CONTRIBUTORS

Giorgio Agamben, Baruch Spinoza Chair at European Graduate School EGS, is a professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy and teaches philosophy at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. Agamben’s unique blending of literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, literature and art makes him one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. He was a visiting professor in Paris and has taught at American universities such as UC Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Cruz and Northwestern.

Manuel Arias-Maldonado is lecturer in political science at the University of Malaga, Spain. He is currently a research associate at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Berkeley and spent periods of research in Keele, Oxford and Siena. His research topics include environmental politics, political liberalism and the minimal state, deliberative democracy, as well as Wikipedia and the sociopolitical implications of information technologies. On this last topic he has published a comparative study of the German, Spanish and English Wikipedias. His most recent book is Real Green: Sustainability after the End of Nature (2011).

Fareed Armaly is an artist and curator, whose work introduces a research-driven methodology that draws its guidelines out from selected roles and fields of enquiry, setting these in new correspondences “coercing constellations” (Helmut Draxler). Armaly considers the open definition of artistic practice as the medium with which to render a contemporary syntax that implicates a politics of representation, culture and identity. Armaly has exhibited internationally at distinguished platforms such as Documenta 11. Parallel to this, he has occupied a range of positions within the art-institutional system, including cocurating museum exhibitions (Louisiana Museum, Denmark) and four years as artistic director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Since 2008 he has been instructor on the Ecole du Magasin curatorial programme, Grenoble, and between 2011 and 2013 is visiting fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Aleida Assmann is a cultural anthropologist and Egyptologist. She is professor of English and comparative literature, University of Constance. Assmann’s research is chiefly concerned with questions of cultural memory, remembering and forgetting. Notably, she has examined the tensions between personal experience and official remembrance in the history of memory in Germany after the Second World War. In a recent work, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (2006), Assmann points out a number of possible paths from an individual to a collective construction of the past. Assmann has been a visiting scholar at a number of universities and institutes, including the Getty Center in Santa Monica, California (1995), Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1998–1999) and Princeton University (2001).

Roger Ballen, born in New York City, has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa for almost 30 years. During this period from 1982 to 2008 he produced eight books and his style evolved from photojournalism to a unique artistic vision. The subject of animals has been an essential theme to Ballen’s work since he started photography over 40 years ago. His next book (to be published in 2013) will be on birds photographed in a strange surrealistic place. Ballen’s work has been shown in important institutions throughout the world and is represented in many museum collections, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, the Tate, London, England and Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA.

Jean Baudrillard’s (1929–2007) work combines philosophy, social theory and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture and thought, Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and as a writer who developed his own style and forms of writing. He was an extremely prolific author who published over 30 books, including The System of Objects, Impossible Exchange, Screened Out and The Perfect Crime.

Alexander Becherer, sculptor and painter, sees his roots in urban life and in the influences of street art, although he himself prefers to live in a rural area. Vast wall productions, classical paintings, right through to the creation of—and experimentation with—sculpture and collage are characteristic of his work, which is based on a play with ambiguity, status, waste, loss of identity, abnormity, deliberate or non-deliberate provocation and antagonisms. His main theme, though, is masquerade, the glance behind the curtain. Becherer’s sculptures construct complex object layers of composite beings inbetween man and animal, carrying a subtle humour and excess armament at the same time.

Philipp Beckert, is a musician and photographer. From 1990-1992 he was the assistant concertmaster of the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra. He has been the first violin in the Rundfunksinfonie Orchester Berlin (RSB) since 1996. In addition to his orchestral work, Philipp Beckert is also active as a soloist and in chamber music ensembles, and was involved in many premieres of New Music and contemporary composers. Philipp Beckert has been a photographic autodidact for the last 25 years. He works in black and white analogue photography in a style of photo and travel journalism. Numerous trips overseas have brought him to Japan, China, Brazil, Canada, Korea and the USA where he has combined his concert appearances with photographic research. Philipp Beckert is a co-founder of NUXN – Platform for Photography and Visual Anthropology.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a writer, media theorist and media activist. He took part in the ’68 movement as a student. Accused of participating in militant actions he was imprisoned in 1969 and in 1972. Like other intellectuals involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. In 2002 he launched the experiment Telestreet, a network of activist media against the Italian media dictatorship. In 2009 he published The Soul at Work (Semiotext(e), Los Angeles). He has been a contributor to the magazines Semiotext(e) (New York), Chimères (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Archipiélago (Barcelona). He teaches social history of communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and works as coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCÉPSI).

Peter Berz is a cultural and media scientist who works on the natural philosophy of Jacques Monod at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Berlin and lectures at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His fields of interest are Lamarckism in history and the present day, biological morphogenesis and topologies. Among his publications are L’imaginaire animal (2011), Versuch über die Wölbung (2010), Die Lebewesen und ihre Medien (2009), Die Kommunikation der Täuschung: Eine Medientheorie der Mimikry (2008), Die vier Verschiebungen des Blicks (2005) and 08/15: Ein Standard des 20. Jahrhunderts (2001).

Alain Bieber studied rhetoric, sociology, literature and political science in Tübingen and Paris. He works as an art critic, blogger, project manager and curator in Strasbourg. In 2004 he founded REBEL:ART, a platform for art, culture and politics. Ongoing projects are The International Stickeraward and PARASITES, an illegal exhibition series. He cocurated the Subversiv Messe in Linz and the Dockville Festival in Hamburg, was a jury member at DokFest Kassel, Viral Video Award and Backup Media Festival, and has given lectures about street art, subversive strategies, fanzines and illegal interventions all over the world. For the last three years he has worked as a journalist for the German ART magazine in Hamburg and is now the project manager for ARTE Creative in Strasbourg.

