SSRC

Ted Byfield is currently (Sept 2008) an Assistant Professor in the Communication Design and Technology Department of Parsons the New School for Design, New School University, and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. He 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 over a decade 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 extensively 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 conduct social research 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.