Bassam El Baroni Editor

Bridget Crone (1973–2023) was a writer and curator based in London, UK. She was a senior lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, The University of London, where she co-convened the Ph.D. programme in Advanced Practices. Bridget died of cancer on 28th January, 2023, before the publication of this book, for which she is the founding editor. Crone had significant professional curatorial experience in the visual arts sector stretching across more than twenty years, working in the UK, Australia and internationally. She was the artistic director of Media Art Bath from 2006 to 2011 – a publicly funded research-based commissioning agency based in South West England – and, prior to that, she was curator at The Showroom Gallery, London. Crone also taught at universities and art schools in the UK and Australia, including Chelsea School of Art and Design, Monash University, and Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, as well as giving guest lecturers and seminars at universities across the UK. She was a member of the European Forum for Advanced Practices, a Europe-wide network engaged in questions of artistic research and a COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action. Focusing on the body in material and speculative terms, Crone’s work explores questions of ‘liveness’ and the image in relation to contemporary performance art and moving image practices, and the changing relations of body, technology and ecology. Her edited book The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, was published in a second revised and extended edition in 2017. In 2022, Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, was published; co-edited by Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton, (2022). Recent essays include: ‘Future’, with Henriette Gunkel, in The Bloomsbury Handbook for 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019) and ‘Flicker-time and Fabulation: from flickering images to crazy wipes’ in Fictions and Futures, (2017). Recent curatorial projects include Propositions for a stage: 24 frames of a beautiful heaven (2017, Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore), Spectral Ecologies (2017, Mildura Arts Centre) and the multiple site-based project The Cinemas Project: exploring the spectral spaces of cinema in Regional Victoria (2014, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Mildura Arts Centre, Geelong Gallery). Bridget wrote regularly for artists and recently published an extended introduction, titled ‘Wounds of Unbecoming’ (addressing questions of gender and trans materiality), for Turner Prize winner Tai Shani’s collected writings, Our Fatal Magic (2019). Bassam El Baroni is a curator, writer, sporadic artist and Associate Professor in Curating and Mediating Art at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland. He has lectured at the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem (2013–2018) and served as the artistic director of the now folded non-profit art space ACAF - Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, in Alexandria, Egypt (2005–2012). El Baroni’s work explores artistic and curatorial practices in relation to technology, the political economy, financialization, infrastructural futures and histories, and new forms of activism. Recent publications include: Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (2022) and Manual for a Future Desert (co-editor with Ida Soulard and Abinadi Meza, 2021). Curatorial projects include: Infrahauntologies, Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany; La Box ENSA, Bourges, France (2021-2022); Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, 2010 (co-curator); the Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway, 2013 (co-curator with Anne Szefer Karlsen and Eva González-Sancho); Agitationism, the 36th Eva International–Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick, 2014; and, What Hope Looks like after Hope (On Constructive Alienation) at HOME WORKS 7, Beirut, 2015. In 2021, El Baroni, in collaboration with Constantinos Miltiadis, Georgios Cherouvim and Gerriet K. Sharma, co-created Cybersyn 1973/2023, a video installation that reimagines the historic Project Cybersyn within the context of accelerated automation and advanced financialization. El Baroni holds a Ph.D. in Curatorial Knowledge from the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. He lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Matthew Poole is a Professor of Art History and Theory in the Department of Art & Design at California State University, San Bernardino. His practice involves producing exhibitions, publishing artists’ projects, writing on topics related to the relations of production and distribution of art, and teaching. He is currently the interim chair of the Department of Communication & Media at CSUSB, and from 2015-2021 he was chair of the Department of Art & Design. Prior to moving to California in 2012, Poole was a faculty member in the Department of Art History & Philosophy at The University of Essex, Colchester, UK, where he ran the post-graduate curatorial programs. Recent publications include: ‘Infrastructure, Ideology, Hegemony’, in Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art, (2022); ‘Allography and the Baroque Agency of the Objectile’, in Construction Site for Possible Worlds, (2020); and ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Diagrammatics of Love, Sex, and Erotics’ in Glass Bead Journal Site 2: Dark Room – Somatic Reason and Synthetic Eros, published online April 2019.