Marc Bijl, a Dutch media artist, studied at the Royal Academy of Art and Design in s’Hertogenbosch and at the Rennie Mackintosh School of Art in Glasgow. He was part of Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt with his fake Flash Art and legal and illegal interventions in public space. He has participated in various international group shows since then, such as Nation (2003) at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, 20/20 Vision (2004) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the touring exhibition Populism (2005), Dark (2006) at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and Restless Empathy at Aspen Art Museum (USA). Among his latest solo shows are never trust a rebel at Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart (2012) and 9/11 666 777 at Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam (2010). He is currently working on large abstract paintings and preparing his first museum solo show at Groninger Museum in October 2012.

Elize Bisanz is an art historian and semiotician. She was educated in Berlin and Paris and holds a master’s degree in cultural science and a PhD in communication science. She is professor at the Institute for Studies in Art at the University of Lüneburg and a member of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University. Her recent book, an edition of Charles S. Peirce’s Monist Series, is an essential contribution to a timely access to the Peircean universe of science. Her research fields include cultural communication, deconstruction, pragmaticism and interdisciplinary scientific methods. She is also the author of Die Überwindung des Ikonischen (2010), as well as the editor of various interdisciplinary books such as Das Bild zwischen Kognition und Kreativität: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zum bildhaften Denken (2011).

Elisabeth Blum, architect, author and lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Zurich, has focused her research on architecture, urbanism and atmospheric perception in architectural spaces, art and urban environments. Her books include Atmosphäre: Hypothesen zum Prozess der räumlichen Wahrnehmung (2010); Dubai: Stadt aus dem Nichts (2009); FavelaMetropolis: Berichte und Projekte aus Rio de Janeiro und São Paulo (2004); Schöne neue Stadt (2003); Boulevard Ecke Dschungel (2002); Ein Haus, ein Aufruhr: Anmerkungen zu Zaha Hadids Feuerwehrhaus (1997); Wem gehört die Stadt? (1996); and Le Corbusiers Wege (32003).

Michael Blum is an artist and writer based in Montreal. His work aims at critically re-reading the production of culture, myths and history. Projects include A Tribute to Safiye Behar, 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005), Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co., De Appel, Amsterdam (2006), Cape Town – Stockholm (On Thembo Mjobo), Mobile Art Production, Stockholm (2007), Exodus 2048, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and New Museum, New York (2008–09), Capri in Tangerang, ruangrupa, Jakarta (2011) and Faktories und Felder, The Israeli Center for Digital Art (2012). He is a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s School for Visual and Media Arts.

Friedrich von Borries is an architect and teacher of design theory and curatorial practice at HFBK Hamburg. He is also the curator of contemporary design at the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry. From 2007 to 2008 von Borries was a guest researcher at ETH Zurich and at MIT Cambridge, while simultaneously acting as a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. Between 2003 and 2009, he co-led the Berlin ‘raumtaktik’ office with Matthias Böttger. He is a research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London and a fellow of the Junge Akademie of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2008, Borries was the commissary-general for Germany’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher and champion of the anti-globalization movement, whose work spanned a broad range of subjects from ethnography to art, literature, education, language, cultural tastes and television. Bourdieu’s most famous book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). It was named one of the twentieth century’s ten most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association.

The French group Bureau d ́études has been producing cartographies of contemporary political, social and economic systems for the past several years. The visual analysis of transnational capitalism is based on extensive research and is usually presented in the form of large-sized murals. For example, “Governing by Networks”, a chart produced in 2003, visualizes the mutual involvements and dependencies within the global media conglomerates. Revealing what normally remains invisible and contextualizing apparently separate elements within a bigger whole, these visualizations of interests and cooperations re-symbolize the unseen and hidden.

Angelique Chrisafis is The Guardian’s Paris correspondent. She was previously Ireland, then arts correspondent for the London daily.

James Clifford is a historian and anthropologist. He was trained in social and intellectual history at Harvard University. Since 1978 he has taught cultural theory, literature and anthropology in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Writing Culture, edited with George Marcus (1986), The Predicament of Culture (1988), Routes (1998) and On the Edges of Anthropology (2003). He is currently completing Returns, a book on indigenous cultural politics in postmodernity.

Olivier Coulange, a French photographer, has been part of the renowned Agence VU in Paris since 1992. His photographs remain a reflection of a society where superficial appearances destroy human interactions. Coulange’s work has explored those considered outsiders: from the homeless, the Romani people or psychotic children to pornography. His work has been published and exhibited worldwide, including at prominent festivals such as Les rencontres d’Arles and Visa pour l’image.

Branka Ćurčić is an art critic and, since 2002, programme editor in the ‘new media center_kuda.org’, Novi Sad, Serbia (www.kuda.org). She is also the editor of a publishing project (kuda.read) that focuses on critical approaches towards new media culture, political culture, contemporary artistic practice and the social realm. Within kuda.org, she participates in (co-)curating exhibitions and in organizing lectures, conferences and workshops.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He has been a professor of journalism at NYU, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine and a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. His books include The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. His latest is the essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. Dery is at work on a biography of the artist and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.

David d’Heilly is principal of 2dk, a research and production company. He has been published in nine countries, in books or by periodicals such as The Economist and Wired. He has produced and/or directed award-winning documentaries and feature films, and has produced and curated exhibitions and cultural festivals in Europe, the USA and Japan. He is currently writing a book about Tokyo and global urbanization.

Wolfgang Fach is professor emeritus of political theory at the University of Leipzig, having been vice-president of the university until 2011. In 1998 he was visiting professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and in 1986/1987 visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His topics of interest are the history and genealogy of political ideas since the eighteenth century, with a focus on theories of governing. Among his publications are Die Hüter der Vernunft (1999), Die Regierung der Freiheit (2003) and Politische Ethik (2003).

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art & Architecture at Princeton University. His latest books are The Art-Architecture Complex (2011) and The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (2011).

