Biographies

Biographies

Manetta Berends works with forms of networked publishing, situated software and collective infrastructures. She is a member of Varia (https://varia.zone), a member based organisation working on everyday technology in Rotterdam, and an educator at the master Experimental Publishing (https://xpub.nl) at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Sophie Boiron

Maria Dada is a Lecturer in Interaction Design at London College of Communication. Her work is placed within the fields of design, continental philosophy and visual culture. She investigates the role of digital imagery in reconfiguring socio-political institutions and structures. She has degrees in both continental philosophy from the Centre for Research in European Philosophy and Computing and Communication Arts from the Lebanese American University.

Pierre Huyghebaert

Phil Langley is an architect and ‘computational designer’ from London. Phil develops critical approaches to technology and software used in architectural practice and more generally for spatial design. Phil developed a number of software prototypes that show how software mediates in design.

Nicolas Malevé is a visual artist, computer programmer and data activist, who lives and works between Brussels and London. Nicolas is currently working on a PhD thesis on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery. In this context, he initiated the project Variations on a Glance (2015-2018), a series of workshops on the experimental production of computer vision, conducted in several international venues such as Cambridge Digital Humanities Network (Cambridge, United Kingdom), Hangar (Barcelona, Spain), Algolit (Brussels, Belgium), or Arhus University, (Arhus, Denmark). Nicolas contributed to exhibitions (documenta12, Kassel; Kiasma, Helsinki), research events (“Archive in Motion”, University of Oslo; Document, Fiction et Droit, Fine Arts Academy, Brussels; Image Net/Work, Fotomuseum, Winthertur), and publications by MIT Press and Presses Universitaires de Provence.

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black Feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. elegantcollisions.com

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice »Technoflesh« investigates the representation of identity and the digitization of biomass in the networked space of appearance. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and an MA in Visual Strategies from the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. She teaches Design Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts Arnhem and is Chief Information Officer at Design Academy Eindhoven. She was a 2016 Fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and recipient of the talent development grant by The Creative Industries Netherlands 2016/2017. Niquille is commissioned contributor to the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Currently she is researching the use of digital capture technology for evidence production with the long-term project »Parametric Truth«.

Possible Bodies

Helen V. Pritchard is an associate professor in queer feminist technoscience & digital design at i-DAT, and the programme lead for MRes Digital Art and Technology. Helen’s work considers the impacts of computation on social and environmental justice and how these impacts configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner she works together with others to make propositions and designs for computing, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and environmental practice. Helen is the co-editor of DataBrowser 06: Executing Practices (2018) and Science,Technology and Human Values: Sensors and Sensing Practices (2019). She regularly collaborates with Winnie Soon on software art and writing machines, and together with Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha, she activates The Underground Division.

Blanca Pujals is an architect, spatial researcher and critical writer. Her cross-disciplinary practice uses spatial research and critical analysis to engage with questions around the geographies of power on bodies and territories, policies of scientific and technological knowledge production, as well as transnational politics, developing tools for undertaking analysis through different visual and sonic devices. Her work encompasses film, architecture, lecturing, curatorial projects, teaching and critical writing.

Jara Rocha are an interdependent researcher-artist. They are currently involved in several disobedient action research projects, such as Volumetric Regimes (with Femke Snelting), The Underground Division (with Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), and Vibes & Leaks (with Kym Ward and Xavier Gorgol). They are also part of the curatorial team of DONE programs at Foto Colectania, Barcelona and teach film studies (MA) at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, Barcelona, as well as at the Körper, Theorie und Poetik des Performativen Department at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Stuttgart. Rocha works through the situated, mundane, and complex forms of distribution of the technological with an antifascist and trans*feminist sensibility.

Sina Seifee is an artist and researcher, living and working between Cologne, Brussels, and Tehran. www.sinaseifee.com

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software in various constellations. With Seda Guerses, Miriyam Aouragh, and Helen Pritchard, she runs the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha) she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations and with Jara Rocha, Femke activates Possible Bodies. Between 2003 and 2021, she was co-responsible for the artistic program of Constant, association for art and media based in Brussels. Femke supports artistic research at PhdArts (Leiden), MERIAN (Maastricht) and at a.pass in Brussels. She teaches at XPUB (Master programme for experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

Spec

The Underground Division is a collective research project on techniques, technologies and infrastructures of subsurface rendering and their imaginations/fantasies/promises. It is dug by Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting with the help of many other others. Which are the presences, latencies, absences and potentials that need to be accounted for, in relation to that deep and thick complexity? The Underground Division bugs contemporary regimes of volumetrics that are applied to extractivist, computationalist and geologic damages. The research will eventually culminate in the Trans*Feminist Rendering Program, a hands-on situation for device making, tool problematizing and "holing in gaug". ddivision.xyz

Kym Ward