, New York Art Book Fair and the Internet Archive's Decentralized Web Summit. Lai Yi has been supported by Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, rehearsal Residency, Pioneer Works and Peer-to-Peer NYC. She is the author of '100 Scores: movement inspired by computers' and tends to her creative practice at Soft Surplus, a collective warehouse space in Brooklyn. Her current research interests include the proliferation of movement through crappily compressed images, the resistance of automated 'best practice' bodies, and how analog forms move in resistance against digital power.

•  laiyiohlsen.com

•  Vimeo

Laniyuk is an award winning queer Aboriginal poet born of a French mother and a Larrakia, Kungarrakan and Gurindji father. Her poetry and short memoir reflects the intersectionality of her cross cultural and queer identity. She contributed to the book Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans Perspectives. She is currently exploring the intersection of her poetry, decolonial theory and P2P technologies (poetic computation ala Taeyoon Choi) co-running workshops for queer people of color in Melbourne exploring accessibility and safety of P2P technologies. She has also run decolonial lectures and workshops for universities and in Aotearoa New Zealand at the first Scuttlebutt gathering.

•  blockades.org
•  laniyuk

Lauren is a graphic designer and artist working in exhibition and print design at MGMT Design in New York City. Her work investigates the materiality of digital systems and the labor involved in making them run.

•  squishysystems.com

Libi is an an artist and PhD student currently based at the University of Colorado, primarily in the Media Archaeology Lab & the Blow Things Up Lab. Libi's work is focused on tech defamiliarization as an educational tool, using workshops as both an education and artistic practice. Libi is interested in the technological, social and environmental implications of convenience and regularly hosts workshops on tech repair, retro technology, privacy & security, open source practices, and alternative networks.

•  libirose.com
•  @rose_alibi

Lorraine is a co-organizer for IntersectTO, a community for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and/or people of colour) folks interested in tech and digital justice. IntersectTO's aim is to have a space for folks to share tech skills, find collaborators, and hold critical discussions on how technology affects communities of colour.

•  intersectto.gitbook.io

Marie is a designer and programmer working around tools and methods for making. She is currently drawing typefaces and developing scripts at Occupant Fonts, while independently collaborating with various authors, artists, and designers.

•  motsuka.com
•  marieotsuka

Nahee is an artist and a web developer exploring programmability of human sexual behavior. She writes code poems, builds web applications, draws illustrations and makes videos regarding body images bound up with sexuality, power dynamics and communication protocols in sexual relationship and experimental approaches to human reproduction. She studies and teaches at Hunter College, studied at School for Poetic Computation, was a resident at MassMOCA, is a member of Soft Surplus which is collective workspace in Brooklyn and was a member of Eobchae which is an artist collective in South Korea. She is based in New York and Seoul.

•  nahee.app
•  @AppNahee
•  nahbee10/nahee.app

Renée is an interdisciplinary curator, artist and writer at the crossroads of curation, social practice and creative placemaking. By embedding herself in communities, Renée identifies object-oriented networks shaped by cultural aesthetics, urbanization, law, and technology. You can find Renée's writing in publications like Hyperallergic, Vice, and Chicago Magazine. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

•  reneereizman.com
•  @reneereizman

Sam believes that all design should be human-centred. She’s excited about the role designers can play in developing technology & policy that considers the real needs and values of people. She currently works as a freelance designer, researches & teaches in the School of Design at George Brown College, and studies for a Master of Information at the University of Toronto (with a concentration in Culture & Technology and Critical Information Policy Studies).

•  sammcgarva.com
•  @therealitycorp
•  therealitycorp

Scott focuses on telecommunications policy as it intersects with questions of equity and access. After years of policy work on Capitol Hill, he is now working with NYC Mesh, an open, neutral, and resilient community network aiming to make a home or business internet connection accessible and affordable to all New Yorkers.

•  nycmesh.net
•  @rscooter369

Sphere is an artist collective of Brian Patrick Franklin (MFA, New Media, Pennsylvania State University) and Chris Wille (MFA, Metals, Illinois State University) who explore the complex and often blurry relationship between virtual and physical objects, actions, and identities. Sphere's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions as well as being presented at prominent festivals and conferences including The World Maker Faire and The Digital Games Research Association Annual Summit.

•  spherecollective.com

Tobias is an artist and educator based out of Toronto Canada. He has an MFA from York University and currently works as an instructor at OCAD U, Humber College and Toronto School of the Arts. His art and research practice uses 3d animation to explore the intersection between art, society and technology. Recent projects of his have focused on topics such as the history of the Blockchain, hashtag aesthetics and the ontology of virtual art spaces.

•  tobiasjwilliams.com

Victoria is a freelance digital graphic designer and trainer based in Toronto, and is a steering committee member of the Design Justice Network, which rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.

•  designjusticenetwork.org