Georg Franck studied philosophy, economics and architecture. Holding a doctorate in economics, he became a practising architect and town planner in 1974. In addition, he was active in software development and produced a planning information system, which has been marketed since 1991. Besides these main responsibilities, he has been engaged in writing widely on philosophy and economics. In the German-speaking world he is known for having been the fist theorist to write on the economy of attention, with publications dating back to 1989. Since 1994 he has held the chair of digital methods in architecture and planning at the Vienna University of Technology.

Roger Frantz is professor of economics at the San Diego State University. Between 2005 and 2008 he held the interim chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, San Diego State University. Among his books are Renaissance in Behavioral Economics: Essays in Honor of Harvey Leibenstein (2007, as editor), Two Minds: Intuition and Analysis in the History of Economic Thought (2005) and X-Efficiency: Theory, Evidence, and Applications (1988).

Matthew Fuller is a writer and cultural critic. He is the author of various books including Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (2003), Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (2005) and Elephant & Castle (2011). With Usman Haque, he is coauthor of Urban Versioning System v1.0 (2008) and with Andrew Goffey, coauthor of the forthcoming Evil Media. He is the editor of Software Studies: A Lexicon (2008) and coeditor of the journal Computational Culture. Matthew Fuller is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software and is a reader at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Lia Gangitano is a curator and founder of PARTICIPANT INC, a not-for-profit art space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She is editor of Dead Flowers (2010) and the forthcoming anthology, The Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the ́90s. She has also served as a curatorial advisor for PS1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, with exhibitions including Lutz Bacher, My Secret Life (2009).

Saroj Giri teaches politics at the University of Delhi. From the ‘armed struggle’ of the Maoists in India to WikiLeaks, he engages with ‘social eruptions’, including most recently the London riots and Tahrir Square demonstrations. He has written on ecological Marxism, social movements, the World Social Forum and secularism in India. He is primarily interested in radical social theory and, in particular, the Marxist notion of political subjectivity for revolutionary change. Recently he has contributed to the ‘idea of communism’ initiated by Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist and internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet postmodern art and literature, as well as on the Russian avantgarde. He is Global Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Science, New York University. Among his recent publications are Art Power (2008) and Going Public (2010).

Gabriele Hadl’s research has focused on how alternative and community media are affected by policy and social movements. On this topic, she has edited a special double issue of the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics (vol. 5, nos 1 & 2) and acted as an editorial advisor and contributor to the Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media (John D.H. Downing ed., 2010). She is also interested in the effects of the media environment on the natural environment. She teaches media policy as an assistant professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. She is the head of the Community Communication Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, a founder of the Civil Society Media Policy Consortium (http://web.mac. com/ellenycx/CSMPolicyPublic) and a member of the NUESTROSMedios/OURMedia Network. Her civic engagement includes the Buy Nothing Day Japan Network (http:// bndjapan.org), for which she designed the Zenta Claus icon.

Joachim Halse is assistant professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. With a combined background in anthropology and interaction design, Joachim Halse earned his PhD (IT University of Copenhagen) in the emerging discipline of design anthropology. In his research he explores the future-making aspects of mundane, everyday life through hybrid research practices that lie between ethnographic fieldwork and design-oriented articulations of new possibilities.

Dirk Hebel is assistant professor of architecture and construction at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore and runs DRKH Architecture. He has taught at the ETH Zurich, Princeton University and Syracuse University and has been scientific director of the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC). Dirk Hebel and Jörg Stollmann were principals of INSTANT Architects from 2002 to 2008. With Hanspeter Logo and Tobias Klauser they run United_Bottle Group. The project United_Bottle received the Van Alen Institute Fellowship Award, the Red Dot Design Award for Best Conceptual Design and the LANXESS Award.

Christina Hemauer, born 1973 in Zurich, Switzerland, studied arts and art education at Zurich University of the Arts and liberal arts at the Academy of Arts, Ghent. Roman Keller, born 1969 in Liestal, Switzerland, graduated in environmental sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and studied to become a photographer in Zurich (Gaf), New York (SVA, ICP) and Karlsruhe (HGK). The two artists have been collaborating since 2003. In 2006 Hemauer | Keller proclaimed a new era in art history— Postpetrolism. www.roadnottaken.info, postpetrolism.info

Daniel Hermsdorf studied art history, media and theatre studies in Bochum and Paderborn, receiving his PhD in 2010. Since 1995 he has been a freelancer in the domain of journalism, public relations, and cultural and lecturing activities in the humanities. Since 2004 he has published numerous articles on media studies and critique on www.filmdenken.de, and has, since 2005, been making documentary and experimental videos for the FilmFundBüro.

Tom Holert is an art historian and critic who occasionally slips into the role of cultural producer. A former editor of Texte zur Kunst and Spex, he currently teaches and conducts research at the Centre for Art/Knowledge at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Among his books are Imagineering: Visuelle Kultur und Politik der Sichtbarkeit (as editor, 2000), Entsichert: Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhundert (coauthored with Mark Terkessidis, 2002), Fliehkraft: Gesellschaft in Bewegung — von Migranten und Touristen (coauthored with Mark Terkessidis, 2006), Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Celebration? Realife (2007), Regieren im Bildraum (2008) and Das Erziehungsbild: Zur visuellen Kultur des Pädagogischen (coedited with Marion von Osten, 2010).

Brian Holmes is a cultural critic, living mostly in Paris and Chicago. He holds a doctorate in Romance languages and literatures from the University of California at Berkeley, was the English editor of publications for Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, was a member of the editorial collective of the French journal Multitudes from 2003 to 2008, and has recently published a collection of texts on art and social movements entitled Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (2007). His new book, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, is forthcoming from WHW/VanAbbemuseum and is available in full at http://brianholmes.wordpress. com. Holmes was awarded the Vilém Flusser Prize for Theory at Transmediale in Berlin in 2009.

