Reuser Biographies

Ecologies of Dissemination: Reuser Biographies

Biographies in publications are often structured to credit individual achievements. For PARSE we experimented with replacing this individualising approach to cultural practice by narrating the relationships and histories that connect the contributors. In the end, it became apparent that this relational approach to draw a map of affinities rather than achievements would place us, the editors, at the centre of the mapped ecologies. Therefore, we settled, until we find a better way, with the conventional self-narrated biographies as provided by the individuals and collectives involved.

What is more? We suggested replacing the normalised descriptor “author” with “reuser” in an attempt to account for the entangled understanding of authorship that is at the very centre of the entire project.

Erri Ammonita

Erri Ammonita is a collective pseudonym resisting biographical narratives

Constant

Constant is a non-profit organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology. Constant works with feminist servers, situated publishing, active archives, extitutional networks, (re)learning situations, hackable devices, performative protocols, solidary infrastructures and other spongy practices to stake out paths towards speculative, libre, intersectional technologies. https://constantvzw.org/

Séverine Dusollier

Severine Dusollier is Professor of Intellectual Property in the Law School of Sciences Po Paris and holds a Senior Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the director of the law school research centre, member of its doctoral committee and the Head of the Master in Innovation Law. From 2014-2019, she was the holder of an ERC (European Research Council) research grant on commons and inclusivity in property. Her current research interests are digital issues of copyright, the concept of authorship, contractual protection of authors and performers.

Andrea Francke

Andrea Francke is a Peruvian social practice artist based in London invested in invisibility, transparency, and developing administrative and pedagogical infrastructures as aesthetic strategies. Selected current projects include Ten Texts on Sculpture (with Matthew de Kersaint Girardeau) ­– podcasts series to explore reading with art students and Future of the Left (FOTL) ­– exploring the political and aesthetic dimensions of administration and policy (with Ross Jardine). Past projects include The Piracy Project (with Eva Weinmayr) exploring book piracy, copying, and other reproduction techniques, Invisible Spaces of Parenthood (with Kim Dhillon). She currently works as a Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts.

Cathryn Klasto

Cathryn Klasto is a spatial theorist, educator and researcher. Invested in transdisciplinary knowledge production, they have a range of enquiry subjects including: metaethics, citational practices, radical publishing, diagrammatic thinking and methodological design. Klasto is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg.

Nkule Mabaso

Nkule Mabaso is the director of the Fotogalleriet Oslo. Since 2021 she is based at the HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design, Faculty of Fine, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, working on a dissertation researching artistic and curatorial practises that are situated at the intersection of art, ecology, and feminisms.

Nicolas Malevé

Nicolas Malevé is an artist, programmer and data activist living in Aarhus, Denmark. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Gabriela Méndez Cota

Gabriela Méndez Cota works at the Department of Philosophy of Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. Her research explores the cultural, political and infrapolitical dimensions of new media and technologies. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). She published with New Formations, Media Theory, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits culturemachine.net, an open access journal of culture and theory. Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015).

C. Thi Nguyen

C. Thi Nguyen is interested in the ways in which human rationality and agency are socially embedded – about how the ways of thinking and deciding are conditioned by features of social organization, community, technology, and art practices. He's also interested in the structures and nature of the interdependences people have with one another – and with artefacts, practices, and institutions. He published the book Games: Agency as Art in 2020 and is currently associate professor of philosophy at University of Utah. https://objectionable.net

Gary Hall

Gary Hall is an experimental critial theorist who works at the intersections of digital culture, politics and philosophy. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he is founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures which brings together theorists, practitioners, activists and artists. He has a history of creating norm-critical collaborative research contexts. His research has been published in Radical Philosophy, New Formations, Media Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, American Literature and Angelaki. He has published several books,among them A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). http://www.garyhall.info/

Jennifer Hayashida

Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and artist based in Stockholm. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD candidate in artistic research at HDKV, the Academy of Art & Design at Gothenburg University. She is the author of A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Poetry/Black Ocean, 2018) and the chapbook Översättaren som arkiv/Arkiv som översätter (Autor, 2020), while her translations between Swedish and English include collections by Don Mee Choi, Iman Mohammed, Kim Hyesoon, and Athena Farrokhzad. Her scholarly and creative work has been published in journals such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Women & Performance, Fence, and Paletten, as well as exhibited at venues including The Vera List Center for Art & Politics, The New Museum, and Bildmuseet.

Peggy Pierrot

Peggy Pierrot is an intellectual worker, teacher and independent researcher (on software, human sciences and popular cultures), writer, radio host living in Brussels, Belgium. She teaches media theory and speculative fiction at erg, école de recherche graphique and is co-editor of Curseurs, Numérique : repères critiques.

