Participant Profiles

Mario Biagioli

Mario Biagioli is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard and Chair of Modern Thought, History of Science and Law at the University of Aberdeen. He studied computer science (University of Pisa), obtained an MFA in photography and Museum Studies (Visual Studies Workshop, 1984), and PhD in history of science (Berkeley, 1989). His work has focused mostly on the place of science at court, and the uses of instruments, imaging techniques, and print, spectacle in the making and display of knowledge (Galileo Courtier (Chicago, 1993) and Galileo’s Instruments of Credit (Chicago, 2006)). His current research is on the history and philosophy of intellectual property and the author function in science. He has edited (with Peter Galison) Scientific Authorship (Routledge, 2003) and is working on “Making IP”—a book on intellectual property in science. He is the editor of The Science Studies Reader (Routledge, 1998), and is completing (with Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi) IP Worlds (Chicago, forthcoming).

Finn Brunton

Finn Brunton is a PhD student at the Centre for Modern Thought. He is currently working on a dissertation about spam under the supervision of Mario Biagioli and Christopher Fynsk, and some related programming and design projects on cultural histories of computation. He is helping to organize the 2008 Recoded conference; you can email him at f at mavo dot nu.

Wendy Chun

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She works on Systems Design Engineering, English Literature, digital media, and questions of race. She is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), the co-editor of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005) with Thomas Keenan. Her Programmed Visions: Software, DNA, Race is forthcoming (MIT, 2008).

Sande Cohen

Sande Cohen (video) is a professor of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. He specializes in historiography, philosophy and cultural criticism. He has published numerous articles in historical and cultural theory, and is the author of Historical Culture (UC Press, 1986); Academia and the Luster of Capital (Minnesota, 1993); Passive Nihilism (St. Martins, 1998); and History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History (Johns Hopkins Press, 2007). He is also the co-editor of French Theory in America with Sylvere Lotringer (Routledge, 2001) and Consumption in an Age of Information with R. Rutsky (Berg, 2005). A special issue of Rethinking History, (12, no4, 2008) will be devoted the Cohen’s work.

Arnold Davidson

Arnold Davidson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and the University of Pisa. He is also the executive editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. He has published numerous articles on 20th century European philosophy, sexuality, and the tradition of spiritual exercises and St. Francis of Assisi. Davidson is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality (Harvard, 2002). He has edited and written an introduction to Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life (Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago University Press, 1998), and has co-authored a book of conversations with Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre (Albin Michel 2001). He is the co-editor of the official French anthology of Michel Foucault’s writings, Philosophie: Anthologie (Editions Gallimard, 2004), and is the co-editor of Questions of Evidence (Chicago University Press, 1994).

Régine Debatty

Régine Debatty is a new media consultant, lecturer, journalist, and curator; she founded and writes for the landmark blog We Make Money Not Art.

Christopher Fynsk

Christopher Fynsk is Head of the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Centre for Modern Thought. His work concentrates on the political and literary aspects of continental philosophy. His books include The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), and Language and Relation: … that there is language (Stanford, 1996).

Peter Galison

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Galison’s work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics—experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He is the author of How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Image and Logic (University of Chicago Press, 1997), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), and Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007). He has co-edited The Architecture of Science with Emily Thompson (MIT, 1999), Picturing Science, Producing Art with Caroline A. Jones (Routledge, 1998), Big Science with Bruce Hevly (Stanford UP, 1992), The Disunity of Science with David Stump (Stanford UP 1996), Atmospheric Flight in the 20th Century with Alex Roland (Springer, 2000), and Scientific Authorship with Mario Biagioli (Routledge, 2003). He has directed The Ultimate Weapon, and co-directed Secrecy with Robb Moss that has premièred at the Sundance Film Festival.

Alexander Galloway

Alexander R. Galloway is an Associate Professor in Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at the New York University. He is an author and programmer, and a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data surveillance engine Carnivore. Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book coauthored with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, 2007).

Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg is a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also the Vice-President of Technical Activities, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and the Co-Founder, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). He has published widely on robotics, linear programming, engineering, computing, and mechanical design, and edited The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (MIT, 2001). His art work has been performed and shown internationally, including the San Francisco Ballet at the SF Opera House, Arlington Arts Center, The Kitchen, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Ars Electronica Center, Fisher Gallery, the Los Angeles Biennial, and Forbes Gallery.

Mark Hansen

Mark Hansen is a professor English, Visual Arts and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He has worked on numerous topics ranging from literary studies to film and media, philosophy, science studies, rock music, and cognitive neuroscience. He is the author of Embodying Technesis (University of Michigan, 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT, 2004), and Bodies in Code (Routledge, 2006). He is the co-author with W.J.T. Mitchell of Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago, 2008); the co-editor with Bruce Clarke Neocybernetic Emergence (Duke, 2008); and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty with Taylor Carman (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Thomas Keenan

Thomas Keenan (interview) is the Director of the Human Rights Project and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (1997); and articles in PMLA, the New York Times, Wired, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, among others. He is the editor of The End(s) of the Museum (Stanford, 1996); the coeditor of New Media, Old Media (2005) with Wendy Chun (Routledge, 1988); and an editorial and advisory board member on The Journal of Human Rights, Grey Room, WITNESS, and the Scholars at Risk Network.

Friedrich Kittler

Friedrich Kittler is the chair for Media Aesthetics and History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is the author of numerous books in media and literary theory, including Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999); Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997); and Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990).

Tim Lenoir

Timothy W. Lenoir is the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society at Duke University. He has published several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present. He is the author of The Strategy of Life (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Politik im Tempel der Wissenschaft: Forschung und Machtausübung im deutschen Kaiserreich (Campus Verlag, 1992), Instituting Science (Stanford University Press, 1997), and the editor of Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford University Press: 1998). He has edited a special volume of Configurations. He is currently engaged in an investigation of the introduction of computers into biomedical research from the early 1960s through the 1990s, particularly the development of computer graphics, medical visualization technology, the development of virtual reality and its application in surgery. Lenoir constructed two web projects on the history of human computer interaction and on the history of bioinformatics. He is the co-founder and editor of the Stanford University Press series, Writing Science.

Thomas Levin

Thomas Levin is a Professor of German, Media and cultural theory at Princeton University. His scholarship ranges from the history of aesthetic theory and Frankfurt School cultural theory to the history and theory of media (archaeologies of vision, German Cinema, and the rhetoric of new media). A former fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna) and at the Institute for Advanced Study (Budapest), in 1999 Levin was chosen by the Dutch Ministry of Culture to be “artist-in-residence” at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where he developed a project entitled “Celluloid Rembrandtiana” that investigated the dynamics of cultural nationalism and mass media through a program of over a dozen films on Rembrandt (1920 to 1999). He also curated the international exhibition entitled “CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother” which was on view at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe through late February 2002. He is the editor of CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (MIT, 2002), the translator of The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Harvard UP, 2005), and author of the forthcoming Resistance to Cinema: Reading German Film Theory (Princeton UP).

Laura Marks

Laura Marks in the Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. She has worked on topics ranging from Arab cinema to theories of embodiment, affect and olfaction, and new media aesthetics. Her current project is a book called Infinity and Enfoldment: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. She is the author of The Skin of the Film (Duke University Press, 2000), and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002). She has curated programs of experimental media art for venues including the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, the Images Festival, Toronto, the Pacific Cinematheque, the Argos Festival, Brussels, the Seoul Net Experimental Film Festival.

Colin Milburn

Colin Milburn is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Science Studies at University of California, Davis. His work focuses on nanotechnology, science fiction, Gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, comic books, film and new media, critical theory, and posthumanism. He is the author of Nanovision: Engineering the Future (Duke University Press, 2008).

Alberto Moreiras

Alberto Moreiras is Sixth Century Professor of Modern Thought and Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen and Regular Visiting Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published, among other books, Interpretacion y diferencia, Tercer Espacio: Duelo y literatura en America Latina, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies, Linea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo politico. He is a coeditor of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring 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 involve close examinations of state secrecy, the California prison system, and the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.” His visual work has been shown in galleries and museums including MASSMOCA (2006), the Warhol Museum (2007), Diverse Works (2005), and the Bellwether Gallery. He is the author of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006) and I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Melville House, 2007) and the forthcoming Blank Spots (Dutton/NAL/Penguin, 2008).