Sophie Houdart is an anthropologist at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and a member of the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, Paris Ouest. For 15 years she has been conducting fieldwork in Japan, focusing on creative and innovative processes. She published La cour des miracles: Ethnologie d’un laboratoire japonais (2008), Kuma Kengo: An Unconventional Monograph (coauthored with Minato Chihiro, 2009) and coedited Humains, non humains: Comment repeupler les sciences sociales (2011), as well as many papers on scientific and architectural practices.

Mark Kammerbauer is a German-American urbanist and architect. He has worked in the USA, the Netherlands and Germany, and is a research associate at the chair of Prof. Hannelore Deubzer, TU München. He has recently completed his dissertation, “Planning Urban Disaster Recovery”, at the Bauhaus University Weimar under the supervision of Prof. Dr Dieter Hassenpflug.

Janina Karolewski holds an MA in Islamic Studies, Ottoman Studies and Political Studies from Heidelberg University. Between 2007 and 2011 she was a member of Heidelberg’s Collaborative Research Centre SFB 619 “Ritual Dynamics”, working on the ritual tradition of Alevi communities in Turkey and the Diaspora. Since 2011 she has been a member of the SFB 950 “Manuscript Cultures” at Hamburg University, studying Alevi manuscripts as a particular case of written knowledge transmission in communities dominated by oral tradition.

Lisa Kirk, a New York based artist, received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her projects have exhibited at galleries, institutions and museums both domestically and internationally, including INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, MoMA PS1, PARTICIPANT INC and MOT International, among others. Kirk’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, Art in America, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, ArtReview, The Guardian and many more.

Alexander Kluge is a German filmmaker, political activist and theorist. Trained in law, he turned to film in the late 1950s at the suggestion of his friend Theodor Adorno, codirecting Brutality in Stone (1960) with Peter Schamoni, a reflection on the Nazi atrocities. In 1962 Kluge signed the “Oberhausen Manifesto”, which declared a new freedom for cinema from convention and commercial concerns, and soon after cofounded Germany’s first film school in Ulm. Kluge was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 1982. As a fiction writer and member of the legendary postwar literary circle Gruppe 47, he won Germany’s highest literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize, in 2003 and the Theodor Adorno Prize in September 2009.

knowbotic research (Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler and Alexander Tuchacek) lives in Zurich. The art group has been experimenting with urbanity, the construction of knowledge and political representations in mediatized public spheres. They hold a professorship for art and media at Zurich University of the Arts. The art group has participated in the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), Seoul Biennale (2002), Hong Kong and Shenzhen Biennale (2007), Biennale Rotterdam (2009), Moscow Biennale (2011), exhibited in Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (1994), Hamburger Kunstverein (1995), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter Oslo (1996), Museum Ludwig Köln (2000), New Museum New York (2002), Witte de With Rotterdam and MOCA Taipeh (2004), Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2005), Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum and Skuc Gallery Ljubljana (2006), NAMOC Beijing (2008) and Aarhus Kunstmuseum (2009), and has received major media art awards.

Joachim Kreysler is a German physician who has specialized in nutrition, public health and tropical medicine. After ten years researching nutrition at the Max Planck Institute in Tanzania in the 1960s, he joined the World Health Organization in 1974 for a period of seven years as regional advisor for nutrition emergencies and primary health care in southern Africa. During the 1980s Kreysler worked in the AIDS Department of WHO’s Geneva headquarters, later joining WHO’s policy unit for emergency relief operations. After the Rwanda crisis in 1994 he became senior medical officer and health policy advisor for the International Red Cross (IFRC). He was awarded the Red Cross Public Health Prize in 2009 for “outstanding visionary work in the elimination of measles”. He is currently involved with People’s Health Movement as an evaluator in the context of the current WHO reform process.

Bruce D. Larkin is professor emeritus of politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the convenor and director of studies of the Global Collaborative on Denuclearization Design. He is author of Nuclear Designs: Great Britain, France and China in the Global Governance of Nuclear Arms (1995), War Stories (2001) and Designing Denuclearization: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (2008), and posts to the web at gcdd.net, design.learnworld.com and blog.learnworld.com.

Tim Lenoir is professor of history and chair of the programme in history and philosophy of science at Stanford University. He is the author of The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (1982), which examines the development of non-Darwinian theories of evolution, particularly in the German context during the nineteenth century. His other books include Politik im Tempel der Wissenschaft: Forschung und Machtausübung im deutschen Kaiserreich (1992), Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (1997), a volume that examines the formation of disciplines and the role of public institutions in the construction of scientific knowledge, and an edited volume, Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (1998).

Armin Linke is an artist who works with film and photography, combining different media to blur the border between fiction and reality. He is working on an ongoing archive of human activity and of the most varied natural and manmade landscapes. His multimedia installation about the contemporary Alpine landscape was awarded a prize at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale and at the Graz Biennial on Media and Architecture. He is professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, guest professor at the Iuav University of Venice, Arts and Design, and research affiliate on the MIT Visual Arts Program, Cambridge.

Kai Löffelbein is a freelance photographer from Germany. He studied political science in Berlin and “Photojournalism and Documentary Photography” at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hanover. Since 2007 he has been working as a photographer for different NGOs and several publications. Kai Löffelbein’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous shows and festivals. In 2011 he was the first German photographer to win the “Unicef – photo of the year” award. In 2012 his series “Kids of Sodom” received the Henri Nannen Award.

Martina Löw is professor of sociology at the Darmstadt University of Technology, specializing in space-related social analysis, urban and regional sociology, women’s and gender studies. Her publications include Raumsoziologie (2007), Einführung in die Stadt- und Raumsoziologie with Silke Steets and Sergej Stoetzer (2007) and “The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces Through the Simultaneity of Effects and Perception” in the European Journal of Social Theory (2008).

