DISNOVATION.ORG is a working group based in Paris, initiated by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. At the crossroads between contemporary art, research and hacking, the collective develops situations of disturbance, speculation, and debate, challenging the dominant ideology of technological innovation and stimulating the emergence of alternative narratives. They recently edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy. Their research includes artworks, curation and publications.

Their work has been presented at numerous venues and festivals internationally such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Transmediale (Berlin), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), FILE (Sao Paulo), Strelka Institute (Moscow) and the Chaos Computer Congress (Hamburg)... Their work has been featured in Forbes, Vice, Wired, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural.it, Digicult, Gizmodo, Seattle Weekly, torrentfreak.com, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.

Nicolas Maigret [FR] (http://peripheriques.free.fr) is an artist, curator, and educator. He exposes the internal workings of media, through an exploration of their dysfunctions, limitations or failure thresholds which he develops into immersive, ambiguous and critical artworks. He initiated DISNOVATION.ORG, a working group which aims to disrupt, pervert, and complexify the narratives on technological innovation. He teaches at Parsons Paris and develops a research on technological “Black Boxes” with V2_ Rotterdam and UCL Louvain. With Maria Roszkowska he co-edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.

Maria Roszkowska [PL] is an artist, designer and initiator of the DISNOVATION.ORG working group with Nicolas Maigret. From 2010 she conducted research with EnsadLab Paris, before joining Intégral Ruedi Baur, a cultural design studio based in Paris. She designed and coordinated « Don't Brand My Public Space! », a 3 years research on the issue of cities applying branding strategies. In 2015 she edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy. She is a recipient of a 2018 Design Trust Grant (Honk Kong).

Grayson Earle's diverse technological practice is unified by a political approach to media arts. Employing video games, video projection, algorithmic audiovisual generation, biological organisms, and robotics, his work tends to intervene on physical spaces and entrenched ideas. His creative practice articulates a repositioning of resistance to power that invites participation from reluctant citizens.

Earle (b. 1987) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He teaches Emerging Media Technology at The New York City College of Technology. Previous to that, he taught as an adjunct at Hunter College, split between the Computer Science, Film and Media, Integrated Media Arts, and Studio Art MFA programs. This interdisciplinary posture is emblematic to his work as an artist, and is an approach he proselytizes in his courses on game programming, electronics, and generative art.

Recent displays of his work include SeoulArts in South Korea; Eastern Bloc and Centre Phi in Montreal; the Brooklyn Museum, Macy Gallery, and Babycastles in New York City; and the Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. He has presented research and given artist talks at The Whitney Museum of Art, Theorizing the Web, The Magnum Foundation, The Vera List Center, College Arts Association, and Open Engagement. He has published essays on the socioeconomic implications of the Cold War on abstract expressionism in the United States and Russia, critical applications of blockchain technology, and new methods for rhetorical approaches in video games.

Nicolas Maigret is an artist, curator, and educator based in Paris. He is a recipient of the Award for Research in Artistic Technology (2015), the First Prize for Digital Arts from Arte Laguna (2016), and a Design Trust Grant, Honk Kong (2018).

Nicolas Maigret exposes the internal workings of media, through an exploration of their dysfunctions, limitations or failure thresholds which he develops into immersive, ambiguous and critical artworks. He initiated DISNOVATION.ORG, a working group which aims to disrupt, pervert, and complexify the accounts on technological innovation. The group develops situations of disturbance, speculation, and debate, challenging the ideology of technological solutionism and stimulating the dissemination of alternative narratives. He teaches at Parsons Paris and develops a research on “Black Boxes” with V2_ Rotterdam and UCL Louvain. With Maria Roszkowska he co-edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.

His work has been presented in international exhibitions and festivals including Transmediale (Berlin), Museum of Art and Design (New York), 30th Chaos Communication Congress (Hamburg), ISEA (Hong Kong), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Elektra (Montréal), China Museum of Digital Arts (Beijing), HEK (Basel), Polytechnic Museum (Moscow), File (Sao Paulo), Northwest Film Forum (Seattle), School of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Pirate Bay 10th Anniversary (Stockholm), Eastern Bloc (Montreal)... His work has been featured in Forbes, Vice, Wired, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural.it, Digicult, Gizmodo, Seattle Weekly, torrentfreak.com, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.

Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, with a particular focus on blockchain technologies. She is investigating the new opportunities for these technologies to enable new governance models and participatory decision-making through the concept of governance-by-design. Her book, “Blockchain and the Law,” was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright).

Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. She is an alumni in the Berlin Program for Artists, a founder and co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, and an organiser of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. Recent solo exhibitions include Off: Endgame, curated by Rhizome, Refraction and Fingerprints at Public Works Administration, New York, USA and Terraforming at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin, Germany. She is on the advisory board and was formerly the smart contract lead for Circles UBI, a blockchain-based community currency that aims to lead to a more equal distribution of wealth. She was also the technical lead for Culturestake, a project that uses quadratic voting to lead to better decisions about arts funding. She was a co-founder of bitspossessed, a software development consultancy that operates as a coop, and in 2022 was a visiting Professor of blockchain art at The Cooper Union.

Simon Denny lives and works in Berlin. He was born in Auckland, New Zealand and holds a BFA from Auckland University. He completed his MFA from the Frankfurt Städelschule and has taken part in 4 residencies split between Western Europe and Australia. Simon Denny’s work has challenged numerous themes entrenched in modern society’s globalized culture: the Internet, technological obsolescence, corporate culture, television broadcasting, and national identity. He is interested in technology’s role in shaping global culture and in the ways information is controlled and shared. The rapid technological growth and innovation seen by large corporations and start-ups alike since the dot com boom is a phenomenon which motivates Denny’s practice. He creates a dialogue with these ideas through installations that combine sculpture, graphics, and moving images.

Cullen Miller is a systems artist, spatial-media designer, and composer. His projects vary in nature but typically fall within the spectrum of media architecture, sound design, installation, composition, and systems design. Reared in Detroit, he relocated to San Francisco pursuing curatorial work with Gray Area, SFCMP, and to teach digital signal processing. He currently spends his days designing and engineering systems architecture. He has released recordings under numerous aliases and organizes the concert series, FINITE. His performances and installations have been exhibited internationally in various museums, galleries, and clubs.

Gabriel Dunne (b.1981 San Francisco) is an audiovisual artist who creates works that explore visual, audible, and physical frequencies, drawing influence from natural systems, sensory patterns, structures and rhythms of the perceivable and imperceivable universe. He integrates a wide range of mediums including sculpture, music, sound, visualization/sonification, digital manufacturing and fabrication, parametric software, and site-specific installation. He has performed and shown his work internationally at venues including Barcelona Festival Sonar, Interferenze Italia, and is featured in the permanent collection of NY MoMA, and has been featured in WIRED Magazine, Mondo India, FOCUS Italia, Discover, Contemporary Art of Science and Technology, and Architectural Digest.

In addition to his studio practice, Dunne is an educator and conducts workshops in various communities, schools, and orgs. He’s developed curricula for visual programming, audio/visual graphics, and integrative media arts practice which contextualizes computing and technology as a language and creative medium. In 2010 he co-founded the group [O_o] oooshiny, which has grown to include an international community of designers, technologists, and artists. In 2012, he produced ‘NAAG’ in collaboration with Vishal K Dar, a 14′ tall site-specific sculpture which comes to life through an integrative digital fabrication and projection mapping process, aspiring to deconstruct the notion of sculpture as a static object. The work was installed in an abandoned factory in central Delhi, India during the India Art Faire — an event that included the local community in its process resulting in magical stories of its appearance. In 2015, ‘NAAG’ a larger version was installed in Mumbai, and most recently featured in the N.E.A.T. exhibition at the CJM in San Francisco in 2015/16. Dunne was an Artist in Residence at Gray Area in 2009/10 and Autodesk in 2014/15. He holds a B.A. from UCLA DMA.

Erik van der Molen is both a designer and artist. In 2004 he cofounded Office vs Office, a San Francisco boutique design shop providing a wide array of digital and branding services. Currently the sole owner of Office vs Office, Erik builds multi disciplinary teams to meet the demands of both small and large multifaceted projects for internationally recognized clients. At times Erik lends his expertise on a consultant basis when it’s necessary to work within an existing framework or organization, providing similar services such as CX/UX/design expertise, audit and redesign of proprietary in-house products, or validating the feasibility of bringing a new product or service to market, then providing a vision for its future.

While Erik’s work may at times blur the line between art and design, he keeps a strict boundary. Design serves a concrete purpose, while art stands on its own. Erik's work is focused on exploring an interplay of light, color, and various materials in both static and time based mediums. In 2003 he began creating custom live video experiences and installations for music and other related events, and has been actively VJ'ing ever since. Erik has had the pleasure of working with various artists such as Bonobo’s 2013 world tour, as well as performing at large festivals such as Winter Music Conference and SXSW, and creating site specific installations, the most recent being Mutek SF, 2018. With 30+ Mac adapters, Erik is readied to team with whatever lonely projector awaits a dance the chance to bring a more immersive experience to the floor.

