Participants
Confirmed Guests include: Ainsley Walton, Alfredo Cramerotti, Ali Kazimi, Andréa Picard, Anne Balsamo, Ayisha Abraham, Barbara Hammer, Bart Testa, Benj Gerdes, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Christopher Eamon, Daichi Saito, David Rokeby, David Teh, Donghyun Park, Dont Rhine (Ultra-red), Dot Tuer, Ed Halter, Hangjun Lee, Henriette Huldisch, Hito Steyerl, Irina Leimbacher, James Holcombe, Jean Gagnon, John Greyson, Jorge La Ferla, Kathy High, Kevin Jerome Everson, Konrad Becker, Michael Snow, Ming-Yuen S. Ma, Nicky Hamlyn, Nicole Gingras, Ou Ning, Paige Sarlin, Peggy Gale, Pelle Snickars, Peter Ride, Pip Chodorov, Ross Lipman, Shai Heredia, Sobhi Al-Zobaidi, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Steve Anker, Steve Loft, Susan Oxtoby, Tamar Guimaraes, Tom Sherman, Ursula Biemann, Vera Frenkel, Wafaa Bilal, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Yvonne Rainer.
Additional invitees (official observers) include:
Birgit Hein (Berlin), Sanja Grbin (Zagreb) and Thomas Beard (New York).
Support for additional invitees from Goethe-Institut Toronto and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Extended Biographies of Congress Participants:
Ayisha Abraham is a visual artist who does installation art and makes short digital films. She studied Fine Arts at the MS University, Baroda, India, BFA 1987, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA (MFA) 1995, and did the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1991-92. She works as a visual arts consultant at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India. She has, among other courses on the history of visual cultures, organized an in house documentary film festival for the students titled “Nazariya” and is presently engaged in making a series of short experimental film from home movies she has been collecting since 2000.
Steve Anker, dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), formerly served as artistic director of the San Francisco Cinematheque between 1982 and 2002. In his capacity as director of the San Francisco Cinematheque, Anker oversaw one of the most respected showcases of experimental film and video in the world, presenting more than 90 programs per year. He has taught film history and filmmaking at the San Fraqncisco Art Institute for 18 years, and at San Francisco State University, the Massachusetts College of Art and Tufts University. Exhibits and series that Anker has curated include Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films—a 76-program film series co-curated for the Museum of Modern Art with MoMA’s Jytte Jensen—and Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema: 1955-1993. Anker also guest curated a series of Bay Area avant-garde films for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of its exhibition Made in California. Publications of his include catalog essays for Big As Life, Unknown Territories and Independent America (AMMI), as well as articles and reviews for Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cinematograph, Idiolects and the the Soho Weekly News. Anker has served as a jurist for the National Endowment for the Arts Film/Video production grants, ITVS, and for the California Arts Council Media Arts Fellowships as well as on the juries of several film festivals.
Anne Balsamo’s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer and entrepreneur. She is currently a Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. In 2002, she co-founded Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Previously she was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a collaborative research group at Xerox PARC who created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She served as project manager and new media designer for the development of RED’s interactive museum exhibit, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. Her new book project, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work examines the relationship between cultural reproduction and technological innovation.
Konrad Becker is an author, artist and producer. Director and co-founder of the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 and of Public Netbase from 1994 to 2006, he initiated World-Information.Org, a cultural intelligence agency. He has conceptualized and organized a large number of pioneering projects, international conferences and exhibitions in art and science. Latest book publications include: “Strategic Reality Dictionary” (2009), “Deep Search” (2009) “Nonstop Future” (2008) and “Tactical Reality Dictionary” (2002) world-information.org/wii, www.t0.or.at, global-security-alliance.com
Ursula Biemann (Switzerland) is an artist, theorist and curator who in recent years has produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. In a series of internationally exhibited video projects, as well as in several books “Been there and back to nowhere” (2000), “Stuff It – The Video Essay in the Digital Age“ (2003) and her new monograph “MISSION REPORTS“ (2008) she has focused on the gendered dimension of migrant labour from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers in the global context. Her experimental video essays connect a theoretical macro level with the micro perspective on political and cultural practices on the ground. Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis in the curatorial project “Geography and the Politics of Mobility” (2003) at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, “The Maghreb Conncection“ on migratory systems in North Africa, Cairo/Geneva (2006) or the art research projects “Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil politics at Kunstwerke Berlin (2005) and “Sahara Chronicle“ on trans-saharan mobility. The most recent video essay “X-Mission” (2008) is an analysis of the Palestinian refugees camps as a zone of exception. Biemann’s practice has long included discussions with academics and other practitioners, she has worked with anthropologists, cultural theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of sonic culture. Her video essays reach a wide and diverse audience through festival screenings, art exhibitions, activist conferences, networks and educational settings. She has exhibited internationally.
Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal is an assistant professor of art at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has exhibited his art world-wide, and traveled extensively to lecture and inform audiences of the situation of the Iraqi people and to the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. Bilal’s latest dynamic installation, Domestic Tension, placed him on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was accessible online to a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day. The month-long piece spurred on-line debates and intense conversations, garnering the praise of the Chicago Tribune, which called it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time,” and named him Artist of the Year in 2008. Newsweek’s assessment was “breathtaking.” Although, it is the resulting dialogue that Bilal seeks. As an artist, he feels that he does not have the privilege to create work that is not political. In the face of a war that stretches on, the 2004 deaths of his brother and father, the violence in his own history, Bilal seeks to imbue his audiences with a sense of empowerment that comes from hope in the enduring potential of humanity. In fall 2008 City Lights published “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun,” about Bilal’s life and the Domestic Tension project. In 2009 Booklist named it one of the top 10 arts books of the year.
