Geert Lovink
Biography
Geert Lovink (1959, Amsterdam), media theorist, net critic and activist, based in Sydney,studied political science on the University of Amsterdam (MA) and will hold a PhD at University of Melbourne (early 2003). He is member of Adilkno, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, a free association of media-related intellectuals established in 1983 (Agentur Bilwet auf Deutsch). From Adilkno the following books appeared: 'Empire of Images' (1985), 'Cracking the Movement' (1990) on the squatter movement and the media, 'Listen or Die' (1992) on free radio, the collected theoretical work 'The Media Archive' (1992 - translated into German, English, Croatian and Slovenian), the collection of essays 'The Datadandy' (1994 - in German) and the book/CD 'Electronic Solitude' (1997). Most of the texts of Adilkno in Dutch, German and English can be found at http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet. He is a former editor of the media art magazine Mediamatic (1989-94) and has been teaching and lecturing media theory throughout Central and Eastern Europe. He is a co-founder of the Amsterdam-based free community network 'Digital City' (http://www.dds.nl) and the support campaign for independent media in South-East Europe "Press Now" http://www.dds.nl/pressnow. He was the co-organizer of conferences such as Wetware (1991), Next Five Minutes 1-3 (93-96-99) http://www.n5m.org, Metaforum 1-3 (Budapest 94-96) http://www.mrf.hu, Ars Electronica (Linz, 1996/98) http://www.aec.at and Interface 3 (Hamburg 95). In 1995, together with Pit Schultz, he founded the international 'nettime' circle http://www.nettime.org which is both a mailinglist (in English, Dutch, French, Spanish/Portuguese, Romanian and Chinese), a series of meetings and publications such as zkp 1-4, ‘Netzkritik’ (ID-Archiv, 1997, in German) and ‘Readme!’ (Autonomedia, 1998). From 1996-1999 he was based at De Waag, the Society for Old and New Media (http://www.waag.org) where he was responsible for public research. Since 1996, once a year he has been coordinating a project and teaching at the IMI mediaschool in Osaka/Japan http://www.iminet.ac.jp. A series of temporary media labs was started in 1997 at the arts exhibition Documenta X in Kassel/Germany called Hybrid Workspace (for archive see http://www.medialounge.net which continued in Manchester (1998) and Helsinki, in the contemporary arts museum Kiasma (http://temp.kiasma.fi). A recent conference he organized was Tulipomania Dotcom conference, which took place in Amsterdam, June 2000, focussing on a critique of the New Economy www.balie.nl/tulipomania. In early 2001 he co-founded www.fibreculture.org, a forum for Australian Internet research and culture which has its first publication out, launched at the first fibreculture meeting in Melbourne (December 2001). Since 2000 he is a consultant/editor to the exchange program of Waag Society (Amsterdam) and Sarai New Media Centre (Dehli). His latest conference he co-organized is Dark Markets on new media and democracy in times of crisis (Vienna, October 2002, http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at/). Two books document his collaboration with the Dutch designer Mieke Gerritzen which he co-edited: Everyone is a Designer (BIS, 2000) and Catalogue of Strategies (Gingko Press, 2001). Together with Mieke Gerritzen in 1998 he co-founded the Browserday events (www.browserday.com), a competition for new media design students. In 2002 The MIT Press will publish two of his titles: “Dark Fiber”, a collection of esssays on Internet culture and “Uncanny Networks”, collected interviews with media theorists and artists. Online text archives: www.desk.org/bilwet and www.laudanum.net/geert. Contact: geert@xs4all.nl
geert@xs4all.nl