Biographies

Sue Bell Yank (article) -is a writer and arts organizer. She is currently the Assistant Director of Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum, and adjunct faculty in the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. Her writing has been featured in the 2008 California Biennial exhibition catalogue, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the Huffington Post, and various arts blogs including her ongoing essay blog entitled Social Practice: writings about the social in contemporary art (www.suebellyank.com ).

Marco Cuevas-Hewitt (article) -is a writer and cultural worker whose work straddles artistic, activist, and research practices. Politically, he came of age during the alternative globalisation movement, but also counts postcolonialism, anarchism, and the environmental justice movement among his influences. He is currently completing a doctoral thesis in anthropology and sociology, after which time he plans to move into more creative and collaborative endeavours. Marco was born and raised in Australia with familial ties to the Philippines, but is presently on a temporary sojourn in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Khristopher Flack (article) -is a farmartalist living in Newport, Vermont.

Gavin Grindon (article/ note; opens to PDF) -is postdoctoral research fellow at Kingston University of London, and has previously taught at Goldsmiths, Birkbeck and Manchester. He has published in The Oxford Art Journal, Third Text and Radical Philosophy, and was a co-author of A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible. His research focuses on histories of art-activism and theories of revolution-as-festival. He has been involved in a number of art-activist collectives.

Libertad O. Guerra (article) -cognitive and urban anthropologist, educator, social and art researcher/historian, and hostess of the Bronx Salon series, a heady locale for lush lounging and distilled discussion on placemaking issues and transcultural horizons in the private-meets public-environment of her Mott Haven brick-house. In 2003 she co-founded 'Spanic Attack (serving as its director), a New York City based organism built on a Latin/o American sensibility to transcend the lived solitude of migrant artists when confronted by the annoying strategies of industry and the false choice that art without sponsorship is non-viable. She teaches within the CUNY system and during the last two years has been archival researcher and organizer of the Re-membering Loisaida Project : the Visible/Invisible Body of Puerto Rican sectors on the Lower East Side to the Downtown Scene  at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.

Luis Guerra (article) -is an art worker (Master in Visual Arts, 2001, Universidad de Chile). Currently he is studying a Master in Aesthetics at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. His work has been "exhibited" in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Canada and China. He also has been professor at several Chilean Universities and Cultural adviser.
www.luisguerra.net
www.instituteforcriticalresearch.org

Tim Jensen (article) -is a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University, where he researches and teaches rhetorical theory.  He wants to put the art back in artillery and emphasize the response side of responsibility.  He hopes to one day grow up on a farm.

Chris Lee (article) -is a free-lance graphic designer from Canada, but currently based in The Netherlands, where he graduated from the Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam). While at the Sandberg, he engaged in a practice focusing on speculative visualizations of (alternative) currencies, and their attendant institutions and ephemera. He has also facilitated several workshops on currency where the task is to develop a currency system and in so doing, to discuss and articulate the operation and dynamics of power and money without a heavy reliance on stratified knowledge and expert jargon. He is currently designer and editorial-board member of the journal Scapegoat: Landscape, Architecture, Political Economy. .

Marc James Léger (article) -is an artist, writer and educator living in Montreal. He is editor of the collected writings of Bruce Barber, Performance, [Performance] and Performers, as well as Culture and Contestation in the New Century, and is author of the forthcoming Brave New Avant Garde: Essays in Contemporary Art and Politics.

Jaleh Mansoor (article) -completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2007. She has taught at SUNY Purchase, Barnard College, Columbia University, and Ohio University before coming to the University of British Columbia.  Having worked on materialist abstraction in the context of Marshall Plan Italy, she is interested in complicating the discourse on abstraction, totality, universality, labor, and mere life in contemporaneity. Her areas of teaching and research include modernism, critical theory, historiography, and critical curatorial studies. She works as a critic for Artforum and is a frequent contributor to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and, more recently, The Journal of Aethestics and Protest. Mansoor wishes to occupy and dilate the relationship (and tension) between activism and scholarship.

Olive Mckeon (article) -is a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles where she writes about Marxism and dance studies. Following many years of contemporary dance training, she makes dances without much dancing in them. She is a peach, a loose dog, a militant, a lost bird. 

Ian Milliss (article) -is anAustralian whose early 70s participatory conceptualist work soon led to an involvement in activist community groups and trade unions.  Although he occasionally exhibits he has always thought that galleries are just one small part of the range of tools available for the artist’s job of cultural innovation and adaptation. His latest project http://yeomansproject.com revisits a thwarted mid 70s project about sustainable farming and the definition of the artist.

