Conference Contributors

Janneke Adema

Dr Janneke Adema (she/her) is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of (book) publishing and digital culture. She is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures  (Coventry University). In her research she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, post-publishing, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, ScholarLed, and Post Office Press (POP), and the Research England and Arcadia funded Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, on which she is Co-PI. Her monograph Living Books. Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021) is openly available.

Z. Blace

Z. Blace (born 1976, SFR Yugoslavia) is an anti-disciplinary artivist, wikimedian, cultural worker, and queer instigator who studied at Fine Arts Academies in Zagreb and Sarajevo, also with Keiko Sei & Vasulkas (FaVU Brno) and Nan Hoover (Summer Academy Salzburg). Z. was media/design researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie and doctoral candidate in Arts at Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. Z. is (in+)consistently working (in-)between fields of contemporary culture and arts, digital technology and media, community sports and activism – by cross-pollinating queer/commoning perspectives and embodied experiences with thinking and doing methods across networks and contexts.

Simon Bowie

Simon Bowie (he/him) is an Open Source Software Developer at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. He is part of the COPIM project and is focused on the Experimental Publishing work package providing technical support for the work package’s pilot projects and developing the ExPub Compendium.

Joana Chicau

Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, researcher and coder, with a background in choreography and performance. Her methodolgy explores how design and coding practices interfere deeper with interfaces and information displays — when considering choreographic thinking, embodiment and perceptual possibilities. Her projects are delivered across multiple media: websites and online platforms, to printed books and online publications, workshops, performative events and beyond.

She privileges the use of Free-Libre Open Source software. She collaborates with various international practitioners in the creative industries, non-profit and activism, on both commissioned and self-initiated projects. She also provides consultancy on research and project development and strategy. She is an associate lecturer at the University of Arts of London (UAL) and has also been tutoring and facilitating workshops in international various institutions. Chicau is currently undertaking a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Rebecca Fiebrink. at the Creative Computing Institute (UAL). She is a member of Varia.Zone, center for everyday technology and co-founder of Netherlands Coding Live.

Gary Hall

Gary Hall is media theorist and experimental writer, editor and publisher. He works (and makes) at the intersections of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He is the author of a number of books including, most recently, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). In 1999 he co-founded the critical theory journal Culture Machine, an early champion of open access in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), the first open access publishing house explicitly dedicated to critical and cultural theory, which he co-directs. 

Julien McHardy

Julien McHardy is a sociologist of technology, designer, dramaturge and publisher, working across disciplines and institutions. Julien co-founded the open-access publisher Mattering Press and ScholarLed, a collective of academic-led open-access presses. He runs a studio in Amsterdam and contributes to the COPIM project’s Experimental Publishing Group while also holding a position at the University of St. Gallen, where he follows a group of climate hackers.

Gabriela Méndez Cota

Gabriela Méndez Cota works full time in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. She holds an MA and a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has explored technoscientific/socioenvironmental controversies from some of the theoretical perspectives that inform cultural studies, including deconstruction, post-Marxism and feminism. She is the author of one book and several essays and articles on intellectuals, scientific activism, critical literacies and the politics of cultural representation, including one in new formations, titled Policing the Environmental Conjuncture (2019). Between 2019 and 2021, she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project Centre for Post-Digital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015). She recently completed an essay on Ivan Illich, ‘The Gift of Gender: Ivan Illich and (infra)feminism’, which is due to appear in a special issue of the journal Política Común (2023).

An Mertens

An Mertens is media artist, nature guide and writer. Her artistic practice focuses on creative writing using code. In this context she founded Algolit in 2012, an art research group around text and code in Brussels. She creates publications, installations, performances. From 2008 till 2021 she was a core member of Constant in Brussels. 

