Biographies
Simon Browne
An artist, researcher and self-proclaimed "contingent librarian", convenient shorthand for an ever-expanding list of actions he performs in his practice. He is a member of Varia and a graduate of XPUB, the Experimental Publishing Master Programme of the Piet Zwart Institute. Simon is the initiator of the bootleg library, a collection of republished texts and the readers collected around them. His work engages with the social dimension of publishing, free software and infrastructure that supports interpersonal knowledge-sharing networks.
Luke Murphy
Luke Murphy is a programmer based in Rotterdam, whose interests currently revolve around peer-to-peer systems, technology co-operatives, low-tech constraints, Do-It-With-Others approaches, counterfoil research and community organising. He is a proud member of Varia, Centre for Everyday Technology.
Lozana Rossenova
Lozana Rossenova is a researcher and designer based in Berlin. She recently completed a PhD degree at London South Bank University, in collaboration with Rhizome, working on a redesign of the ArtBase net art archive. Lozana is an active member of the Wikimedia community and is particularly interested in working with open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructures, which organise, store and make knowledge, and different ways of knowing, accessible.
Pedro Sá Couto
Pedro Sá Couto is a media researcher and graphic designer from Porto, Portugal. His research focuses on surveillance in the realm of publishing, while questioning authorship, protecting users’ identity and revealing hidden processes required to subvert surveillance in physical and digital media.
David Benqué
https://davidbenque.com
https://diagram.institute
https://cryptpad.fr
David Benqué is a designer and researcher from Paris France, living and working in London UK. He is a PhD graduate (2020) from the Royal College of Art. His thesis proposes diagrams as a language to critically investigate algorithmic prediction. His research operates through design practice while borrowing methodology from media archaeology and the digital humanities.
David is currently the design lead for CryptPad, a collaboration suite that is end-to-end encrypted and fully open-source. He also operates the independent research practice Institute of Diagram Studies.
WordMord
WordMord means that words can kill.
WordMord believes that the violence of language is not eradicated by merely deleting/erasing words, but rather by transversing their violent imposition through specific practices that trouble and disrupt grammatical consistency, semantic norms, ‘correct’ pronunciation, ‘proper’ bodily posture. The rupture of linguistic limits suggests the possibility of experiencing language in its materiality.
WordMord poses questions on the relationship between language, technology, trauma and violence. The collective artistic research will evolve through workshops, presentations and artworks. Through collaborations with artists, activists and groups working on feminist coding, WordMord seeks to shape an online rhizomatic space as an active feminist archive. At the same time, the project will provide tools and methods towards a poetically subversive meta/para/re-writing of derogatory narratives and consequently, of trauma and violence.
WordMord´s initial research group: Vassiliea Stylianidou aka Franck-Lee Alli-Tis, Angeliki Diakrousi, Christina Karagianni, Stylianos Benetos aka Oýto Arognos, Mounologies: Eleni Diamantouli and Anna Delimpasi. It started in collaboration with the #CNMFPP in 2019.