Gabriel Mindel Saloman (article) -is an American born artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. As a musician he has spent nearly a decade touring internationally and has released well over 50 recordings as a part of the experimental music group Yellow Swans. Simultaneously he has collaborated in a variety of relational artworks, most notably with Red76. Recent projects include the Lower Mainland Painting Co. - a group of artists researching and engaging in questions of Art, Labour and Art Labourers; and The STAG - a gallery run out of the Vancouver home of he and his partner Aja Rose Bond. Saloman is currently pursuing his MFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts where he is seeking to explicitly merge the trajectories of his work in Sound and Social Practices, demonstrating that the resistant potential of noise can be brought to a critical state of praxis.
http://diademdiscos.wordpress.com/
http://lmpc.ca
http://thestrathconaartgallery.tumblr.com/

Protest and Stagnation (article) -

Cornelia Lein was born 1988 in Vienna, has been studying painting at the University of applied arts/ Vienna
since 2007 and currently works as a visual artist.

Hannah Rosa Öllinger was born 1987 in Korneuburg, has been studying stage and set design at the University
of applied arts/ Vienna since 2006 and currently works as a sculpturer, costume and stage designer in Vienna.

Alice Neusiedler was born 1986 in Vienna, has been studying sociology and science of theatre, film and media at the University of Vienna since 2005 and works in the field of sociology of culture and art .

Jakob Brossmann was born in 1986 in Vienna and is working there in film and theatre as a director and designer.

Manfred Rainer was born in 1987 in Korneuburg and is studying painting, animation and stage- and filmdesign at the university of applied arts Vienna since 2006. 

Pawel Szostak was born in 1986 in Szczecinek/Poland and has been working in the publishing and later the movie business in Vienna. His favourite animal is the naked mole rat.

Thomas Streitfellner was born 1981 in Salzburg, has been studying transmedia arts at the University of applied arts/ Vienna and works as an artist in Vienna.

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) (article) is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible “Do-It-Yourself” techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.The core PLOTS program is focused on “civic science” in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. PLOTS achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.

Shannon Dosemagen A co-founder of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Shannon is based
in New Orleans. Prior to working with Public Laboratory, she was the Oil Spill Response Director at the
Louisiana Bucket Brigade, conducting projects such as the first on-the-ground health and economic impact
surveying in Louisiana post-oil spill. Shannon has an MS in Anthropology, a BFA in Photography and Anthropology
and has worked with nonprofits for over eleven years.

Jeff Warren Founder of Grassroots Mapping and co-founder of Public Laboratory, Jeffrey Warren makes maps
and citizen science tools at p.irateship in Somerville, MA, and is a research affiliate of MIT's Center for Future
Civic Media. He has founded or co-founded various organizations, including Vestal Design, a multidisciplinary
design firm, Cut&Paste Labs, a Lima, Peru-based school for open-source programming, Weardrobe.com, and
Paydici Inc. Jeff holds an MS from MIT's Center for Civic Media, and a BA in Architecture from Yale University.

Sara Wylie Sara Wylie, a Public Laboratory co-founder, for her doctoral work at MIT in History, Anthropology
and Science, Technology and Society, developed webtools for community monitoring of the oil and gas industry. Presently Sara is Public Laboratory’s Director of Toxics and Health Research as well as visiting faculty in
Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Digital + Media Department. At RISD Sara teaches social theory and anthropology of science and technology to artists and designers in order to develop new “in practice” methods
for Social Studies of Science.

Matthias Regan (article) -is a poet, teacher and activist who lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. His poetry publications include The Most of It, CodebookCode, Death Blossoms and Huckabee Goes Electric; he recently edited The Philosophy Workers, a collection of Carl Sandburg's writings for Charles H. Kerr press. He is a keyholder at the Mess Hall and a founding member of the Next Objectivists. He teaches writing and literature at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

Ron Sakolsky (article) -is a radical writer/activist whose twenty-first century books are: *Surrealist Subversions* ( Autonomedia, 2002 ); *Creating Anarchy* (Fifth Estate,2005); *Swift Winds* ( Eberhardt, 2009 ). Most recently, along with Andrea Langlois and Marian van der Zon, he co-edited, *Islands of Resistance:Pirate Radio in Canada* ( New Star, 2010). He lives on Denman Island in British Columbia where he combines writing prose, poetry and fiction with pirate radio broadcasting, deejaying community dances, creating surrealist-inspired sound collages with a trio known as Sonarchy, pitching in at a potato co-op, and involving himself in a direct action campaign against a proposed coal mine on nearby Vancouver Island.

Dr. Victor Tupitsyn (article) -is a critic and cultural theorist living in New York and Paris. In 2003 he guest-edited Post-Soviet Russia, the anthology of contemporary Russian theory and philosophy of Art, printed by Routledge (Third Text). His new book, The Museological Unconscious, was printed in 2009 by the MIT Press.

Ultra-red (article) -is an international sound art collective founded in 1994. While the visual image serves as the foundation for most discussions of political art, Ultra-red turn the focus to the ear: the sound of communities organizing themselves, the acoustics of spaces of dissent, the demands and desires in our voices and in our silences, pedagogy in language and speech, and the echoes of historical memories of struggle. Ultra-red members are currently conducting sound investigations in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, as well as Torbay and London, UK.

Meg Wade (article) -is a freelance writer, researcher, and facilitator of group processes. She previously worked as a community organizer with Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, and has also spent much time in Chicago. These days, she can often be found behind the counter at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.