In 2019, she launched the pseudonym Anaïs Berck, a collaboration between humans, algorithms and trees. As a collective, they open up a space in which human intelligence is explored in company of plant intelligence and artificial intelligence. 

https://www.anaisberck.be/ | https://www.algolit.net/ | https://constantvzw.org/

Rebekka Kiesewetter

Rebekka KIesewetter studied art history, business administration, and modern history at the University of Zurich. Currently she is doing a PhD at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. She also is a researcher on WP6: Experimental Publishing, Re-use, and Impact of the Coventry University based COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) research project; a  member of Jisc's Open Research Advisory Board; an editorial board member of continent.; and a co-editor of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers experimental book series with Open Humanities Press.

Paige Raibmon

Paige Raibmon’s research engages a range of questions united by her preoccupation with Indigenous peoples’ endurance and resurgence in the face of settler colonialism’s historical workings and on-going implications.  It is situated on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Northwest Coast.  Paige has a long-standing commitment to collaborative and community-based research practice.  And she has a keen interest in new modes of research dissemination and scholarly output.

Paige has lived most of her life on the unceded, ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people where she now resides with her two daughters.  Her grandparents/great-grandparents came to Canada from Hungary, Sweden, and shtelts in Eastern Europe.  As a settler scholar and mother, her teaching, writing, and public history efforts grow from my on-going learning about her place in this place.

Paige is the editor of BC Studies: The British Columbia Quarterly, a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes regional scholarly work in print, audio, and multi-media formats. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University (2020-2023).   From 2015-2019, she was a Senior Fellow in CIFAR’s Successful Societies Program, an international, interdisciplinary research group focused on global inequality, its causes and implications.

Lozana Rossenova

Lozana Rossenova is a digital designer and researcher. She holds an MA from the Department for Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where she was a Sessional Lecturer in hybrid and digital publishing between 2016–2021. In 2021, she completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organisation. Her research focuses on open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructures, which organise, store and make knowledge, and different ways of knowing, accessible. Rossenova is currently based at the Open Science Lab at TIB, Hanover, working on the NFDI4Culture project towards a national research infrastructure of cultural heritage data.

Winnie Soon

Winnie Soon is a Hong Kong-born artist coder and researcher interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries, engaging with themes such as Free and Open Source Culture, Coding Otherwise, artistic/technical manuals, digital censorship and minor technology. With works appearing in museums, galleries, festivals, distributed networks, papers and written forms, including co-authored books entitled Aesthetic Programming and Fix My Code, Winnie is the co-editor of the Software Studies Book Series (MIT Press) and Co-PI of the research project Digital Activism. They are Course Leader at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, and also Associate Professor (on leave) at Aarhus University and visiting researcher at the Centre of the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University.

Toby Steiner

With a background in Cultural and Media Studies (MA in Television Studies), Toby Steiner (he/him) currently works as project manager on Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). For the last thirteen years, he has worked with a multiplicity of projects that sought to foster uptake of OER and Open Education practices, Open Publishing FLOSS tools for teaching, learning, and research, and Open Science and Scholarship in more general terms and in a variety of configurations. In parallel, he used to work on a part-time PhD in Cultural Memory and Media Studies, but ultimately decided to end this project in early 2018 due to personal reasons.

He continues to be interested in exploring Open Scholarship practices in their many facets, currently with a focus on scholar- and community-led open access books infrastructures particularly for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In his free time, and together with Dr Kim Akass, he is co-editor of the scholarly blog CSTonline, the open access companion blog to Critical Studies in Television, is a member of the Radical Open Access Collective, participates in the Commoning the Means of Knowledge Production reading group, and volunteers his time on a variety of open initiatives such as the Open Access Tracking Project, and the German-language scholar-led.network.

Simon Worthington

Simon Worthington (he/him) is a book liberationist. He is a researcher in data publishing for NFDI4Culture and leads the NextGenBooks project at the Open Science Lab, TIB, the German National Library of Science and Technology.

As an open science advocate, his work has been about making open-source software for multi-format publishing to support knowledge justice. He was a founder of the technology and culture magazine Mute. While studying Fine Art at the Slade School, UCL and CalArts, he discovered a much more interesting world of knowledge liberation from pioneers such as Alan Kay and Ted Nelson — he never looked back.