Boyan Manchev, philosopher, is professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, and a former vice-president and programme director at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Among his recent books are Miracolo (2011), L’altération du monde: Pour une esthétique radicale (2009) and La métamorphose et l’instant — désorganisation de la vie (2009).

Oliver Marchart is professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne. Among his recent books are Die politische Differenz: Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben (2010), Hegemonie im Kunstfeld: Die documenta-Ausstellungen dX, D11, d12 und die Politik der Biennalisierung (2008) and Cultural Studies (2008).

Rudolf Maresch, born 1954, lives near Regensburg, Germany, from where he is active as an author, publicist and critic. He has edited several books that deal with media and the public sphere, culture and politics, as well as the future of Western societies. Among his recent publications are Cyberhypes (2001), Raum, Wissen, Macht (2002) and Renaissance der Utopie (2004). Since the mid-1990s he has contributed to diverse internet media, at present particularly the online magazine Telepolis.

Rémy Markowitsch, born in Zurich in 1957, started out as a journalist and photographer. In all of his projects, he creates imaginary contextual spaces by drawing on an immense store of references, but these spaces can only be accessed through the sensuality and seductiveness of his objects and photographs, through his light, text and video installations. All of Rémy Markowitsch’s deliberately conceived and yet sensually accessible works are the result of enthusiastic and extensive forays into literature and research, history and politics, voyages and discovery, colonialism and the appropriation of the other, addiction and a passion for collection.

Jürgen Mayer H. is the founder and principal of J. MAYER H Architects’ studio focussing on works at the intersection of architecture, communication and new technology. Recent projects include among others the villa Dupli.Casa near Ludwigsburg, Germany and Metropol Parasol, the redevelopment of the Plaza de la Encarnacion in Sevilla, Spain, the residential building JOH3 in Berlin, Germany. From urban planning schemes and buildings to installation work and objects with new materials, the relationship between the human body, technology and nature form the background for a new production of space. Jürgen Mayer H.’s work has been published and exhibited worldwide and is part of numerous collections including MoMA New York and SF MoMA. National and international awards include the Mies-van-der-Rohe-Award-Emerging-Architect- Special-Mention-2003, Winner Holcim Award Bronze 2005 and Winner Audi Urban Future Award 2010.

Thomas Metscher, philologist and philosopher, studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, Bristol and Heidelberg, received a PhD in English Literature in 1966, taught German literature at the University of Belfast from 1961 to 1971, English literature, comparative studies and aesthetics at Bremen University from 1971 to his retirement in 1998. Since then his field of interest has shifted to problems of philosophical anthropology, the theoretical foundation of Marxism, theory of social consciousness, aesthetic and cultural theory. His numerous publications include Kunst und sozialer Prozeß (1977), Herausforderung unserer Zeit (1989), Pariser Meditationen (1992), Shakespeares Spiegel: Geschichte und literarische Idee, in two volumes (1995/1998), Welttheater und Geschichtsprozeß (2003), Imperialismus und Moderne (2009), Logos und Wirklichkeit (2010) and Kunst als ästhetischer Gegenstand (2012). Books on Shakespeare and on aesthetic studies are forthcoming.

Markus Miessen is an architect and writer. The initiator of the Participation tetralogy, he has published on the question of critical spatial practice, institution building and spatial politics. Architectural projects include LU Arts Centre (UK), Gwangju Biennial Hub (Korea), Performa Hub (USA), Post Office Manifesta 8 (Spain) and others. In 2008, he founded the Winter School Middle East. He has held academic positions at the AA (2004–2008), Berlage Institute (2009–2010) and Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (2010–2011). Miessen is now a professor for critical spatial practice at the Städelschule, Frankfurt and guest professor at Geneva University of Art and Design as well as University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Mikael Mikael is an artist who has worked furtively since discovering a secret service project in New York related to Ground Zero. A report on this secret service project has been published by Suhrkamp Verlag under the title 1WTC. Mikael Mikael has obtained a new identity and shuns the public eye. He resides everywhere and nowhere — currently probably in Berlin. He held a scholarship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, in 2011.

Mindpirates is an artist group that works on aspects and issues of contemporary culture, sociology and ecology. The group’s approach is to work independently and in an interdisciplinary way. They combine challenging aesthetics, substantive examination and experiment with new forms of distribution, exhibition and cooperation.

Ken’ichi Mishima is professor for social philosophy at Tokyo Keizai University. From 1990 to 2004 he was professor for social philosophy and comparative cultural studies at the University of Osaka. From 1978 to 1980 he spent a research period in Germany with a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. In the academic year 1994/1995 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In February 2011 Ken’ichi Mishima received an honorary doctorate from The Free University of Berlin.

Miki Mistrati has been working as a journalist since 1994, among others for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR1 and DR2), TV2/Denmark, Nordic Film & TV and Bastard Film. He was the cofounder and owner of Bastard Film from 2000 to 2009 and has produced more than 40 documentaries and features. Among his journalistic awards are The News Award (Denmark, 2002), The Documentary Award of the Year (Denmark, 2009), Gold World Medal NY Festival Award (USA, 2011) and Best Documentary at the Tutti Nello Stesso Piatto international film festival (Italy, 2011).

Stephan Moebius is professor for sociological theory and the history of ideas at the University of Graz. He is president of the Cultural Sociology Section of the German Sociological Association and president of the Sociological Theory Section of the Austrian Sociological Association. His research fields are history of sociology, cultural sociology and sociological theory. His publications are Kultur (2010), Kultur: Theorien der Gegenwart (edited with Dirk Quadflieg, 2011), Ästhetisierung des Sozialen: Reklame, Kunst und Politik im Zeitalter visueller Medien (edited with Lutz Hieber, 2011), Die Zauberlehrlinge: Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939) (2006) and Marcel Mauss (2006).

