Biographies

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), Co-PI of the research project Digital Activism and co-research lead, British Digital Art, British Art Network. 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, and also Associate Professor (on leave) at Aarhus University and visiting researcher at the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University.

Nicolas Malevé

Nicolas Malevéis 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.

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.

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

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

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 Clasto

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.

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.

Jennifer Hayashida

Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and artist, born 1973 in Oakland, California, today based in Gothenburg and New York. In 2018, she debuted with the poetry collection A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Poetry) and has translated poets including Athena Farrokhzad, Ida Börjel, and Burcu Sahin. Hayashida is since 2018 a doctoral researcher at Valand Academy, with the project Feeling Translation, which explores translation as scene and event in relation to race, the body, and the nation-state.

Nkule Mabaso

Nkule Mabaso is the director of Natal Collective an independent production company active internationally in the research and presentation of creative and cultural Africana contemporary art and politics. Forthcoming projects include producing the Gallery of Leaders exhibition for the Freedom Park Museum, Pretoria. Other recent projects include the curation, together with Nomusa Makhubu, of the South Africa Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Arte 2019 under the title The stronger we become. Nkule graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2011 and received a Masters in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2014. She is the former curator of the Michaelis Galleries at University of Cape Town (2015-2021). She has curated and organised exhibitions and public talks in Switzerland, Malawi, Tanzania, the Netherlands and South Africa. Nkule voluntarily serves on the advisory boards of VANSA, the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg, The University of Cape Town Works of Art Committee, the Museum Services Board of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport and is contributing editor to the Oncurating.org Journal at the ZHdK; an issue entitled “Decolonial Propositions”, edited together with Jyoti Mistry is forthcoming (April 2021). Nkule’s practice is collaborative with her research interests centering around theorizing and articulating nuanced aesthetic questions from the black female vantage point and she has made significant strides in national and international curatorial projects and has contributed to a number of prominent research publications on the subject.

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism, and Free Software. In various constellations, she works 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. In the research project Ecologies of Dissemination ​​​​​​she develops, together with Eva Weinmayr, feminist and decolonial approaches to Open Access. Femke regularly teaches at New Performative Practices (Stockholm University of the Arts) and supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht). She also contributes to Nubo, a cooperative which provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services. In the context of SoLiXG, Femke develops Counter Cloud Imaginaries, non-sovereign institutional infrastructures and methods for infra-resistance.

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.