Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He founded the magazine A/traverse (1975–81) and was a staff member of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976–78). Involved in the Autonomia political movement in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. Bifo published the books After the Future (AK Press, Oakland, 2011), The Soul at Work (MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010), Félix (Luca Sossella, Rome, 2001), Cibernauti (Castelvecchi, Rome, 1994) and Mutazione e Cyberpunk (Costa & Nolan, 1993). He has contributed to the magazines Semiotext(e), Chimères, Metropoli, and Musica 80, and is a collaborator of e flux journal. He is Coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI).

Enda Brophy teaches in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he specializes in the political economy of communication. His current research addresses labour and collective organization in the media and communication industries.

Steve Collis is a poet and critic who actively participated in the events of Occupy Vancouver. His creative and critical projects concentrate on the histories of and possibilities for labour, and how we might imagine modes of resistance in the face of an entrenched neoliberalism. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches 20th and 21st century poetry and poetics.

Brady Cranfield and Jamie Hilder are Vancouver-based collaborators with a background in academia and studio experience. Their practice is project-specific in terms of content, aesthetic strategies, and exhibition design, but is always driven by research.

Jaleh Mansoor is an assistant professor of Art History at The University of British Columbia. Her first book, entitled Marshall Plan Modernism is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her research on painting in the context of Marshall Plan Italy opens up on to problems concerning materialist aesthetic abstraction in both modern and contemporary art. While Marx evoked aesthetic abstraction in the introduction of The Grundrisse only to bracket it off from concrete abstraction in the realm of production, circulation, and consumption, Mansoor traces the ways in which aesthetic abstraction symptomatizes dynamics in concrete abstraction across a spectrum of responses, sometimes “transparent” to, sometimes in dialectical response to, and occasionally in manifest resistance to capitalist abstraction understood as the extraction of surplus labor to be realized on the market. Mansoor explores the lacunae between bio-politics and theories of subsumption, which art, in turn, mediates prior to its theorization.

Cecily Nicholson is the administrator of Gallery Gachet and has worked in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories, since 2000. Her work, both creative and social, engages conditions of displacement, class, and gender violence. She is the author of Triage (Talonbooks, 2011) and From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014).