Harm’s broad practice includes software, sculptural assemblage, and collage. He investigates how algorithms can analyse digital archives to guide aesthetic decision taking. Using computer programming he deconstructs prevalent notions in art, such as intuition and expression. His ultimate desire is to discover the reasoning structure of his own consciousness, with its implicit associations and assumptions. In this process he borrows ideas from psychoanalysis, the writing of Jacques Derrida, and Artificial Intelligence (which he studied). He’s had institutional exhibitions at Museum Kurhaus Kleve, the New Museum in New York, MCA Chicago,The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam. In 2015 the MAK Vienna acquired Harm van den Dorpel's work Event Listeners and thereby became the first museum to purchase a work of art using bitcoins.

Maria Roszkowska [PL] is an artist, designer and initiator of the DISNOVATION.ORG working group with Nicolas Maigret. From 2010 she conducted research with EnsadLab Paris, before joining Intégral Ruedi Baur, a cultural design studio based in Paris. She designed and coordinated « Don't Brand My Public Space! », a 3 years research on the issue of cities applying branding strategies. In 2015 she edited The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy. She is a recipient of a 2018 Design Trust Grant (Honk Kong) for a research about China's Shanzhai culture.

RIAT is an institute for research, development, communication and education in the fields of cryptoeconomics and the blockchain. RIAT works with experimental artistic technology and open hardware. It explores and actively stress-tests the role of research and development in the age of zero-trust, through novel forms of presentation, discussion and publication. Examining the global cryptoeconomic condition and its effects on culture and society, it fosters an open and interdisciplinary discourse to improve crypto-literacy for the society of tomorrow. RIAT is an independent institute operating since 2012 with its main headquarters in Vienna, Austria and a large international network around the globe.

Max Hampshire (UK) is a developer and crypto/blockchain researcher based in Amsterdam. He is one of three project initators of terra0, an organisation built on Ethereum that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems, and is also a Blockchain engineer at BlockLab in Rotterdam, developing proof-of-concepts and MVPs for the blockchain infrastructure of the future. He also works with the RIAT Institute For Future Cryptoeconomics, engaging in research-through-practice to glimpse the interaction possibilities of tomorrow's cryptosphere, and previously worked with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. His work has been presented and discussed at Transmediale, Furtherfield Gallery, Ars Electronica, FIBER, and Het Nieuwe Instituut (amongst others), and has been published and discussed in/by ecocore, Forbes, and re:plublica.

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, currently living in Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression— like money, police or prisons. Since before the 2008 financial collapse, Thornton has focused on researching and revealing the complex nature of debt through socially engaged art. She has produced large and small social projects and writings with activist and art organizations, festivals, conferences, and institutions including Transmediale, Bemis Center for the Arts, MoneyLab, Furtherfield Gallery, MayWorks-Halifax, Strike Debt, Headlands Center for the Arts, Cannonball Miami, Volta Fair in Basel, Mass Arts, PS-1, Brooklyn Museum, Flux Factory, Gallery 400 in Chicago, Southern Exposure, SFMoMA, EFA Project Space, and more. Her early research into the social and imaginal impact of financial debt systems makes her role as artist at educational and cultural institutions to be like that of an ethics accountant or janitorial shaman for the political economy (who delves into the closets to check on the ghosts that every institution keeps hidden). She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social center at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

Rob Myers is an artist, writer and hacker from the UK now based in Vancouver, BC. An early creative and critical adopter of the blockchain, his work centers on the intersection of changing technological, aesthetic and social form. Rob's blockchain art projects include "Facecoin" (2014), "Blockchain Aesthetics" (2015) and "Artworld Ethereum" (2014 - ongoing). His writing on the subject includes "(Conceptual) Art, Cryptocurrency and Beyond" (2014), "Blockchain Geometries" (2018) and the story "Bad Shibe" (2017).

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the pop group YACHT, the founding editor of Terraform, VICE’s science-fiction vertical, and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women who Made the Internet (Penguin Random House). She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, WIRED, and Aeon; previously, she was a contributor to Grantland and wrote National Geographic’s popular culture and science blog, Universe. She is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.

Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud were both born in Zurich and live and work in Berlin. They are professors at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, have participated in numerous international exhibitions and have been awarded many international prizes. Their art works include open-source projects that uncover forms of censorship of the Internet, undermine the concentration of political power and even resolve the dependency on infrastructure. The tools, provided by the artists, are used by communities in the USA, Europe, Australia and in countries such as Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, India, China and Thailand. Even in North Korea activists participate. But not everyone is fond of these projects. Their findings on the secret prisons on the US military bases in Guantanamo and Iraq have not been covered by the US media. The PR China denied Wachter and Jud to enter the country since 2013.