Marialaura Ghidini is a contemporary art curator and researcher. She was founder director of the web-based curatorial platform or-bits.com (2009-2015), and organised projects ranging from online and gallery exhibitions to site-specific interventions in public spaces, radio broadcasts and AiR programmes. With a background in the humanities and a practice-based Ph.D in Curating After New Media (CRUMB at the University of Sunderland, UK), her expertise lies in curatorial studies and contemporary art reflecting on the role of the technological. She is interested in exploring different forms of artistic and curatorial production and formats of display by working with contexts of engagement beyond the gallery and the museum. Marialaura is faculty and course leader for the Bachelor in Creative Arts in Experimental Media Arts at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. Rebekah Modrak is an artist and writer, and one of the creators of #exstrange. She created the artworks Re Made Co., which recreates online commerce to parody the rhetoric of designer tools, and Rethink Shinola, a internet work exposing a complex agenda of marketing blackness, labor, and authenticity with Detroit as the central subject. She authored Bougie Crap (infinite mile, 2015) to analyze the links between design, education, and corporate culture. Her book, Reframing Photography (Routledge, 2010), situates photographic practice within a broader context of contemporary art, art theory and other disciplines. Writing for Consumption Markets & Culture and The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design describe how culture jamming and mirroring can undermine branding's hollow rhetoric. Rebekah is associate professor at the University of Michigan.