Pip Chodorov is a New York filmmaker living in Paris. He started scratching on film at age 6, but studied cognitive science at the University of Rochester, and film semiotics at the University of Paris. He has worked in film distribution – at Orion Classics, NYC; UGC, Paris; and Light Cone, Paris – and at the Cannes festival’s American Pavilion since 1989. He founded Re:Voir Video, in 1994 (http://re-voir.com) and The Film Gallery in 2005, the first art gallery devoted excusively to experimental film. Additionally, in 1995 he started the internet-based forum on experimental film, FrameWorks (http://hi-beam.net/fw.html), and he co-founded in 1996 L’Abominable, a cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris (http://l-abominable.org/index-en.html). He is currently president of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (http://cjcinema.org), the longest-running filmmakers’ cooperative in France.
Alfredo Cramerotti (Chamber of Public Secrets) is a writer, curator and artist. His work explores the relationship between reality and representation across a variety of media and collaborations such as TV, radio, publishing, media festivals and curation. He is Co-curator (as CPS) of the forthcoming Manifesta 8, the European biennial of contemporary art in Murcia and Cartagena, Spain, and Curator at QUAD, the art, film and media centre in Derby, UK. He co-runs the collective art and media projects AGM Annual General Meeting (www.annualgeneralmeeting.net) and CPS Chamber of Public Secrets(www.chamber.dk). Recent publications include the book “Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing” (2009).
Barry Doupé (b. Victoria, BC) is a filmmaker living in Vancouver. He holds a Bachelor of Media Arts Degree from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. He is also a member of The Lions collaborative drawing group (www.lionspile.ca). His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Lyon Contemporary Art Museum, Pleasure Dome and the Tate Modern.
Christopher Eamon is a New York-based independent curator and writer. Previously, he was curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, San Francisco. Exhibitions include Silent Treatment (1999) and Bill Viola: The Crossing (1999), Aspen Art Musem; Video Acts: Single-Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust (2002-2003), PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York, and ICA, London; Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection 1963-2005 (2006), Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin; A Rictus Grin (2008), Broadway 1602, New York; and Accidental Modernism (2008), Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. Eamon’s publication projects include Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (2005), Northwestern University Press, Evanston, and Steidl, Germany; Film and Video Art (2009), Tate Publishing, London; and Art of Projection (2009), Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern. In 2010, Eamon will be curating an exhibition of contemporary Eastern and Central European post-conceptual art at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Kevin Jerome Everson is a filmmaker and Associate Professor at the University of Virginia. Everson has a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. To date he has made three feature-length films and over 50 shorts. In 2005 his debut feature Spicebush, a mediation on rhythms of work and the passage of time in Black American working class communities, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and won the Jury Documentary Prize at the New York Underground Film Festival. Cinnamon (2006) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and IFFR and has played at several international film festivals. The 2007 IFFR commissioned Emergency Needs was selected for inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. His most recent feature The Golden Age of Fish (2008) has shown at IFFR, BAFICI (Argentina) and NYUFF. In 2006, Filmmaker Magazine named Everson one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
Rooted in an interrogation of the abuses of power and their consequences, projects by multidisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel have been seen at documenta IX, Kassel; the Offenes Kulturhaus Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz; the Setagaya Museum, Tokyo; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Biennale di Venezia (Club Media, 1997; Head Start, 2001) among other important venues. Body Missing, her site-specific video-photo-web project on art theft as cultural policy (installed most recently in the tunnels under the City of Linz, and at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna, 2008-9) was the focus of From Theft to Virtuality, an international conference on the artist’s work organized at the ICA, London by art historian Griselda Pollock. The conference papers will form the basis for the first published anthology on Frenkel’s thought and practice. Her newest video, ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive, received its world première at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam (November, 2008), and its Canadian première at the Images Festival Gala, Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto (April, 2009). An early survey of Frenkel’s videos, curated by Dot Tuer for the 1997 Images Festival Spotlight provided the core selection to which new material was added for Of Memory and Displacement / Vera Frenkel: Collected Works, a four disk DVD/CD-ROM boxed set available from Vtape Distribution, Toronto.
Jean Gagnon is an independent curator and art critic based in Montreal. From March 2008 to September 2009, he was Director/curator of the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Montreal. Prior to this, Mr. Gagnon was Executive Director of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology from 1998 to 2008. Since 2004, he has been Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. From 1991 to 1998, he was associate curator of media arts for the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa. He initiated the DOCAM research alliance on documentation and conservation of technologically-based art works. He recently co-edited a special (bilingual) issue of Artpress 2 (Spring 2009) entitled Media Arts: Conservation and restoration.
Peggy Gale is one of the first Canadians to publish on the subject of video art. In 1973, Gale organized an exhibition at the AGO called Videoscape, which explored the work of over fifty artists working in video. After being hired by Art Metropole as their first video art expert, she was asked to edit the anthology Video By Artists (1976) and selected by the National Gallery to currate videos for an exhibition called Another Dimension. In 1979, Gale began working for A Space Gallery, a muti-disciplinary artist-run centre before becoming a freelance writer, editor and curator. In 1994, Gale co-authored Video re/View: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists’ Video with Lisa Steele. Most recently she edited Artist’s Talk, compiled from fifteen interviews with artists. Gale has also contributed essays to Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (1995) and Lectures Obliques (1999), and published in numerous periodicals. In 2006, Gale won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Benj Gerdes is an artist and activist working in film, video, and a number of other public formats. He frequently works in collaboration with other artists, activists, and theorists, including as a member of 16 Beaver Group. He is interested in intersections of political discourse, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His individual and collaborative work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes through historical research and reenactment, dialogue, and participatory or aleatory formalizations. Gerdes’ work has been exhibited widely in both traditional venues and emerging platforms, with the former including Kiasma Musuem of Modern Art (Helsinki), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), Guangzhou Triennial (China), Luleå Biennial (Sweden), REDCAT Gallery (Los Angeles), Art in General (New York), the New Museum (New York), and Migrating Forms (New York); and the latter more often including public performances and programs, web platforms, broadcast television, and books and publications such as October, The Journal of Aesthetics + Protest, Ninth Letter, and Rethinking Marxism. He is the recipient of numerous residencies, including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Woolworth Building Workspace Residency and Visual Arts Network (VAN) Exhibition Residency, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, and the Experimental Television Center. He has taught and lectured in numerous institutions and public contexts, and is currently a Visiting Artist in the Cinema Department at Binghamton (State University of New York) and serves on the video faculty at the Cooper Union School of Art.
