Darren Wershler is an Associate Professor at Concordia University, where he holds a University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature. Wershler is the co-founder and co-Coordinator of the Concordia Media History Research Centre (MHRC) and a board member of the Technoculture, Art and Games group (TAG), an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on game studies, design, digital culture and interactive art. For many years, Wershler served as faculty at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) Media Lab, the first postgraduate interdisciplinary theory-and-production program in Canada. From 1997-2002, Wershler was also the Senior Editor at Coach House Books, a leading Canadian literary press and the first press in the world to produce simultaneous print and digital editions of poetry and fiction. Wershler is the author or co-author of 12 books, notably, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Cornell), Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and FREE as in speech and beer: open source, peer-to-peer and the economics of the online revolution (Financial Times, 2002). He has also edited over 35 books (and occasionally designed them as well) for various academic and commercial presses, including Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (U of Toronto Press, with Rosemary J. Coombe and Martin Zeilinger).

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and in addition, he is Docent of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland. Parikka has published extensively on digital culture, media theory, and visual culture. Parikka’s books include Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, published by Peter Lang in 2007, with the 2nd revised edition expected in 2016. Parikka’s Insect Media won the 2012 Anne Friedberg award for Innovative Scholarship (Society for Cinema and Media Studies). The co-edited collection The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture was published by Hampton Press, and Media Archaeology came out with University of California Press. What is Media Archaeology? was published in 2012. In 2013 his edited collection of Wolfgang Ernst’s writings, Digital Memory and the Archive, came out with University of Minnesota Press. Recently Parikka published The Anthrobscene (2014) and A Geology of Media (2015). His co-edited book on the Finnish media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi was published Fall 2015 by MIT Press.

Lori Emerson is an Associate Professor with a split appointment in the Department of English and the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is also Director of the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL), a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using still functioning but obsolete tools, hardware, software and platforms, from the past. The MAL is propelled by the need to both preserve and maintain access to historically important media of all kinds, from magic lanterns, projectors and typewriters to personal computers from the 1970s through the 1990s, as well as early works of digital literature and art. Emerson writes about media poetics as well as the history of computing, media archaeology, media theory, and digital humanities. She recently published Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (U of Minnesota Press) and is co-editor of three collections: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (with Marie-Laure Ryan and Benjamin Robertson); Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (with derek beaulieu, Wilfrid Laurier University Press); and The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader (with Darren Wershler, Coach House Books).