Chantal Mouffe is professor of political theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London. She has taught and researched in many universities in Europe, North America and South America, and she is a corresponding member of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is the editor of Gramsci and Marxist Theory (1979), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (1992), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (1996) and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (1999); the coauthor with Ernesto Laclau of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985); and the author of The Return of the Political (1993), The Democratic Paradox (2000) and On the Political (2005).

Molly Nesbit is chair and professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum. Her books include Atget’s Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000). Midnight: the Tempest Essays, a collection of her essays on contemporary art, is published by Periscope Press. Since 2002, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has curated Utopia Station, an ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website and street project.

Henk Oosterling is associate professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and director of Skillcity. His research programme Intermediality explores the crossovers between philosophy, arts and politics. Aside from his own books, he has (co)edited more than two dozen volumes of essays, the most recent of which is Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics (2011). In 2004 he founded Rotterdam Skillcity, a strategic concept for social design that has been adopted by Rotterdam’s city council as the blueprint for a ten-year renovation of Rotterdam South. His most recent publications on these projects are Woorden als daden (2009) and Doendenken (2012).

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana and Berlin. She is best known for her onsite projects using participatory design, her drawing series and her architectural case studies. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the Americas. In 2011 she was appointed professor at HFBK Hamburg. She has received numerous grants and awards, including the Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship at The New School in New York (2007).

Princess Hijab is an anonymous street artist working primarily in Paris, France. Her art centres on veiling the main characters on underground billboards using black paint.

Sophia Prinz is research associate at the chair for comparative sociology of culture at Viadrina European University (Frankfurt/Oder). Among her main fields of research are theories of visual culture, poststructuralist sociology and theories of perception and affect. Among her publications are Das Design der Gesellschaft: Zur Kultursoziologie des Designs (edited with Stephan Moebius, 2012), Visual Studies (coauthored with Andreas Reckwitz and published in Kulturstudien, edited by Stephan Moebius, 2012) and Pierre Bourdieu und die Kulturwissenschaften: Zur Aktualität eines undisziplinierten Denkens (edited with Daniel Šuber and Hilmar Schäfer, 2011).

RAMMSTEIN are an (East)-German “Gesamtkunstwerk”, made up of six musicians and performers: Paul Landers, Christian Lorenz, Till Lindemann, Richard Kruspe, Oliver Riedel and Christoph Schneider. Rammstein was founded as a band in Berlin in 1994. Their world tours have been great success stories, especially in the USA. The band’s specific performance rests on their stage, light and pyrotechnical shows, their song oeuvre (performed solely in German), as well as their music videos, made by internationally renowned directors. The stage shows and music videos display a distinct language of symbols, metaphors and emblems. Throughout their career they have avoided any marketing and journalism.

Jacques Rancière is professor of philosophy at European Graduate School EGS, Switzerland and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include Aux bords du politique (1990), Courts voyages au pays du peuple (1990), Le destin des images (2003) and Politique de la littérature (2007).

REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT (the implications of which in German range from ‘Cleaning Service’ to ‘Purification Society’) is an artists’ project group that works at the intersection between art and social reality. Martin Keil and Henrik Mayer first came together to create RG. The artists work with partners from different backgrounds, providing platforms for interdisciplinary activities. Their way of working is based on the positive potential of connecting different spheres of society. RG initiates projects that generate new relations and that interest groups of people. In their way of working they follow a cognitive concept of art. RG understands contemporary art as a catalyst of social and political processes.

Birgit Richard has been lecturing in theoretical and practical new media at the Goethe University Frankfurt since 1997. Her fields of research and teaching are image cultures (youth-art-gender), especially in web 2.0 social networks such as YouTube, flickr, MySpace and Facebook, material and visual cultures, media and net cultures, intersectional visual gender studies (the visual construction of gender), as well as the aesthetics of current youth cultures. Her publications include inter-cool 3.0: Jugend Bild Medien (coedited with Heinz-Hermann Krüger, 2010), Flickernde Jugend—rauschende Bilder: Netzkulturen in Web 2.0 (2010), Konsumguerilla: Widerstand gegen Massenkultur? (coedited with Alexander Ruhl).

Christian Ritter studied theory of art and design at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Since 2006 he has been research associate at the ZHdK Institute for Critical Theory. From 2008 to 2010 he was director of a research project entitled “Migration Design”, based jointly at ZHdK and the University of Zurich. Since 2012 he has been research associate at an artistic and ethnographic research project investigating the representation of everyday youth culture on mobile telephones (University of Zurich and ZHdK, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation). He is working on a doctoral dissertation at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne KHM. His current research interests and publications focus on visuality and identity in transcultural space, youth culture, design and branding, and visual culture in the internet and everyday life.

Irit Rogoff is a theorist, curator and organiser who writes at the intersections of the critical, the political and contemporary arts practices. She is professor of visual culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, having founded the Visual Culture Department there in 2002. Her work across a series of new ‘think tank’ PhD programmes at Goldsmiths (research architecture, curatorial/knowledge) focuses on the possibility of exchanging knowledges across professional practices, self-generated forums, academic institutions and individual enthusiasms. Publications include Museum Culture (1997), Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (2001), Unbounded: Limits Possibilities (2008) and Looking Away: Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities (2010). Her curatorial work includes De-Regulation (2005–2008), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. (2006) and Summit: Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture (2007).

Elisabeth von Samsonow, artist and philosopher, is professor in ordinary for philosophy and historical anthropology of art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and guest professor at Bauhaus University Weimar. Among other things, her academic work focuses on the relationship between art and religion in the past and present, the theory and history of female identification, sacral androgyny and the disintegration of the self in modernity. As an artist, she deals with the systematic and symbolic place of sculpture in the canon of the arts. Amongst her recent publication are Anti Elektra: Totemismus und Schizogamie (2007), Unzipping Philosophy (ed., 2009), Egon Schiele: Ich bin die Vielen (2010), and Elektra: Die Geburt des Mädchens aus dem Geiste der Plastik. Auf Friedrich Nietzsche (2011).