Nicole Gingras is a writer and independent curator living in Montreal. Since 1985, she has been associated with museums, public galleries, artist-run centres and festivals. She is interested in experimental approaches to film, video and digital art and has curated film and video programs and solo and group exhibitions that have toured Canada, France, England. She has collaborated with various festivals in Amsterdam, Basel, Berlin, Casablanca, Hérouville Saint-Clair, London, Montreal, Quebec City, Split, Oberhausen, and since 2003, she has been programming at FIFA – International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal. In 2002, with Eric Mattson, she co-founded “minute”: a collective reflecting on the use of various media, initiating production and diffusion projects in and outside Canada. She published a wide variety of essays, interviews and monographic texts, some of which focus on the use of the voice and the power of words, on the relationships between still and moving images, and on the status of the image and on sound art practices. As an independent publisher, since 1996 she has produced monographs and artists’ books, as well as CDs featuring artists from Quebec and Canada. As part of a researcher in residence program at Artexte, Montreal, she edited an anthology and a CD, S:ON – Sound in Contemporary Canadian Art in 2003. Her most recent curatorial projects include “Tracking the Traces” (2005-2006), a two-part exhibition (12 artists from Canada and abroad) and Traces, its publication both produced by Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University, Montreal; TROU – Christof Migone (2006) produced by the Galerie de l’UQÀM, Montreal; Observations (2008-2009) at SBC-Art contemporain, Montreal; Listening to See (2007-2009), three solo exhibitions with German artists in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Montreal and three artist-run centers. She is currently preparing a monographic exhibition, with artist Raymond Gervais, documenting 35 years of his work, as well as researching the relationship between sound and image in media art, and guest curating for TraficART, a biennial taking place in Saguenay (North of Quebec), in August 2010.
John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator. His features include: Urinal (1988 – Best Feature Teddy, Berlin Film Festival); Zero Patience (1993 – Best Canadian Film, Sudbury Film Festival); Lilies (1996 – Best Film Genie, Best Film at festivals in Montreal, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, San Francisco); Uncut (1997, Honourable Mention, Berlin Film Festival) and most recently Fig Trees (2009 – Teddy for Best Documentary at the Berlinale, the Best Canadian Feature award at the Toronto Inside Out Film Festival, and a Special Award at the Torino GLBT Film Festival). Greyson has been active in various anti-occupation, anti-censorship, AIDS, peace and queer activist media projects. An associate professor in York University’s film department, he is the recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art.
Tamar Guimarães (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is an artist based in Copenhagen. Thinking of documents as palimpsests, her practice proposes historical narratives as contingent and fluid, and as spaces from which one can speculate on the present. She’s involved in the organization of small, intimate gatherings, collective readings, small-scale public talks and film screenings, invested on the possibilities of creating transient micro-communities and minor public events. Her recent exhibitions include Panorama, Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Dura Lex Sed Lex (no cabelo so Gumex) a solo show at David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen; Artspace Sydney and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Bright Morning Star/ Kenneth Anger cycle, at Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal; a text for the summer 2009 issue of Printed Project, published by Visual Artists Ireland; the 7th Gwangju Biennial (Korea); the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (China); CPH DOX international documentary film festival, Copenhagen; Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts, Nuuk, Greenland. She was a studio fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program (NY) in 2007-2008 and a research curator for the Third Guangzhou Triennial in 2008. She is currently preparing a publication in collaboration with Capacete and Forlaget * [asterisk] as well as producing new work for the 29th Sao Paulo Biennial.
Considered a pioneer of both queer cinema and experimental media, Barbara Hammer is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 30 years. Her experimental films of the 1970’s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. In the 80’s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Optic Nerve (1985) and Endangered (1988) were selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials (’85,’89). Nitrate Kisses (1992) was chosen for the 1993 Whitney Biennial. In April, 2008, Diving Women of Jeju-do premiered at the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival. Her most recent work, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor (2008), premiered at the 32nd Frameline International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in San Francisco. It was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival and Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art. She has had retrospectives at The Berlin Film Festival and Centre Pompidou, Paris in 1985, the Digital University Taiwan in 2005, Universitad Complutense in Madrid in 2008. She teaches each summer at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her memoir, HAMMER! Making Movies Out Of Sex and Life was released in March 2010. In the next year, retrospectives of her work will be held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (Sept. 2010), and the Tate Modern in London (Jan. 2011) which will include a film performance of Changing the Shape of Film on the bridge of the turbine room. The Tate will also feature an online historic database of Hammer’s performances and static visual art and photography.
Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Arthur, The Believer, Cinema Scope, Kunstforum, Millennium Film Journal, Moving Image Source, Rhizome, The Village Voice and elsewhere, and he is a 2009 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival, and has organized screenings and exhibitions for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cinematexas, Eyebeam, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Museum of Modern Art, and San Francisco Cinematheque. He currently teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts department at Bard College, and has lectured at Harvard, NYU, Yale, and other schools as well as at Art in General, Aurora Picture Show, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, the Images Festival, the Impakt Festival, and Pacific Film Archive. His book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games was published in 2006. With Andrea Grover, he is currently editing the collection A Microcinema Primer: A Brief History of Small Cinemas. He is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York.
Nicky Hamlyn is a filmmaker, writer and lecturer. He studied Fine Art at Reading University and has completed over forty films, videos and installation works since 1975. He has worked as a workshop organiser at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and at the BBC as a dubbing editor. Recent screenings include New York and Toronto film festivals and at Ann Arbor film festival where he had a retrospective screening of work made over the last twenty years. His book Film Art Phenomena was published by the British Film Institute in 2003. He has also published essays on Stan Brakhage’s Roman Numeral films and Peter Kubelka’s film Arnulf Rainer. He is Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts, Maidstone, UK and a visiting lecturer to the Royal College of Art, London.
Birgit Hein (b. Berlin) worked together with Wilhelm Hein as a filmmaker from 1966 – 1989. She has worked as a solo filmmaker since 1990. In 1968 she co-founded XSCREEN in Cologne, one of the first sites for showing underground and avant-garde film in a German speaking country. She is the author of “Film im Underground” (1971) widely considered the first German-language study of underground film and later “Film as Film” (1977). Since, she has since published widely. She has exhibited and had retrospectives internationally, including in Berlin, Kopenhagen, London, Madrid, Montreal, New York, Paris, Rotterdam and Shanghai. She was professor at the University of the Arts in Braunschweig from 1990 – 2007. She lives and works in Berlin.
Shai Heredia is a filmmaker and curator of film art. She founded Experimenta – the international festival for experimental cinema in India – in 2003. Over the years, she has rapidly developed the festival into a significant international forum for artists’ film and video. Shai has also curated experimental film programmes for major film and art venues like the Berlinale Film festival Germany, Tate Modern UK, EXiS Korea, Images Festival Toronto, Cinema Nova Brussels and Lightcone; Scratch Projections Paris amongst others. Shai holds an MA in documentary film from Goldsmiths College, London. She is currently a Programme Executive at the India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore, where she makes arts grants under the Extending Arts Practice and the Curatorship programmes.
Kathy High is a visual/media artist, independent curator, and educator. She produces videos and installations posing queer and feminist questions into areas of medicine/bio-science, science fiction, and animal/interspecies collaborations. Her areas of interest are video art, new media arts, video/media art preservation and history, experimental and documentary filmmaking, curatorial studies, feminist studies, bio-arts, animal studies and intersections of living science and arts. Her art works have been screened in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, and she has received awards for her media works from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. High is an Associate Professor of Video and new Media at the Department of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, a department specializing in integrated electronic arts practices <http://arts.rpi.edu>. She teaches digital video production, contemporary media art history and theory and has been working in the area of documentary and experimental film, video and photography and new media for over twenty years. See Video Data Bank for information on video work by K.High: http://www.vdb.org
Cheryl L’ Hirondelle (aka Waynohtêw, Cheryl Koprek) is an Alberta born mixed blood multi and interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and musician. Her creative practice is an investigation of the junction of a cree worldview (nêhiyawin) in contemporary time and space. In 2004, L’Hirondelle was one of the first Aboriginal artists from this land now known as Canada to be invited to present her new media work at DAK’ART Lab, as part of the 6th Edition of the Dakar Biennale for Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal. In both 2005 & 2006, L’Hirondelle was the recipient of the imagineNATIVE New Media Award for her online net.art projects: treatycard, 17:TELL and wêpinâsowina. Her 2008 interdisciplinary project nikamon ohci askiy (songs because of the land), was recognized as an honoree in the Net.Art category of the 13th Annual Webby Awards. In 2009 she curated “Codetalkers of the Digital Divide (or why we didn’t become ‘roadkill on the information superhighway’)” for imagineNATIVE Film + Media Festival’s 10th Anniversary. She has also been involved in a variety of media arts initiatives including: Smartlab Associate Researcher, 2005–07; Banff New Media Institute Advisory Committee, 2006; Canada Council Media Arts Advisory Committee, 1997–2001; KIDS FROM KANATA On-line Aboriginal Liaison, 1995-96; and Drum Beats to Drum Bytes Thinktank, 1994.
James Holcombe is a key member of no.w.here, leading workshops on the various technical aspects of filmmaking such as super 8 and 16mm cameras, optical and contact printing, and hand processing. His film work explores collisions of chance, improvisation, structure and decomposition, using improvised ‘in camera’ techniques to explore the technical and material aspects of film along with experimentation in hand processing. James’s work has been exhibited throughout the UK and Europe. Screenings include
Serpentine Gallery, 2009, VideoEx Festival, Switzerland, 2009, “Starting From Scratch”, Rotterdam, 2008, Evolution Festival, Leeds, 2007, Tate Modern, 2006, Avanto Festival Helsinki, 2005.Formed in 2004 by artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, no.w.here is an artist run space in London which opens a space where the place of the moving image within contemporary art can be explored and expanded. Whether supporting artists and the development of their work, or critically engaging audiences, artistic practice lies at the core of no.w.here, and is fed by innovative projects, events, facilities, workshops and education
programmes.www.no-w-here.org.uk
Henriette Huldisch is associate curator at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where she oversees the Media Archive. From 2001 to 2008 she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where she co-curated the 2008 Whitney Biennial Exhibition and Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75. Previously she curated shows such as a retrospective of films by Robert Beavers and the exhibition Small: The Object in Film, Video, and Slide Installation (2004), with the work of Sol LeWitt, Jonathan Monk, and Michael Snow. Among Huldisch’s writings are essays and interviews in Artforum, North Drive Press, and Collecting the New: New Museums and Contemporary Art, as well as numerous Whitney publications. In the fall of 2009 she was a guest professor at the Malmo Art Academy, Sweden.
