New York based media theorist Ted Byfield will be the first guest in Interventions, a new series of events hosted by the imaginary property (.imp) research group at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht. Ted Byfield is a professor at Parsons the New School for Design and visiting fellow at Yale Law School (Information Society project).
In his intervention he will be reflecting on methods and practices that
make up (im)material architectures. Intervention #1 has been video
recorded and can be viewed below.
Click here to watch the video documentation of this presentation.
Ted Byfield worked for over a decade as a freelance book editor,
with an emphasis on cultural, intellectual, and technical history, for
numerous academic and public-interest publishers including the Dia
Center for the Arts, the New Press, and Zone Books. His collaborative
artwork (1989-1994) was exhibited in across the U.S. and Europe,
including an unprecedented double show at American Fine Arts and the
Pat Hearn Gallery in New York City. However, his attraction to the
rarefied atmosphere of the "art system" gave way to a much more
vigorous interest in the communicative potential of transnational
networks. In that vein, he has served for several years as co-moderator
of the well-regarded Nettime mailing list, editing co-edited two of its
proceedings (README! [Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999] and NKPVI
[Venice/Ljubljana: MGLC, 2001]), and co-organizing several conferences,
among them Tulipomania: A Critique of the New Economy (Amsterdam,
2000), blur_02 (New York, 2002), and the Next 5 Minutes 4 (Amsterdam,
2003). He has written widely about the politics of internet governance,
including serving as a co-editor of ICANN Watch. His writings on a
variety of subjects, from space photography to intellectual property,
have appeared in publications as diverse as the Cook Report, First
Monday, Frieze, Le Monde Diplomatique, Movement Research, Mute, and
Stanford Humanities Review; and he has consulted for the BBC, The
Kitchen, KPN, Location One, the Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the "Waag" Society for Old and New Media, among others.
Awards and honors he has received include contributing to the winner of
the 1997 Rotterdam Design Prize, the 2002 Design Trust for Public Space
Fellowship in Journalism, a 2003 grant from the Open Society Institute
to develop community networking training programs in Sri Lanka’s
"post-conflict" environment, and contributor in 2003-2004 to the Social
Science Research Council’s "Information Technology and International
Cooperation" workgroup. His current research interest centers on the
problem of developing a coherent curriculum oriented toward analyzing
and designing the invisible "spaces," systems, networks, and protocols
that increasingly define the fabric of everyday life.
Jan van Eyck Academie
Academieplein 1
6211 KM Maastricht
The Netherlands
