Biographies

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Biographies

Manetta Berends works with forms of networked publishing, situated software and collective infrastructures. She is a member of Varia, a member based organisation working on everyday technology in Rotterdam, and an educator at the Masters programme Experimental Publishing at the Piet Zwart Institute.

Sophie Boiron has her graphic designer practice rooted in her photography, painting and cultural management skills. She is participating with Spec uloos studio doing amongst other things book design and typography while gradually expanding the scope of her work as a member of the Atelier cartographique cooperative with focuses on collaborative GIS and paper cartography.

Maria Dada is 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 is exploring several practices around graphic design, cartography, type design, web interface, schematic illustration, book design and teaching these practices at La Cambre art school. Along with participating in Spec uloos and OSP, he develops topological and non-topological mapping with Atelier cartographique and others Brussels urban projects.

Phil Langley is an architect and “computational designer” based in London. Phil develops critical approaches to technology and software used in architectural practice and more generally for spatial design. As a Director of Bryden Wood Technology, an integrated architectural and engineering practice, Phil leads the Creative Technologies team which is focused on building design automation software for building and infrastructure projects around the world. After training and practising as an Architect, Phil completed his MSc in Architecture: Computing and Design at UEL in 2007, focusing on generative design and neural networks. He has published and presented his work with software prototypes internationally – in both academic and professional contexts — on the ways in which software mediates design and the built environment.

Nicolas Malevé is a visual artist, computer programmer and data activist, who lives and works between Brussels and London. Nicolas obtained his PhD with a thesis on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery (2021). 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 Aarhus University (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. https://elegantcollisions.com

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher based in Amsterdam, NL. Her practice Technoflesh investigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at HeK-Haus der Elektronischen Künste (2020), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019), La Gaite Lyrique (2019). She has published writing in Volume Magazine, AD Architecture and e-flux. She is Chief Information Officer at Design Academy Eindhoven. In 2016 she was Research Fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and is commissioned contributor to the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Niquille is recipient of the Pax Art Award 2020 and Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2021/2022). Currently she is investigating the architectural and bodily consequences of computer vision, researching the politics of synthetic training datasets.

Possible Bodies is a collaborative research activated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in relation to technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. How does cyborg-ness participate in the presentation and representation of so-called bodies? Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices.

Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer and geographer. As a practitioner they work together with others to make propositions and designs for computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival. Helen is an associate professor in queer feminist technoscience & digital design at i-DAT, University of Plymouth. They are the co-editor of DataBrowser 06: Executing Practices (2018) and Science, Technology and Human Values: Sensors and Sensing Practices (2019).

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 is 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), The Relearning Series (with Martino Morandi), and Vibes & Leaks (with Kym Ward and Xavier Gorgol). They are part of the curatorial teams of DONE at Foto Colectania, of ISEA at Arts Santa Mònica and of La Capella, all in Barcelona; Jara also teaches screen studies at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, as well as at the Körper, Theorie und Poetik des Performativen Department at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. With Karl Moubarak and Cristina Cochior, they conform the Cell for Digital Discomfort at the 21/22 Fellowship for Situated Research of BAK, Utrecht. Jara works through the situated, mundane, and complex forms of distribution of the technological with an antifascist and trans*feminist sensibility, and their show "Naturoculturas son disturbios" emits erratically from dublab.es radio.

Sina Seifee, born in Tehran 1982, is an artist based in Brussels. Using storytelling, video, and performance, he explores and teases with the heritage of zoology in West Asia. His work picks up on how epistemologies, jokes and knowledges about animals get shaped in the old and new intersections of techno-media and globalism. His work has been been presenting internationally in WIELS, Brussels (2020); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2016); Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017); Temporary Gallery, Köln (2019); Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2019); and Akademie der Künste der Welt, Köln (2015). http://www.sinaseifee.com

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software in various constellations. With Seda Gürses, 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 (Masters programme Experimental Publishing, Rotterdam).

Spec is a structure based in Brussels structured around Pierre Huyghebaert, Sophie Boiron and several independent collaborators. The studio works mainly in the cultural, associative or public field. If its structure is of a commercial type, its work is not a commodity, but aims at the production of meaning. Speculoos is also part and works with Atelier cartographique. http://speculoos.com

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 V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha and 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". http://ddivision.xyz

Kym Ward lives and works in Bidston, Liverpool, UK. She is one of the founding hosts of the Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, a not-for-profit study centre, focused on providing artists, writers, academics, performers, etc., with a cheap, temporary place to dictate their own working methods. She moves between more solitary performance research practice and organising and enabling alternative or non-hierarchical educations. Her interests lie in productive critique: of softwares’ production of social relation, of technologies of organisation and, when possible, the cheeky reappropriation of institutional structure.