Ram Krishna Ranjan

Ram Krishna Ranjan (born 1985, India) is a lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersection of research, pedagogy and film practice. His educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies, Fine Art and Film. In his work, he critically explores decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and the intersectionality of caste, class, and gender. He has made several films on these issues. His latest film, Fourth World, delves into the various facets and stages of a creative-collaborative practice that attempted to foreground and engage with Dalits’ experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943.

Dubravka Sekulić

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her research explores transformations of contemporary cities, at the nexus between the production of space, laws, and economy. She is the MA City Design Programme Lead at the Royal College of Art. She holds a PhD from gta the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich (CH), on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-aligned Movement. With Godofredo Pereira she is co-editing a book on taking back the land. She is a researcher for the project Curatorial Design: A Place Between and a co-editor of the relational digital publication Total Reconstruction. She is the author of several books, including Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), and most recently she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on Don't Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored the spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform.

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism, and Free Software. With the Brussels' based association for art and media she experimented with Free Culture as a trans*feminist practice through performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research, and educational prototypes. Her thinking about reuse was sharpened as part of her work with the Libre Graphics Movement in dialogue with the practice of Open Source Publishing (OSP), a design collective which she co-founded in 2006.

Currently Femke works in various constellations on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard, she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists on what computational infrastructures do to collective life. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication results from a collective disobedient research project which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

Femke supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht) and contributes to Nubo, a cooperative which provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services. In the context of SoLiXG, she develops Counter Cloud Imaginaries, non-sovereign institutional infrastructures and methods for infra-resistance. With the Infrastructural Rehearsals collective, she collaborates on proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches to the climate crisis, from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives.

Winnie Soon

Dr. Winnie Soon is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries, engaging with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology. With works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and alternative written forms, including co-authored books titled Boundary Images (2023), Fix My Code (2021), and Aesthetic Programming (2020), Winnie is the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series (MIT Press). Artistically, Winnie received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (Artificial Intelligence and Life Art Category), the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture at Stuttgarter Filmwinter — Festival for Expanded Media, WRO 2019 Media Art Biennale Award, and the 26th and 17th ifva awards (Special Mention and Silver award). Currently, they are Associate Professor of Art and Technology at UCL - Slade School of Fine Art.

Marloes de Valk

Marloes de Valk (NL) is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the threat of global warming and being spied on by the devices surrounding her. Surprised by the obsessive dedication with which we, even post-Snowden, share intimate details about ourselves to an often not too clearly defined group of others, astounded by the deafening noise we generate while socializing with the technology around us, she is looking to better understand why.

She is a PhD researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, in collaboration with The Photographer's Gallery, looking into the material and social impact of the networked image on the climate crisis.

https://bleu255.com/~marloes

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr works at the interface of art, critical publishing and radical education. Her focus is on decolonial feminist discourses, pedagogies, and practices. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” (with erg, Brussels) and co-initiated kritilab, an open-source platform and laboratory for Critical Diversity Literacy at the intersection of art and education. As part of Ecologies of Dissemination (HDK-Valand, 2022-24) with Femke Snelting, she develops decolonial feminist practices to Open Access.

Recent collaborative publication projects include "Noun to Verb", a PhD thesis concerned with the micro-politics of publishing from an intersectional feminist perspective that was developed and published on a MediaWiki. She collaborates with Lucie Kolb on decolonial, feminist approaches to naming and cataloguing knowledge in institutional libraries in the Global North that led to an exhibition and the online publication “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22); Further projects include “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and modes of reproduction.

Currently, she works as Guest Professor for Critical Access at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel Academy of Art and Design (CH) and supports the team of the Masters "Critical Social Practice in Art Education" at ZHdK Zurich. Since 2024 she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK).

Stephen Wright

Stephen Wright is a theorist, art writer and currently together with Tamarind Rossetti artistic director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. He taught the practice of theory at the École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image (Poitiers/Angoulême). From 2017 to 2021, he co-directed the postgraduate art-research programme, Document & Contemporary Art. He is the author of Toward a Lexicon for Usership.

In 2018, Rossetti and Wright founded a 1:1 scale agroecological experimental field called Ferme au Sauvage for the cultivation of organic fruit and vegetables, where they offered farm-to-table meals and farm-to-panel workshops (called ‘Ideaseeding’), ran a farm shop in the studio and documented the project artistically. They currently run a permaculture farm and research project in Corrèze, France.