Founding Members

Jose Serrano-Reyes spent four years as an economic analyst/forecaster for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, engaged in the day-to-day trend analysis and trades that set and carry out the free-market intervention agenda that stabilizes the world’s credit, currency, and capital market systems. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and was awarded an undergraduate fellowship at Yale University for his research in cultural theory and economics. In 2004 Jose was admitted to Columbia University’s architecture and foreign/public policy schools to pursue individualized graduate work on media and social system design. He declared independence for his research in 2005.

Seth Aylmer has been making films since high school in Maine, where he was awarded a Level 1 grant from the NFAA for his short video “The Reel Feel.” It was showcased at the Smithsonian and garnered him a Presidential Scholar of the Arts award. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Colby College with a degree in Philosophy. He has been living in New York City since 2004, working with art, media, and the internets.

Tatiana Platt is a well known Internet executive and entrepreneur in New York City. She is an angel investor in Internet based start-ups, and serves as a corporate advisor on new media branding and programming strategy. She is a former Senior Vice President and Chief Trust Officer of AOL, where she pioneered the development of Web 2.0 standards on social networking. She has also become a key voice in the online industry, working to shape the interactive policy debate in the U.S. and overseas. She is active in philanthropy, has lived and worked all over the world, and speaks six languages.

Money

Linda Law is the CEO of Law & Associates, a real estate development firm developing institutional-quality projects for high tech companies in Silicon Valley. She’s on the management board of SilicomVentures.com, one of the largest organized groups of Angel Investors in the United States with investments ranging from life sciences and medical technology to semiconductors, software and media. The group is comprised of venture capitalists and angel investors who are high tech executives in leading Bay Area companies. Ms. Law lectures at UC Berkeley and Harvard University.

David Demato
Sergio Gonzalez
Michael Robertson

Code

Tim Schwartz curated digital events and exhibits for the Museum of the Moving Image, created in-museum interactive experiences, and built online exhibitions for the Museum. Additionally, Schwartz is an Adjunct Professor at Parsons School of Design where he teaches the course ‘Visualizing the Internet’. He received a B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University and has spent time studying architecture and design.

Michael Frumin was the R+D Technical Director of the Eyebeam Open Lab, where he guided and developed creative technology projects in the public domain. He began his career in original and creative technology-based research while working on advanced networking protocols as an undergraduate at Stanford University. After school, he was a founding member of a team of hackers using their quantitative skills to find proprietary, novel real-time sources of qualitative information for hedge fund managers.

Pete Ash studied at Massey College of Creative Arts in Wellington, New Zealand, graduating with a B.A. in Industrial design. Since graduating, he has taught classes in both Industrial Design and Visual communication at the University, worked on grant-funded collaborative projects with faculty, and freelanced for design commissions.

Matt Richards (The Warren Creative)
Jon Sajdak (The Warren Creative)
Jason Eppink

Editorial
Ryan Brown most recently worked as an assistant at Barry Diller’s IAC in the Programming Department. At IAC he researched market specific build and buy opportunities on the internet while helping the newly formed department grow and stay abreast of industry trends. Prior to that he worked at J. Walter Thompson as an Account Coordinator, working on television, radio and internet campaigns for Welch’s, Unilever, and others. He graduated with a B.A. from Skidmore College in Literature and Philosophy, and proudly claims awesomecelebritynooz.com as one part his brainchild.

Stephanie Bang

Advice

Gregory Sholette is a sculptor, multi-media artist, and a founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation and Distribution and REPOhistory. He is co-editor of the books Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 and The Interventionists. “Sholette has long been a catalytic presence in contemporary political art, including art designed to gather, document and distribute alternative knowledge about networks of power and control in urban spaces.” (NYT)

Lewis Hyde is a poet, MacArthur Fellow, and author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, an inquiry into the situation of creative artists in a commercial society, and Trickster Makes This World, a portrait of the the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and alive. Hyde is currently at work on a book about “cultural commons,” that vast, unowned store of ideas, inventions, and art that we have inherited from the past. He is a founding director of CreativeCapital.org, a venture philanthropy that supports artists “open to changing how they market themselves”.

Douglas Rushkoff is author of ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture, including Media Virus and Coercion, winner of the Marshall Mcluhan Award for best media book. He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance. He has just finished Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, a HarpersBusiness book applying renaissance principles to today’s complex economic landscape.

Duncan Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, head of the CDG Collective Dynamics Group and author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. Starting in the fall of 2007 he will join Yahoo! Research, and will lead their research in human social dynamics. He is currently exploring the “role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior. He holds a B.Sc in physics from the University of New South Wales, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. Watts is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute.

Hooman Radfar is the founder of Clearspring.com, and an expert in social networks and new media. Radfar graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in Economics and Computer Science, and from Carnegie Mellon University with an MA in Information Networking. He was recently named one of the top 25 young tech entreprenuers by Businessweek. You can find him at Widgify.com.

Eyebeam
Skewville
Retna.com
Artforum.com
Eli Chapman