Bios of Event Participants

A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe) convenes groups of people to workshop art related ideas and practices. Their work enacts and constructs moving links between different places, technologies, and layers of knowledge, giving consideration to that which is missing, forgotten, or lost. ACW have facilitated workshops for institutions such as: Artists Space, New York, Serpentine Gallery, London, Camberwell College, London Institute Goldsmiths College, London, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, and the West Collection SEI Investments, Pennsylvania. Solo exhibitions include: Increase Your Uncertainty, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Melbourne Le Feu Scrupuleux, CNEAI Chatou; and, Saisons Increase, a four-part, year-long project at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux.

Basekamp is a non-commercial art community and exhibition space that facilitates interdisciplinary, collaborative projects and critical discussions. Basekamp serves as a hub for the collective development of new models of art systems and the practical and theoretical evolution of collaboration. Basekamp’s 2010 program Plausible Artworlds is a weekly series designed to present and discuss the multitude of nuanced art worlds that are emerging every day. The weekly potluck conversations have featured a wide range of social practitioners including The Public School, Continental Drift, n.e.w.s., F.E.A.S.T., Art Work, Loveland, and Miss Rockaway Armada.

Kadambari Baxi is a New York-based architect engaged in a collaborative practice focused on architecture and media. She is Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Architecture at Barnard College and Columbia University, a partner in Martin/Baxi Architects, and a principal of imageMachine, a new media collaborative that incorporates expanded architecture and media concepts in multidisciplinary projects. Martin/Baxi Architects (M/BA) defines architecture as a cultural practice that combines aesthetic invention, social vision, and technological innovation in the public realm. The firm’s work has been featured in publications and exhibitions internationally, including two recent books: Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Actar, 2007), and Entropia (Black Dog Publishing, 2000). Recent projects include Uncounted Counts: Designing Citizenship, exhibited at the Van Alen Institute for Public Architecture (2009), as one part of a two-part show titled, Aesthetics of Crossing. Baxi is currently working on a multimedia project titled, Two Cities/Three Futures: Architectural Documents, based on CST Station in Mumbai and Ground Zero in New York. She is also designing a series of new technology games for children titled, Triptychs, based on multilingual alphabets. www.imagemachine.com

Claire Bishop is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and Visiting Professor in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London. Her publications include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and the edited anthology Participation (2006). She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her second monograph, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, will be published by Verso in 2011.

L.M. Bogad (Associate Professor, University of California at Davis) is an author, performer, and activist. His book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, is an international study of performance artists who run for public office as a prank. Bogad has led “Tactical Performance” workshops while "Humanities and Political Conflict" Fellow at Arizona State University, and at Carnegie Mellon University both as an "Art and Controversy" Fellow, and as a Distinguished Lecturer on Performance and Politics. Bogad's performances have explored topics such as the Haymarket Square Confrontation, the FBI's COINTELPRO activities, the Pinochet coup in Chile, and global climate chaos. His play entitled COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act, will be published in 2010 by PM Press. www.lmbogad.com

Since 2000, visual artist Maureen Connor has been developing Personnel—a series of interventions concerned with the art institution as a workplace—which explores the attitudes, needs, and desires of the staff at various institutions. She has presented work at: Periferic 8 Biennial for Contemporary Art, Romania; Tapies Foundation, Barcelona; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; MAK, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt; ICA, Philadelphia; and the Whitney Biennial, New York. Currently, Connor is working on an installation of Personnel for the Centre de Recherche en Droit Public, Université de Montréal, Canada, and a related book to be published jointly by Wyspa Art Institute, in Gdansk, Poland, and Revolver Press, in Frankfurt, Germany. Her projects have received funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and The New York Foundation for Artists.

Joseph del Pesco is an independent curator, art journalist, and web-media producer. He has realized curatorial projects at Artists Space in New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; Galerie Analix in Geneva, Switzerland; the Rooseum in Malmö, Sweden; Articule in Montréal, Canada; the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada; and the Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis. He has contributed interviews, reviews, and other texts to: Flash Art, X-Tra, Proximity, Fillip, NUKE magazines, and Art in America's website. More information at www.delpesco.com

As the initiator and current organizer of “democratic innovation” (democratic-innovation.org), founded in 1998, Kent Hansen has functioned as an international pioneer in the interplay between art, organizations, and the workplace. Not a collective itself, “democratic-innovation” develops projects in collaboration with others who form ad hoc groups or merge with one another for the benefit of specific projects. Kent is also a co-founding member (2005) of “tv-tv,” the artist-run tv-station broadcasting throughout Denmark.

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, and the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader, among other books. He writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of the international direct action group, Reclaim the Streets. In 2009 he was a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he helped organize “The College of Tactical Culture,” and he is presently co-founder and co-director of the new Center for Artistic Activism. He is working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.

Since 2002, Tom Finkelpearl has served as the Executive Director of the Queens Museum of Art where he is working on an expansion that will double the size of the museum. The Queens Museum is situated in America’s most diverse county, and it seeks to serve as a cultural crossroads through art programs, community organizing, and educational outreach. He worked for 12 years during two periods at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, first organizing 15 exhibitions in the 1980’s, returning in 1999 as Deputy Director and helping to manage its merger with the Museum of Modern Art. Between his stints at P.S.1, he worked for six years (1990-96) as Director of New York City’s Percent for Art Program where he oversaw 130 public art projects and as Executive Director of Program at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a residency program in Maine for advanced visual artists (1996-1999). Based on his public art experience and further research, he published a book, Dialogues in Public Art (MIT Press, 2000). He is working on a new book on art and social cooperation forthcoming from Duke University Press. He received a BA from Princeton University (1979) and an MFA from Hunter College (1983).