Jorge La Ferla, one of the founders of the video art movement in Argentina, is also a TV and multimedia director. His trilogy Vídeo en la Puna: El Viaje de Valdez (Video in the Puna: Valdez’ Journey), consisting of El primer viaje de Valdez (Valdez’ First Journey), Valdez habanero (Valdez in Havana) (1993-94), and ValdeZen (1993-94), tells the life story of Richard Key Valdez, a fictitious media magnate. The videos question the genres of cinema and television. In 2003 this work was part of the Muestra Euroamericana de Vídeo y Arte Digital (Euro-American Sample of Video and Digital Art) at the Centro Cultural Rojas in Buenos Aires. He is permanent Professor in the Audiovisual Techniques Department of the University of Buenos Aires, and at the Fundación Universidad del Cine. Between 1994 and 1999 he was Academic Coordinator of the video, cinema and experimental multimedia seminars organized by the Fundación Antorchas with the Rockefeller and McArthur Foundations for Latin American artists. He is Director of the Eurolatinoamericano Festival of Video and Digital Art organized by the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and one of the country’s most important representatives of research into the new media. He has published countless articles on audiovisual media in Argentina, Germany, Brazil, France and Switzerland.
Simone Jones – Born in a Red Cross outpost in northern Ontario, Canada, Jones graduated from the Ontario College of Art with a concentration in Experimental Art and received her MFA in Sculpture Installation from York University in Toronto. Jones was the Jill Kraus Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, with a joint appointment in the School of Art and Robotics from 2000 – 2003. Jones is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto where she teaches in the Integrated Media Program.
Hangjun Lee is a filmmaker, programmer for EXiS, editor of N’Avant and independent curator. Lee’s films utilize multi-projection formats with at least two 16mm projectors. In 2006, he created and continues to edit an artists film & video magazine called N’Avant. In addition, Lee was programmed a monthly experimental film & video screening in Seoul from 2007 to 2009 and curated special screening program for several gallery space around the world. Lee has edited the books Carl Brown(2008) and an anthology on issues in Asian experimental media (2009). His recent works are distributed by Lightcone.
Ross Lipman is a Senior Film Preservationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where his many restorations include Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles, the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and works by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Shirley Clarke, Kenneth Anger, and John Cassavetes. He was a 2008 recipient of Anthology Film Archive’s Preservation Honors, and is a two-time winner of the National Society of Film Critics’ Heritage Award. His essays on film history, technology, and aesthetics have been published in numerous books and journals. Lipman is also an independent filmmaker whose works have screened internationally and been collected by museums and institutions including the Oberhausen Kurzfilm Archive, Budapest’s Balazs Bela Studios, and Munich’s Sammlung Goetz. In recent years he has been designing films, videos, and performance works exploring urban decay as a marker of modern consciousness.
Steven Loft is a Mohawk of the Six Nations. He is a curator, writer and media artist, and is currently the Executive Director of the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival (Toronto), the largest festival of Indigenous made film and media art in the world. Previously, he was the first Curator-In-Residence, Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada. While there he curated several exhibitions including Back to the Beginning: Indigenous Abstraction and Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by Aboriginal artists (both currently touring). He was formerly the Director/Curator of the Urban Shaman Gallery (Winnipeg), Aboriginal Curator at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Artistic Director of the Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association. He has written extensively on Indigenous art and aesthetics for various magazines, catalogues and arts publications. Loft co-edited Transference, Technology, Tradition: Aboriginal Media and New Media Art, published by the Banff Centre Press in 2005. His video works, which include A History in Two Parts, 2510037901, TAX THIS! and Out of the Darkness have been screened at festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally. His 2008 curated program for imagineNATIVE, Culture Shock, screened at the Festival and subsequently at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival.
Ming-Yuen S. Ma is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at Pitzer College, a member of the Claremont Colleges. He is the co-editor (with Alexandra Juhasz) of the Moving Image Review of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the upcoming book Resolution 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces (with Erika Suderburg). As a curator and media activist, Ma recently co-directed (with Carol Stakenas) Resolution 3, which included a 3-day symposium, a traveling exhibition, and a book. His experimental videos and installations, including the ReCut Project (2006), THIS IS NOT A FOREIGN FILM (2002), Xin Lu Project (1997-present), Sniff (1997), Slanted Vision (1995), and Toc Storee (1992) have shown national and internationally in venues ranging for the Museum of Modern Art in New York to a tour bus driving around Los Angeles. He has worked with numerous media and arts organizations, including LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), LA Freewaves, Visual Communications, MIX/NYC, Foundation for Art Resources, Inc. (FAR), Highways Performance Space, American Film Institute, The Los Angeles Festival, MIX/NYC, and many others. After producing experimental media for more than fifteen years, Ma recently shifted his focus to writing. He is currently working on a book exploring the relationships between sound culture/theories and experimental media. For more information, go to www.mingyuensma.org
Ou Ning’s cultural practices encompass multiple disciplines. As an activist, he founded U-thèque, an independent film and video organization; As an editor and graphic designer, he is known for his seminal book New Sound of Beijing; As a curator, he initiated the biennale exhibition Get It Louder (2005, 2007) and launched the sound project in China Power Station, co-organized by Serpentine Gallery and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; As an artist, he is known for the urban research projects such as San Yuan Li, commissioned by 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003), and Da Zha Lan, commissioned by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. He is a frequent contributor of various magazines, books and exhibition catalogues and has lectured around the world. In 2008, he was appointed the chief curator of 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. In 2009, he is chosen to be the jury member of the 8th Benesse Prize at the 53rd Venice Biennale. He’s currently based in Beijing, and is the director of Shao Foundation.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh was born in Rotterdam. After graduating from Goldsmiths’ College in London, she worked in Belgium and Germany for many years. Van Oldenborgh films communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique (public) location. In this way her work investigates the political, social and cultural relationships in our society and how these are openly manifested through everyday social intercourse. Other works of Wendelien van Oldenborgh are at the moment shown at the Van Abbemuseum (Maurits Script, 2007) and the MuHKA in Antwerp (LECTURE/AUDIENCE/CAMERA, 2008). In 2009, five years of her work was overviewed at TENT in Rotterdam.
