| BIOS ARTISTS An Architektur is a Berlin-based collective that applies sociopolitical questions to space and architecture. They advocate for a progressive, critical, and discursive notion of architecture. Since 2002 they have published a bi-annual journal on the production and use of the built environment, and possibilities within for political action. www.anarchitektur.com/english.html The Center for Urban Pedagogy brings together artists, designers, community organizations, policymakers and others in order to produce educational projects about places and how they change. Their work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy. Projects range from high school curricula to media projects to exhibitions, and have been seen at Storefront for Art and Architecture and Apex Art in New York City, Princeton University, the Chicago Architecture Foundation and Mess Hall in Chicago; and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. www.anothercupdevelopment.org Ashley Hunt is an artist and activist based in Los Angeles, and primarily interested in questions of power, language, structures of political possibility and their representation. Over the past five years, he has been developing the Corrections Documentary Project which investigates these questions through the framework of the rapid growth and commercialization of the U.S. prison system. His work has been screened/seen at Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, the Slamdance Film & Video Festival and the New York Underground Film & Video Festival. www.ashleyhuntwork.net Institute for Applied Autonomy was founded in 1998 as an anonymous collective of engineers, designers, artists and activists who are united by the cause of individual and collective self-determination. The IAA has produced several projects under its flagship initiative, "Contestational Robotics." Their work has been seen at MassMoCA; Ars Electronica Festival (where it has won awards in 2000 and 2006); ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. TXTMob, a recent project, was a cellphone text message broadcast service widely used by demonstrators during the 2004 DNC and RNC protests and at election protests in the Ukraine and Washington D.C. www.appliedautonomy.com Pedro Lasch is an artist, educator, and activist from Mexico City who has lived in the U.S. since 1994. He is currently Assistant Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts at Duke University in North Carolina. His individual work has been shown internationally, and he is an active member in a wide range of art collectives, such as 16 Beaver Group (New York), as well as various recent Latino/a immigrants' organizations like Mexicanos Unidos de Queens and Asociación Tepeyac de New York. He is the founder of the bilingual (Spanish-English) experimental grassroots program Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses. In 2005, his work was seen in a solo exhibition "Open Routines: Recent Work by Pedro Lasch" at the Queens Museum of Art in New York City. Lize Mogel See Editors bio below. www.publicgreen.com/projects Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer whose work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His most recent projects take up secret military bases, the California prison system, and the CIA's practice of "extraordinary rendition." Paglen's artwork has been shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the California College of the Arts (2002), MASSMOCA, Diverse Works, the LAB, and Bellwether gallery (upcoming). His first book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson) was recently released. www.paglen.com John Emerson is an activist, graphic designer, writer, and programmer based in New York City. He has designed printed and interactive maps for Human Rights Watch, UNDP, Amnesty International, and United for Peace and Justice. His writing about graphic design and activism has been published in Communication Arts, featured in Metropolis Magazine and Print. He has taught digital design and Internet strategy for civil society activists in Tokyo, for the Organization of American States in Jamaica, and at the Parsons School of Design. John is currently a Partner at Apperceptive, LLC. www.backspace.com Jai Sen, an architect and urban designer by training, is an independent researcher based in New Delhi, India. He was earlier a civil activist and campaigner on dwelling, labour, and rights-related issues in Kolkata (Calcutta) and at national and international levels. Working with the collective CACIM, he produced mapping of the "unintended city", public advocacy work, architectural and planning services for marginal communities and other work related to dwelling rights. He has attended the World Social Forums since 2002, and was a member of the WSF India Working Committee and its Co-ordination Team during 2002-3. www.cacim.net Brooke Singer is a digital media artist whose recent work utilizes wireless communications (Wi-Fi, mobile phone cameras, RFID) to initiate discussion and positive system failures. She is currently Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase, and co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media. She is a recipient of the Eyebeam/LMCC Social Sculpture Commission, Franklin Furnace Future of the Present Award, Turbulence.org Net Art