Thorsten Schmitz is a reporter for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. Until 2010 he was the paper’s correspondent for Israel. In 2000 he published Abraham zwischen den Welten: Ansichten aus Israel.

Gregor Schneider is a German artist, whose main area of work is constructed rooms. Since 1985 Schneider has been working elaborately on the house on Unterheydener Straße in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt. Gregor Schneider created replicas of the existing rooms by building complete rooms inside other rooms, each consisting of walls, ceilings and floors. To begin with, the original rooms had all been areas of a house: a bedroom, a coffee room, a lumber-room, a kitchen, a corridor, a cellar. In 2001, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his infamous work “Totes Haus u r” exhibited at the German Pavilion. Gregor Schneider was appointed professor of sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 2009.

Franz Schultheis is professor for sociology at the University of St. Gallen. Prior to that he lectured at the universities of Geneva, Neuchâtel, Paris V and Constance. He is president of the Pierre Bourdieu Foundation and vice-president of the Swiss Science and Technology Council.

Gundula Schulze Eldowy has worked as a freelance photographer since 1985. In 1988 she achieved an international breakthrough at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles. Since then her work has been exhibited internationally, for example in New York, Tokyo, Florence, London, Paris, Moscow, Lima and Los Angeles. Following German reunification she travelled and also stayed for longer periods in the USA, Italy, Russia, Egypt, Japan, Peru and Bolivia. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Higashikawa Prize for photography. She lives and works in Berlin, Peru and on her travels.

Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti is a media expert and journalist. As a freelance journalist she writes primarily for heise online, the VDI-Nachrichten, Stuttgarter Zeitung, Futurezone and Berliner Gazette. She specializes in issues such as civil rights, freedom of information, data protection and media ethics. She has been a jury member of the Initiative Nachrichtenaufklärung (INA) since 2000, for which she has conducted and coordinated research seminars at the universities of Dortmund and Bonn for many years. To accompany the study “Kooperative Technologien in Arbeit, Ausbildung und Zivilge- sellschaft” (Cooperative Technologies in Work, Training and Civic Society) she founded the platform KoopTech together with Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer in the summer of 2007.

Richard Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts — about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history and social theory. In the mid-1990s he began a project charting the personal consequences of work for workers, a project which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character (1998) is an ethnographic account of how mid-level employees make sense of the ‘new economy’. The second, Respect in a World of Inequality (2002), charts the effects of new ways of working on the welfare state. A third, The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006), provides an overview of change. Most recently, he has explored more positive aspects of labour in The Craftsman (2008).

Cynthia E. Smith serves as Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s curator of socially responsible design in New York. Trained as an industrial designer, she led multidisciplinary design and planning projects for cultural institutions for over a decade. After earning a graduate degree at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, she joined Cooper-Hewitt, where she integrates her work experience with her advocacy on human rights and social justice issues. She coauthored “The Politics of Genocide: U.S. Rhetoric vs. Inaction in Darfur” for the Kennedy School Review (2005). She cocurated the 2010 Design Triennial: Why Design Now? and curated the Design with the Other 90% exhibition series. Named a “20/20 New Pioneer” by Icon design magazine and one of Metropolis magazine’s “next generation of young curators”, she has served on several international design juries and lectured widely on socially responsible design.

Jörg Stollmann is professor for urban design and urbanization at the TU Berlin and runs his architecture practice based in Zurich. He is founding partner of the non-profit platform urbaninform.net. He has taught at the UdK Berlin and the ETH Zurich. Jörg Stollmann and Dirk Hebel were principals of INSTANT Architects from 2002 to 2008. With Hanspeter Logo and Tobias Klauser they run United_Bottle Group. The project United_Bottle received the Van Alen Institute Fellowship Award, the Red Dot Design Award for Best Conceptual Design and the LANXESS Award.

Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), French sociologist and criminologist, was one of the most versatile social scientists of his time. His theory of social interaction (“intermental activity”) emphasized the individual in an aggregate of persons and brought Tarde into conflict with Émile Durkheim, who viewed society as a collective unity. In La Criminalité comparée (1886) and other works, Tarde pointed out the importance of environment in criminal behaviour. His two-volume Psychologie économique (1902) stimulated the school of institutional economics.

Magdalena Taube studied modern German literature, English and American literature at Humboldt University Berlin. She first became active as a journalist at the age of 13. She has published in the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, taz, fluter.de, jetzt.de and springerin, to name but a few. From 2007 to 2009 she was director of culture and media at du-machst.de, the portal for an initiative promoting greater youth participation launched by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs. Until 2009 she was editor-in-chief of the cultural database of the Kulturportal Deutschland. Since 2002 she has worked in the editorial office of the Berliner Gazette, where she was appointed editor-in-chief in 2009. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on online journalism.

Mark Terkessidis writes about youth- and pop-culture, migration and racism for tageszeitung, Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Zeit, Freitag, Literaturen, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and DeutschlandFunk. He is cofounder with Tom Holert of the Cologne-based Institute for Studies in Visual Culture (isvc.org). He is a member of the international jury for the BMW Group Award for Intercultural Commitment and on the jury of Berlin’s Hauptstadtkulturfonds. His book publications include Kulturkampf: Volk, Nation, der Westen und die Neue Rechte (1995), Psychologie des Rassismus (1998), Fliehkraft: Gesellschaft in Bewegung — Von Migranten und Touristen (coauthored with Tom Holert, 2006) and Interkultur (2010).