Juan Ortiz-apuy was born in San Jose, Costa Rica and at an early age, moved to the province of Guanacaste, in the northern region of the country. At the age of 18, Juan moved to Mexico City where he developed a great interest for art and cinema before returning to Costa Rica to study Architecture. In 2003, he relocated to Montreal, Canada where he earned a BA at Concordia University. He went to graduate school in Glasgow, Scotland at The Glasgow School of Art. He currently lives and works in Halifax, Canada where he is completing a Master Degree in Fine Arts at NSCAD University. Juan
Describes his artistic practice as a road trip into the remote places of language; the grey area where articulation meets ineffability and language is a place of struggle. As he makes this drive without a map, he takes dirt roads, detours, wrong turns and often end up in cul-de-sacs. The trip however, will hopefully lead him inland, searching for highways, open spaces and the possibility of a bridge, of a way out.
Susan Oxtoby is Senior Film Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. For 12 years, Oxtoby worked for Cinematheque Ontario, where she was the Director of Programming from 1997 to 2005. She was also the Programmer of Wavelengths, a forum celebrating avant-garde film at the Toronto International Film Festival, between 2001 and 2005. Oxtoby served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) for two consecutive terms. In October 2005, she was appointed to the National Film Preservation Board, an advisory body organized by the Library of Congress (comprised of film critics, academics, filmmakers, programmers, and studio representatives) that advises the Library on films named to the National Registry. Oxtoby’s other professional experience includes guest programming the 50th anniversary of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar at Vassar College in 2004.
Donghyun Park is a filmmaker, festival director of EXiS (Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul), and Professor of Film at Myongji University, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in film studies at the JoongAng University in Seoul and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. His most recent films are Murderous Intent (2009) and Kimu: The Strange Dance (2010).
Andréa Picard is a Toronto-based writer and curator, who has worked with the Toronto International Film Festival since 1999. She is a full-time programmer at TIFF Cinematheque, the organization’s celebrated year-round screening programme. In addition to programming and organizing numerous directors’ retrospectives and thematic shows, she presents “The Free Screen”, an ongoing series exploring the history, as well the ever-changing evolution of avant-garde film and video and its intersection with other disciplines. Since 2006, she is the curator of Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde programme. Her essays and articles have been published by, among others, Sonnabend Gallery, Oakville Art Gallery, Gallery TPW, Flash Arts International, Canadian Architect, Canadian Art, Prefix Photo, Millennium Film Journal, Border Crossings and Cahiers du cinéma. Her longstanding “Film/Art” column for Cinema Scope magazine explores the junctions between cinema and the visual arts. In 2009, she contributed essays to books on Swiss painter/filmmaker Hannes Schüpbach and Dutch installation artists Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan.
After spending her childhood and adolescence in San Francisco, Yvonne Rainer moved to New York in 1956. Between 1959 and 1960, she studied dance at the Martha Graham School, while learning ballet at Ballet Arts. In the early 1960s, she participated in Ann Halprin’s workshops and studiously attended classes by Merce Cunningham, where she met a number of her future collaborators. In 1962, she became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theatre. Much like other choreographers of her era, Rainer sought to blur the stark line separating dancers from non-dancers. Inspired by John Cage’s indeterminacy notions, she created her performances according to a series of generic tasks that integrated day-to-day gestures into a dance vocabulary (walking, running, lifting, etc.). Rainer created many of the best-known works produced by the Judson, including We Shall Run (1963), Terrain (1963) and Parts of Some Sextets (1965). While creating At My Body’s House (1964), she asked engineers Billy Klüver and Harold Hodges to modify miniature radio transmitters to amplify the sounds of her breathing. In 1966, she premiered Trio A, the first section of her work The Mind is a Muscle. Although she had integrated projected images into her performance environments since the mid 1960s, Rainer wrote and directed her first medium length film, Lives of Performers, in 1972. In 1975, she began to focus primarily on making full-length films. Her films then took a distinctly political turn, exploring such themes as political violence (Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), social exclusion (Privilege, 1990) and illness (MURDER and murder, 1996). In 2000 she returned to choreography and created a new dance: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000), a group performance commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation. Since then she has created three dances: AG Indexical, with a Little Help From H.M. (2006), RoS Indexical (2007), and Spiraling Down (2008). Rainer taught in the Whitney Independent Program from 1974 onward, and since 2005 she has been Distinguished Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. In 2006 MIT Press published Rainer’s memoir, “Feelings Are Facts: a Life.” Recently she has been involved in Documenta 12 (2007), “Here We Dance” at the Tate Modern (2008) and Performa 09 (2009).
Dont Rhine co-founded the sound art collective Ultra-red in 1994 in Los Angeles. The collective conduct sound-based investigations alongside social justice movements where sound is both the medium and the site of inquiry. These investigations take the form of audio recordings, art exhibitions, performances, or sound walks. As an activist, Rhine has worked with a variety of social movements including ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Clean Needles Now (needle exchange), and Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project. Artist, composer and writer, Rhine curates Ultra-red’s online fair-use record label, Public Record. He has lectured extensively across the U.S. and Europe and is on faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.
