1 jan 2002

Geert Lovink

media theorist and Internet critic

Geert Lovink (1959, Amsterdam) studied political science on the University of Amsterdam (MA degree). He is a member of Adilkno, 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, the collected theoretical work The Media Archive (1992-98 - translated into German, English, Croatian and Slovenian), the collection of essays The Datadandy (1994 - in German) and the book/CD Electronic Solitude (1997 -- in German). On his own name a title appeared in German called Listen or Die (Berlin, 1992). A collection of his essays on net criticism and tactical media will be published by MIT-Press.

Lovink is a former editor of Mediamatic (1989-94) and has been working and teaching media theory throughout Central And Eastern Europe (Germany, Romania, Hungary) He is a co-founder of the freenet Digital City, the support campaign for independent media in South-East Europe Press Now and co-organizer of conferences such as Next Five Minutes, Metaforum, Ars Electronica and Interface.

In the spring of 1995, together with Pit Schultz, he founded the international nettime circle which is both a mailinglist (in English, Dutch, Romanian, French and Spanish/Portuguese), a series of meetings and publications such as zkp 1-4, Netzkritik (ID-Archiv, 1997) and Readme! (Autonomedia, 1999). Over the years he has been an active coordinator and contributor to the international nettime list community.

From 1996-2000 he was based at Amsterdam new media center De Waag, the Society for Old and New Media 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. A series of temporary media labs was started in 1997 at the art exhibition Documenta X in Kassel/Germany called Hybrid Workspace which continued in Manchester (1998) and Helsinki, in the contemporary arts museum Kiasma.

Together with Mieke Gerritzen he is the co-organizer/editor of a series of media design competitions, www.internationalbrowserday.com (1998-2000 Amsterdam, 2001 New York and Berlin). A recent project is the Tulipomania Dotcom conference, which took place in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, June 2000, focussing on a critique of the New Economy. He edited the catalogue of the first international streaming media festival, net.congestion (Amsterdam, October 2000), and he is a member of the advisory board of Sarai, a new media center in Delhi (India) which opened in February 2001, a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies(CSDS) where he coordinating Sarai publications and international exchange programs.

source: http://laudanum.net