Michael Tomasello is codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. His research interests focus on processes of social cognition, social learning and communication/language in human children and great apes. His books include First Verbs (1992), Primate Cognition (1997), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (2003), Origins of Human Communication (2008) and Why We Cooperate (2009).

UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo based in Vienna, Austria and St. Moritz, Switzerland, founded by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. Their open circuit of conceptual art, software art, pixel painting, large-scale installations, legal art, net.art and media hacking transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk. The computer and the network are (ab)used and the permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction points toward an extremely expanded concept of one’s working materials: i.e. international rights, piracy, e-commerce, torture, democracy and global communication. Their work is always inherently materialist, flexible and formal. Their thinking is deeply political, but unlike ‘political art’, UM.COM seek to capture the present and the future and to amplify them without preconceived opinion or vision.

Philip Ursprung is professor of the history of art and architecture at ETH Zurich. He studied art history, history and German literature in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin. He taught at the University of Geneva, Berlin University of the Arts, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University New York and the University of Zurich. His most recent book is Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis heute (2010).

Bill Viola is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. For 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. His works focus on universal human experiences — birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness — and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism.

Paul Virilio is a world-renowned philosopher, urbanist and cultural theorist. His work focuses on urban spaces and the development of technology in relation to power and speed. He is known for coining the term ‘dromology’ to explain his theory of speed and technology. He is the author of many books, including Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1977), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989), The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991), Bunker Archaeology (1994), The Vision Machine (1994), Politics of the Very Worst (1999), The Information Bomb (2000), A Landscape of Events (2000), The Accident of Art (2005) and Art as Far as the Eye Can See (2007).

Graham Ward is currently the Fergusson Professor of Philosophical Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester and Regius Professor of Divinity (Elect) at the University of Oxford. He is the author of numerous books including Cities of God (2000), Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (2004), Christ and Culture (2005) and The Politics of Discipleship (2009). He is currently completing a two-volume work on the doctrine of God entitled Ethical Life.

Peter Weibel studied literature, medicine, logic, philosophy and film in Paris and Vienna. Since 1984 he has been professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. From 1984 to 1989 he was head of the digital arts laboratory at the Media Department of New York University in Buffalo. In 1989 he founded the Institute of New Media at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, which he directed until 1995. Between 1986 and 1995 he was in charge of Ars Electronica in Linz. He commissioned the Austrian pavilions at the Venice Biennale from 1993 to 1999. Between 1993 and 1998 he was chief curator at the Neue Galerie Graz, Austria, and has been chairman and CEO of Karlsruhe’s Center for Art and Media (ZKM) since 1999.

Andi Weiland studied politics and communications science at the University of Münster. He has longstanding experience in the field of youth work and promoting young journalists. He is on the board of the Jugendpresse Deutschland e.V. and is responsible for the media projects ‘politikorange’ and Jugendmedien.de. He conducts research into the philosophy of technology and, together with ohrenflimmern.de, publishes his own blog. He is a guest editor at Berliner Gazette.

Peter Welz lives as an artist in Berlin. He studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the Cooper Union in New York and the Chelsea School of Art in London. Peter Welz is one of the most outstanding artists in the young German art scene. His works can be found in such collections as the Goetz Collection, the Falckenberg Collection and the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. Peter Welz sees himself as a sculptor who examines issues related to sculptural design through the medium of video. He is primarily interested in the movement of the human figure in space, which he subjects to extensive artistic research in various test arrangements. Welz attracted international interest with his five-part video that was developed in close collaboration with the celebrated choreographer William Forsythe.

Krystian Woznicki read Islamic and Asian studies and Spanish at Humboldt University Berlin. He is experienced as a curator, author and lecturer. From 1995 to 1998 he was Tokyo correspondent for Spex. Between 2002 and 2005 he was copublisher of a reader-series in newspaper format at etc.publications and director of the digital archive ‘911.jpg’. He is an author of books on globalization. His most recent publications are Abschalten (2008) and Wer hat Angst vor Gemeinschaft? Ein Dialog mit Jean-Luc Nancy (2009). He served for ten years as editor-in-chief of the Berliner Gazette until 2009 and has been its managing editor since then.

Ulf Wuggenig studied sociology, philosophy and political science at the University of Vienna and received his postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is director of Leuphana University Lüneburg’s Kunstraum, an exhibition space for contemporary visual art, which he cofounded with Beatrice von Bismarck and Diethelm Stoller in 1993. He has taught at the art schools of Zurich and Vienna and was professor for sociology at the universities of Hannover and Osnabrück. His most recent book in English is Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ (with Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, 2011).

Evert Ypma is a design researcher, conceptual strategist and lecturer. He works as a consultant on design strategies, identity and positioning questions in the public and private sectors. Between 2005 and 2010 he led a research programme on identity, design and representation (‘multiplicity and visual identities’) at the Zurich University of the Arts. In 2011 he was research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is on the advisory panel of Iridescent: Icograda Journal of Design Research. His home base is Zurich, which he combines with Asia.

Christof Zotter studied Indology and ethnology at the University of Leipzig. He has been a member of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 619 “Ritual Dynamics” at Heidelberg University since 2006. Combining textual studies and fieldwork, his PhD thesis, completed in 2009, explores the initiation ritual of the Brahmins in the Kathmandu Valley. His current research focuses on Hindu lifecycle rituals in Nepal, especially that of marriage.

Nils Zurawski studied sociology, ethnology and geography in Münster, Germany. He obtained his PhD in 1999 with a thesis on “Virtual Ethnicity: Studies on Identity, Culture and Internet”. From 2000 to 2001 he conducted fieldwork in Northern Ireland and afterwards undertook various research projects (on CCTV, loyalty cards and cultures of security). His research interests include surveillance (CCTV, consumption, theory, anthropology of surveillance), identity, urban studies, space, political anthropology, violence, the internet and media, and qualitative methods.

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