Michelle Jacques is a Toronto-based curator and writer, and holds the position of Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her recent projects include: Sarah Anne Johnson: House on Fire (2009); At the Corner of Time and Place (Nuit Blanche Zone B, Toronto, 2007); and Luis Jacob: Habitat (2005-2006). Her recent writings include "The Artist-run Centre as Tactical Training Unit," decentre: concerning artist-run culture (YYZ Books, 2008); and "Art and Institutions: An interview with Janna Graham and Anthony Kiendl," Fuse Magazine, September 2007. She sits on the board of Vtape, and is a contributing editor with Fuse Magazine.

Of Chinese and Ecuadorian descent, Marisa Jahn is an artist/writer/community organizer who co-founded of REV- (www.rev-it.org), a non-profit organization that fosters socially-engaged art, design, and pedagogy. Jahn is a graduate of MIT, a 2007-9 artist-in-residence at MIT’s Media Lab, and an artist-teacher with the Center for Urban Pedagogy. She is the editor of several books including ‘Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices’ (2010). Her work has been presented in public spaces and venues such as the ICA Philadelphia, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Francisco Asian art Musem, National Fine Art Museum of Taiwan, and featured in Art in America, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Frieze, Punk Planet, Make Magazine, Discovery Channel, and more. She is the Deputy Director at People's Production House. www.marisajahn.com, www.rev-it.org, www.peoplesproductionhouse.org

Lisa Larson-Walker was born in Chicago, and is a graduate of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She currently lives and works in New York City, creating work ranging from the poetic interpretation of Lil’ Wayne’s verses, to measuring the kinetic energies of influence charging the levels of appropriation of Tatlin’s Tower; ultimately as a means to situate cultural relationships otherwise immaterial. Manifest as an interdisciplinary practice through formal investigation and performative delineation, her work interrogates the intermingling of the historical, the fantastic, and the lyrical.

Kristin Lucas creates video, installation, intervention, digital photographs, sculpture, and projects for the web. Positioning herself at the centre of her projects, Lucas' work addresses the digital realm from the perspective of its effect on human psychology. Transformation and portraiture are the focus of works set to the backdrop of empty and meaningful exchanges with automated tellers, healing arts therapists, police officers, celebrity impersonators, and a judge. Her works are represented by Postmasters Gallery, and her videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. Lucas is a faculty member of Bard College. She resides in Beacon, New York.

Founded by Artistic Director Darren O'Donnell, Mammalian Diving Reflex is a research-art atelier dedicated to investigating the social sphere, always on the lookout for contradictions to whip into aesthetically scintillating experiences, producing one-off events, theatre-based performance, videos, installation, theoretical texts, and community happenings. Past work includes: Eat the Street, Haircuts by Children, The Children's Choice Awards, Slow Dance With Teacher, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, and Old Women Shooting Guns. Mammalian Diving Reflex's work has been presented around the world in Lahore, New York, Sydney, Birmingham, Portland, Vancouver, Chicago, Greensboro, Los Angeles, Montreal, Victoria, Calgary, Bologna, Terni, Oslo, and Trondheim.

Felicity Tayler is an artist, writer, and information professional. She holds a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies from McGill University, and a B.A. in Fine Arts from Concordia University. Her work has been shown nationally in solo and group exhibitions, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, and her writing has been published in journals in Canada and the United Kingdom. In 2010m she will curate an exhibition on artists' publications at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives. She is a founding member of the artists' collective the Centre de recherche urbaine de Montréal (CRUM). Felicity Tayler's artistic practice employs an interdisciplinary approach combining training in visual arts (painting and drawing) with the competencies and theoretical framework of information science. She is interested in the use of visual representation as an information carrier, be it eighteenth century topographic watercolours, the output of 1960s office technology, or the present-day online communication through the portable document format. Felicity lives and works in Montreal, Québec. www.pictorialpropaganda.ca, www.crum.ca

Camille Turner is a Toronto-based artist and cultural producer who uses media and performance to build bridges across cultures and differences. Her performance work includes Miss Canadiana, a beauty queen on a ‘round the world “Red, White and Beautiful” tour, challenging assumptions of Canadian identity and normative beauty. Her new Afrofuturist project, The Final Frontier is inspired by her experience in Lethbridge Alberta, and the alien landscape of the coulees. Camille is a founding member of the digital collective YZO, and a curator with Subtle Technologies, a festival that blurs the boundaries between art and science. She has presented her work nationally and internationally at numerous conferences, festivals, and exhibitions.

Merve Ünsal is an artist/writer based in New York. A native of Istanbul, Turkey, she has recently finished an Internet-based art project questioning the nature of airports and airport security. She is the co-editor of BoltArt.net, and is currently working on various writing and editing projects.

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art theorist, writer, and Professor of Art Theory and History at the European School of Visual Arts (Angoule^me/Poitiers). In 2004, he curated The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (Apexart, New York); in 2005, In Absentia (Passerelle, Brest); in 2006, Rumour as Media (Aksanat, Istanbul), and Dataesthetics (WHW, Zagreb); and is currently preparing, amongst other projects, Withdrawal: The Performative Document (New York), as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship, or spectatorship. A former program director at the Colle`ge International de Philosophie (2000– 2007), and corresponding editor of Parachute magazine (1999–2005), he is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text. Born in 1963, in Vancouver, Canada, he lives and works in Paris.