Commission, Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds, among others. She has exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad including the at the Banff Centre; Whitney Museum of American Art; Exit Art, New York; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Diverseworks, Houston; Beall Center for Art and Technology, California; and Biennale de Montréal. www.bsing.net Jane Tsong manipulates the infrastructure of everyday life. Her works have appeared on the streets and in the art spaces of Southern California, the Midwest, New York, San Antonio, and Milan. Her staged performances have been seen at Walker Art Center, SpaceSpace, and Theatre Mu in Minneapolis. She is currently designing a permanent public piece for a new wastewater treatment plant in Seattle, which will open in 2010. WRITERS Kolya Abramsky's research is on energy-related conflicts in the world economy. He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at SUNY Binghamton. He has worked in the secretariat of the World Wind Energy Institute at the Nordic Folkcenter for Renewable Energy in Denmark, and has been active for many years in different global anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist networking processes. His political activities include mobilizations, international solidarity campaigns, education, publications, and translation work, as well as self-organized grassroots skill-sharing and exchange between different grassroots movements. Alejandro de Acosta received his Ph.D. in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture from SUNY-Binghamton, and his B.A. from Hampshire College. His dissertation, The Power of the Affects, concerns the relation between reason and emotion in relation to group and individual subjectivity. His current research and teaching interests are in Latin American philosophy, and the theoretico-practical intersection of anarchist theory, experimental therapeutic practices and assorted "limit-experiences." He has published articles in OFF! The Voice of Campus and Community, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Radical Society, and Tactical Sound.< Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias have been involved with grassroots organizing, direct action, popular education, translation, writing, and agit-prop production. They are currently PhD candidates in Geography and Anthropology respectively at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. They co-founded the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs) which researched and produces activist mapping. They also collaborate under the name /Producciones Translocales/, focusing recently on precarious labor and migration regimes. Avery Gordon is Professor of Sociology and Law and Society at University of California, Santa Barbara and Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and the editor of Mapping Multiculturalism and Body Politics, among other works. Her most recent articles on imprisonment and the War on Terror were published in Race & Class and Le Monde Diplomatique. Her current writing aims to comparatively understand the nature of captivity and confinement today. its means of dispossession, and what's required to abolish it. Since 1997, she has co-hosted No Alibis, a weekly public radio program on KSCB 91.9 FM, Santa Barbara. Sarah Lewison is an artist and writer whose work explores alternative economics and political subjectivity. Her installation, performance and media projects provoke status quo dynamics between spectators, producers and raw materials through role-playing, dialogue and the production of proposals. She and her collaborators have presented work in galleries and public spaces throughout North America, Europe and Tijuana, Mexico. Her single-channel media work includes the 1995 videotape "Fat of the Land", a collaborative documentary about waste grease bio-diesel that offers a home-brewed proposal for sustainable economics. A corresponding editor for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Sarah writes for other independent journals and her recent essay "Tales from the Uni-nursery" about 60s communes appears in the upcoming compilation "Failure: Idealism and History." www.carbonfarm.us Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaimen works in Dhaka and New York. His projects include Visible Collective/Disappeared In America (Whitney Biennial, 2006), Muslims Or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie? (UK House of Lords), and System Error: War is a Force that gives us Meaning (curatorial project with Lorenzo Fusi, Palazzo Papesse, Siena). Recent essays include "Fear of a Muslim Planet: Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, DJ Spooky ed., MIT Press, forthcoming), "Guerillas in the Mist" (Sarai Turbulence, Documenta 12), "Beirut: Illusion of a Silver Porsche" (Men of Global South, Adam Jones ed., Zed Books) and "Why Mahmud Can't be a Pilot" (Nobody Passes, Matt Bernstein ed., Seal Press). www.shobak.org Heather Rogers is a journalist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (The New Press, 2005). Her documentary film, also titled Gone Tomorrow (2002), screened in festivals around the globe. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Nation, Socialist Register, Utne Reader, Architecture Magazine, Art and Design, Punk Planet, and The Brooklyn Rail. |