Kriss Ravetto

Kriss Ravetto is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Visual Culture. Before joining the faculty at Aberdeen University she has taught at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, and Emerson College. She works on representations and theorizations of sexual violence in film, digital media and photography, and more recently the relation of image to gesture and experience in digital and installation art. She is the author of Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics, (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and has published articles on Post-Soviet Eastern European Cinema, Feminism and Film Theory, Performance Art, and avant-garde cinema of the 1960s in journals including Screen, Film Quarterly, PAJ, and Third Text.

Brian Rotman

Brian Rotman is a Professor of Mathematics and Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Becoming Beside Oneself (Duke, 2008), Mathematics as Sign (Stanford, 2000), Ad Infinitum (Stanford, 1993), Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford, 1993), Jean Piaget (Cornell, 1978), and Theory of Sets (Oldbourne, 1966). He is the co-founder of Mouth and Trousers theatre company, and he has written seven plays, including Sheets, performed at York & Albany, 1979; Love Bombs, performed at Southampton University 1982; Eisenstein's Flight, a radio play, performed at Lima, Ohio 2003; and Urschrift, a dialogue for two aliens. In collaboration with colleagues at the Advanced Center of Arts and Design at Ohio State, he designed a computer program for fingerspelling in American Sign Language (ASL).

Julia Scher

Julia Scher is a world renowned artist and a Professor of Art and Media at Kunsthochschule für Medien, Köln, and at MIT in the Visual Arts Program. Her work critically engages electronic security and surveillance issues in our culture. She is interested in creating temporary and transitory web/installation/performance works that explore issues of power, control and seduction. Her spoken word CD’s and installations have been exhibited worldwide in physical art spaces—including recent solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, and Schipper and Krome in Berlin—as well as on the world wide web and on the Electra recording label.

Eugene Thacker

Eugene Thacker is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Biomedia (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), The Global Genome (MIT Press, 2005), and co-author with Alexander Galloway of The Exploit (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Sha-Xin Wei

Sha-Xin Wei is the Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, and Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Computer Science at Concordia University in Montréal. He directs the Topological Media Lab, a studio-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives—such as the Remedios Terrarium. Sha’s major art research work include the T-Garden responsive environments, Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, and Softwear gestural sound instruments, and most recently kinetic sculpture and low resolution displays responding to movement and gesture. He co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, and Sponge art group in San Francisco. With Sponge and other artists, Sha-Xin Wei directed event/installations in prominent experimental art venues: including Ars Electronica Austria, V2 The Netherlands, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical United Kingdom. He has also exhibited media installations at Postmasters Gallery New York and Suntrust Gallery Atlanta.

Siegfried Zielinski

Siegfried Zielinski is the founding director of the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany, and currently chair of media theory: archaeology and variantology of the media, at the Berlin University of the Arts. He has published numerous articles and realized numerous films, video and exhibitions projects on history, theory, variantology, media archaeology, and the praxis of audiovision—including “Responses to the Holocaust in Western Germany”, “Channel Four—Fernsehen zwischen Kultur und Kommerz”, “Einhundert—Kurzfilme zur Archäologie der Audiovision”, “Museum Hermeticum”, “Wie man sieht—”. He was director of the Cologne based festival “Digitale” (1995-2000). He is a member of the European Film Academy, the Academy of Arts Berlin, the Faculty of the European Graduate School, Saas Fee, the Budapest Center for Culture and Communication, and the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain. He is the author of numerous books including: Deep Time of the Media (MIT, 2006), Audiovisions (Amsterdam University Press, 1999), Variantology 1: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies (König, 2005), Variantology 2, Veit Harlan (G. Fischer, 1981), Archäologie der Medien (Rowohlt, 2002), and Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders (V. Spiess,1986).