Peter Ride is Principal Research Fellow at The University of Westminster. He is course leader for MA Visual Culture and currently developing the forthcoming MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture (from October 2010). His research is centred around creative practice, in particular addressing digital media and interdisciplinary arts projects. He was one of the first curators in the UK to produce internet artworks. Recent curatorial projects include a retrospective, ŒDavid Rokeby -Silicon Remembers Carbon¹ in the UK and Canada (2007/8) and a group exhibition Timeless: time, landscape and new media¹ (Toronto, 2005). Previously he was employed at the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV, (1983-7) The Photographers¹ Gallery (1989-93), Cambridge Darkroom Gallery (1993-5), Artec, the Arts Technology Centre, London (1995-7) and DA2 Digital Arts Development Agency (1998-2000). He is the co-author with Andrew Dewdney of (The New Media Handbook¹, Routledge, 2006.
David Rokeby is an installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. He has been creating and exhibiting since 1982. For the first part of his career he focussed on interactive pieces that directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception systems. In the last decade, his practice has expanded to included video, kinetic and static sculpture. His work has been performed / exhibited in shows across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia, including most recently, LuminaTO Festival (Toronto, Canada) in 2009 and Synthetic Time (Beijing, China) in 2008. Awards include the first BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for Interactive Art in 2000, a 2002 Governor General’s award in Visual and Media Arts and the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art 2002. (http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/home.html)
Originally from Japan, Daïchi Saïto is an independent filmmaker based in Montreal. In 2004, Saïto co-founded the Double Negative Collective, a Montreal-based artist filmmaking group dedicated to the exhibition and production of experimental cinema, and has been active as a catalyst for the resurfacing interest in celluloid in the local artistic community. The films of Saïto explore the relation between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the material nature of the medium, fusing a formal investigation of frame and juxtaposition with sensual and poetic expressions. His films have screened in various venues both in Canada and abroad, including: The New York Film Festival; The Images Festival; The Toronto International Film Festival; The International Film Festival Rotterdam; The London Film Festival; The Hong Kong International Film Festival; Cinematheque Ontario; Anthology Film Archives; SFMOMA, among others. His recent films include ALL THAT RISES (2007) and TREES OF SYNTAX, LEAVES OF AXIS (2009). His films are available from CFMDC (Toronto) and Light Cone (Paris).
Paige Sarlin is an artist, activist, and writer. She has an M.F.A. in Film, Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in English from Oberlin College. She was awarded a Joukowsky Presidential Fellowship by Brown University where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media. Her first full-length documentary film, The Last Slide Projector, premiered at
the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007. Her work has been exhibited internationally and TLSP has screened at Anthology Film Archives, the Toronto Contact Festival, and the NW Film Forum. Her
writings on art, film, and politics have been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, AREA: Chicago, Framework: A Journal of Film and Culture, October, and Re-Thinking Marxism. Since 1999 she has been an active participant in 16 Beaver Group in New York City, a platform for the discussion of the intersection of art and politics. Paige is the curator of Magic Lantern Cinema, an experimental film and video series in Providence, Rhode Island. Currently she is developing both a dissertation and a film about the history of the interview form. The working title for her dissertation is “Interview-Work: The Interview Form and Labor.”
Tom Sherman is an artist and writer. He established a video production facility at A Space (1972-74); was a founding editor of Fuse magazine (1980); represented Canada at the Venice Biennale (1980); published “Cultural Engineering” as part of a retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Canada (1983); founded the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council (1983); was an international commissioner for the 1986 Venice Biennale; was appointed Director of the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University in 1991; published “Before and After the I-Bomb…” (Banff Centre Press 2002); received the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art (2003); received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art (2010).
Pelle Snickars is Associate Professor and Head of Research at the Swedish National Library. He is the co-editor of numerous books on media history including: 1897: Media Histories around the Stockholm Exhibition (2006), Narrative in different Media (2007), A Cultural History of Media (2008), Inside the Image Archive: On Photography and the Effects of Digitization (2009) (all in Swedish). Internationally, Snickars has published extensively on both early cinema as well as new media. Currently, he is participating in EUscreen, an EU-funded project centered on bringing televisual material online. Recently Snickars was the co-editor of the first major publication on the biggest repository of popular culture on the Web, The YouTube Reader (2009). A similar book, focusing on Apple’s iPhone, is forthcoming during late 2010 – Moving Data: The iPhone & My Media.
Michael Snow is considered one of Canada’s most important living artists, and one of the world’s leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explores the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompasses film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow’s practice comprises a thorough investigation into the nature of perception. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow’s films of this period, including Back and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such as Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he has focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). He studied at Ontario College of Art. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Order of Canada, and two Los Angeles Film Critics Awards. Snow has had solo exhibitions and retrospectives across the world. Toronto’s Power Plant Gallery mounted his latest works in the show “Recent Snow: Projected Works by Michael Snow.”
Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and video artist in the field of essayist documentary film as well as a cultural theorist, widely published writer, and professor of cultural and gender studies at the University for the Arts in Berlin. Migration, cultural globalisation, feminism and political theory are central themes of her artistic and theoretical work. Steyerl studied cinematography in Tokyo and Munich and has a PhD in Philosophy. In 2004 she Participated in Manifesta 5, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. She participated in documenta 12, Kassel 2007, Shanghai Biennial, Rotterdam Film Festival and was the subject of a solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. In addition, Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy and has taught film and theory at (amongst other institutions) Goldsmiths College and Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a film and video curator who lives and works in Berlin. She is Co-Director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (with Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler) and Member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum and founding director of Forum Expanded, a new section of the Berlin International Film Festival which negotiates the boundaries of cinema. Her curatorial work comprises numerous film programs, retrospectives and exhibitions, among them Michael Snow, Guy Maddin, Heinz Emigholz, Birgit Hein, Ulrike Ottinger, Stephen Dwoskin and many others. She is also the curator of the series “Rising Stars, Falling Stars“ with Vaginal Davis and recently co-curated (with Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel) LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in A Rented World (October 2009). She regularly gives lectures and teaches classes. Her texts have been published in ‘Frauen und Film’, ‘The Moving Image’,'Texte zur Kunst’,'Ästhetik & Kommunikation’, ‘Schriftenreihe Kinemathek’ as well as in various festival and exhibition catalogues. She is the editor of: Kinemathekheft Nr. 93: “Germaine Dulac” (with Sabine Nessel and Heide Schlüpmann), Berlin 2002; “The Memo Book. Films, Videos and Installations by Matthias Müller”, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005; “The Primal Scene: Christine Noll Brinckmann. Films and Texts”, Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008; “Who says concrete doesn’t burn, have you tried? West Berlin Film in the ’80s” (with Florian Wüst), Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008. www.arsenal-berlin.de
David Teh is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He studied critical theory at the Power Institute, University of Sydney, receiving his PhD in 2005. Before moving to Singapore, David was an independent critic and curator based in Bangkok (2005-09). His projects there included Platform, a showcase of Thai installation artists (The Queen’s Gallery and The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, 2006); The More Things Change… The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2008); and Unreal Asia, a thematic programme for the 55th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2009). David has been a frequent contributor to numerous journals, newspapers and magazines including Art Asia Pacific, Art & Australia and The Bangkok Post; is an editorial advisor for C-Arts and Eyeline; and was a moderator of ‘Cultural Ecologies: Communicating Contemporary Art in the 21st Century’ at the Asian Cultural Co-operation Forum in Hong Kong (2006). His current research is on contemporary visual art, film and new media in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Thailand. David was a co-founder of the Fibreculture forum for internet culture (www.fibreculture.org <http://www.fibreculture.org> ) and a founding director of Sydney artist-run initiative, Half Dozen. He is a director of Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney (www.chalkhorse.com.au <http://www.chalkhorse.com.au> ).
Bart Testa is senior lecturer at the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto. His teaching includes courses on Chinese cinemas, European art films, urbanism and film, avant-garde cinema, Science Fiction movies and other popular film genres. He has authored two books on experimental films, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (1993) and Spirit in the Landscape (1989) and edited an anthology on Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as journal articles and anthologized essays.
Kaitlin Till-Landry is an emerging Toronto-based artist/curator who works primarily with video. Her studio practice engages conceptual properties of performance for the camera and its lasting documentation. Till-Landry graduated from the University of Toronto with a Specialist in Visual Studies. In 2007 she restored a collection of 1970s reel-to-reel videos belonging to performance artist Martha Wilson for Vtape. She then designed a collection assessment system for Vtape that considered how to detect and best record degradation for each format of video in the Vtape collection. In 2009 she co-founded Butcher Gallery with Lili Huston-Herterich and Brad Tinmouth. Till-Landry’s curatorial projects have included On You On Me, for Butcher Gallery and From Foundation to Fixation: Video Art and The Face, for Vtape. Most recently Till-Landry’s art practice has produced performance-based work that explores psychological properties of the camera in relation to the effect that mediatized culture has on the presentation of self, be it virtual or physical.
Dot Tuer has been writing about video art since the 1980s in the capacity of a theorist and cultural historian. Her work has focused on video art in Toronto, the famous artist-run Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), technology, memory and global media. She has contributed essays to countless anthologies and periodicals including Towards the Slaughterhouse of History: Working Papers on Culture (1992), Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (1995), The Institute™ Or, What We Do for Love (2003), and is the author of Caché du Cinema: Discovering Toronto Filmmakers (1985) and Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology, and Cultural Resistance (2005). She has received Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council awards for her writing.
Ainsley Walton is Assistant Conservator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada. With an emphasis on media works in the collection, her job entails preserving, restoring and documenting artworks made from a variety of contemporary and traditional materials and techniques. She has previously worked for the Archives of Manitoba and Library and Archives Canada. In 2007, she was awarded a Claudia de Hueck Fellowship to research strategies for conservation of time-based media at the National Gallery. She holds a B.Sc. in Anthropology (Trent University) and an M.A. in Art Conservation (Queen’s University). She is a former member of the board of Directors of the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of Ottawa and is presently Chair of Galerie SAW Gallery in Ottawa.
Sobhi al-Zobaidi. Filmmaker, artist and scholar. Made documentary films on violence against women, memory and imprisonment. His multimedia installation “deep shit” was a strong critic for post-Oslo Palestine. In his short fiction,“hawal’” he struggles with issues of representation. His first documentary, “my very private map” won first prize at the Institue du Monde Arabe. He co-wrote the lyrics for “death of the prophet” the most circulated Palestinian album by Sabreen. He wrote songs for dance and theater groups. In his current work, both scholarly and artistic, he focuses on issues relating to space and memory. In his recent installation “partition”, he transformed the map of Palestine into a memory game, an act he says was inspired by the Chinese cartographers in Jorge Luis Borges’ story. In his recent publications, “tora bora cinema” and “digital nomads: between homepages and homelands”, he studies digital articulations by Palestinians, that are informed by a condition where space is constantly diminishing. Currently, al-zobaidi is finishing doctoral research at Simon Fraser University.
http://web.mac.com/sobhi
