Johan Grimonprez was born in Roeselare, Belgium in 1962. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York.
Grimonprez's productions have traveled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, to Tokyo and Berlin. Curatorial projects were hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Tate Modern in London. Grimonprez's work is included in numerous collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, the National Gallery, Berlin and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Nominated for the Hugo Boss Award in 2005, Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York). Johan Grimonprez lives and works in Brussels and New York.

Together with Daragh Reeves, media artist Johan Grimonprez conceived the idea of casting Hitchcock look-a-likes, reminiscing Hitchcock's many cameo performances in his own films, such as that of the man who only just catches the bus in North by Northwest. For a moment you see a fat man with a bowler hat, an umbrella and two small dogs, and then you see it: it is Hitchcock himself!

Manuel Saiz has done it! The Famous Hollywood Actor has once again gracefully accepted to be or not to be what he is. Witness the film that inspired the pun in the title of this short video – he is not afraid of a few digs at his person and status. He probably has a small army of agents, managers and assistants around him, to keep all those who are trying to make use of him because of his name at a distance. Perhaps Manuel Saiz was lucky, perhaps he knows the friends of the friends of – perhaps he has been waiting on the doorstep and hanging on the phone for months, driving the whole army crazy. He probably just used a sympathetic argument that struck the right cord: would the actor who likes role reversals for once lend his charismatic voice to a man who is used to doing precisely that?

Studied painting at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. From the start of his career, Veldhoen has been involved in many multidisciplinary projects that incorporated various disciplines such as music, sculptural objects, and later on, video and film. In 1992 Veldhoen started making videoinstallations, and exhibited in 1994, 1996 and 1998 at the Montevideo/Rene Coelho Gallery (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and in 1995 at the DotCom gallery during the Soho Arts Festival in (New York, USA). His video installation Dislocations (1998) was exhibited in France (Marseille and Hirouville) and Germany (Dortmund and Berlin), and was nominated for the international media art price of ZDF/Arte and the ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany). In recent years, Veldhoen started working on projects that can both be interpreted as video installations as well as experimental short films. These projects have been shown worldwide on exhibitions, film festivals and video festivals.

Once 'public space' was a clear concept. It. was a kind democratic medium that could be accessed by everyone, safely and freely available for traffic between people. Now things have changed; thanks to mobile communication systems, we carry our personal space with us like an air bubble, and the public sphere has become a set of subsets. Everyone is always connected to something or someone else, so that the space between has taken on a virtual form of its own, which constantly changes with time. What is left over between the subsets has the characteristics of a vacuum; it generates forces. It sucks in a great many individuals who cannot or will not 'participate', or who do not have or do not want to have access to the means that link the individual bubbles. Veldhoen shows us how differently we now perceive public space, certainly not as a safe place any more.

Robert Arnold was born in 1954 in New Jersey, USA, and lives in Boston where he teaches film at Boston University. He obtained a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Illinois in 1977, an MA from the University of Iowa in 1980 and a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa in 1994. He has received numerous awards and fellowships and his works have been widely exhibited. Arnold's approach is based on advanced digital editing techniques, which he uses to create short videos, designed to be exhibited on a loop. His videos often use effects of sped-up spatial movement and light to manipulate the viewer's optical experience of the passing of time. Though the works are in a sense highly formal, focussing on transformations of colour, shape and form within the video image, in each video these effects are illustrative of a specific theme, ranging from the uniformity of heterosexual desire in pop culture imagery to Ancient Greek philosophical ideas.

The Morphology of Desire is an ongoing experimental media project which explores the commodity representation of gender and desire in popular culture, and the relationship between the still image and illusion of cinematic motion, using digital morphing to animate romance novel cover illustrations as a never-ending dance of unrealized desire. This third version uses of DVD scripting capabilities to randomly sequence the order of image and text as a continuous but non-repeating loop that is constantly shifting narrative implication.

Monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group of basket weaving enthusiasts and theory do-it-yourselfers having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is the super-affirmation of the globalization trap. Monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
http://www.monochrom.at

Soviet Unterzögersdorf (pronounced 'oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf') is the last existing appanage republic of the USSR. The enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called 'Republic of Austria' nor with the Fortress 'European Union'. The downfall of her motherland -- the Soviet Union - in the early 1990s had a particularly bad effect on the country's economic situation. It is a great challenge to secure survival for the small but proud confederation. External reactionary forces put the country in danger. It’s a lack of respect due to a morally corrupted and perhaps even non-existing unity of the peoples. The goal of a glorious future is almost unreachable. But there are a handful of people who don’t give up on a vision for a better tomorrow. Let us tell you the stories of the brave citizens in the beautiful little country of Soviet Unterzögersdorf. It’s a story that will go into history.