So...tell me about yourself.
My name is Ted Byfield. Most people would say they work in higher education, but I work around it. I divide my time between the Deep North (NYC) and the Deep South (Tallahassee), but I’ve also worked quite a bit across Europe with short stretches in South and East Asia.
What do you mean?
There are all kinds of organizations and activities that orbit around universities, and that penumbra is more interesting than the repetition of working a professor or an administrator (I’ve been both).
So what kinds of things do you do?
What most people in higher ed do: research, study, read, write, talk. But rather than work within a specific field or even across a few, I’m interested in ideas about what “fields” are and, even more, in how they work (and don’t work).
I’ll bite. Tell me more...
Most academic fields, and all academic departments, are administrative lifehacks. They reflect institutional needs more than the structure of our world. As more people have come to recognize that, they’ve taken to saying things like “I work at the intersection of” this and that. I was working those intersections — and there are many, not one — when that sounded more like a red-light district than a Venn diagram. This site documents quite a bit of that thought and work.
What does that mean in practice?
I’m specifically interested in education and design, which covers pretty much any context where someone needs to reliably convey or exchange ideas. I’m also interested, more abstractly, in governance and systems — how we make collective decisions and what we need to implement them. I should probably mention that I know more about the history and development of data visualization between, say, 1930 and 1980 than pretty much anyone else. Anywhere. Really.
So what do you actually do?
Most of my work boils down to researching, editing and writing. For many people, those things suggests isolated work in offices, studies, libraries, and there’s some truth to that, but my approach is collaborative to the core. Individual creative expression is great, but collective effort — efforts by many people for many more — matter more.
For example?
This work has taken me around the world, from some of the world’s best publishers to conflict zones, from radical squats to august universities, from multinational legal and financial institutions to scrappy startups, and more. For example: American Fine Arts ([NYC] artist), ARCO ([Madrid] speaker), Aristide Caratzas ([NYC] editor), Ars Electronica ([Linz, Austria] organizer, presenter), Austrian Cultural Forum ([NYC] speaker), Autonomedia ([NYC] editor), De Balie ([Amsterdam] organizer, speaker), Banff Centre ([Banff, Alberta] speaker), Bauhaus-Universität ([Weimar] organizer, speaker), Berkman Center ([Cambridge MA] speaker), Berlin Documentary Forum ([Berlin] editor), Birkhäuser ([Basel] author 1, 2), Cambridge University Press ([NYC] editor), Brooklyn Museum ([NYC] researcher, editor), Columbia University ([NYC] graduate), Constant ([Brussels] speaker), Creative Time ([NYC] organizer, speaker), City College of New York (speaker), City University of New York Grad Center (speaker), Cryptome ([NYC / internet] contributor), Cypherpunks ([internet] contributor), DEAF ([Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Rotterdam]), Deichtorhallen ([Hamburg] artist), Design Trust for Public Space ([NYC] journalism fellow, publisher), DIA Center for the Arts ([NYC] editor), Electronic Frontier Foundation ([San Francisco] provocateur), Engine Room ([NYC] consultant, speaker), Equilibrista ([Mexico City] production consultant), Eyebeam ([NYC] consultant, speaker), Farrar Straus and Giroux ([NYC] editor), First Monday ([internet] author), Frieze ([London] author), Grow Networks ([NYC] lead editor), Hallwalls ([Buffalo] artist), ICANN Watch ([internet] editor, board member), Jan Van Eyck Academie ([Maastricht, NL], speaker), Joseph Kosuth ([NYC] researcher, translator), La Mama ETC ([NYC] technician), Ljudmila ([Ljudmila Digital Media Lab, Slovenia] speaker, author), Location One ([NYC] consultant, organizer, moderator), LUX ([London] speaker), Lydia Lunch ([NYC] technician), Marsilio ([NYC/Rome] managing editor), MIT ([Cambridge MA] speaker), MIT Press ([Cambridge MA] author), Le Monde diplomatique ([Paris] author), Mozilla ([San Franciso / internet], author), Mute ([London] author), National Endowment for the Humanities ([Washington DC] grant recipient), National Security Archive ([Washington DC] editor), nettime ([internet] organizer, moderator, editor), New Museum ([NYC] researcher, author), New Press ([NYC] editor), New School University ([NYC] professor, faculty senate chair), NTNU ([Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim] consultant, editor, writer, teacher), NYU ([ITP / Tisch, MCC, Steinhardt] visiting scholar, speaker), Open Society Foundations ([NYC / Sri Lanka] researcher, consultant, grant recipient), Open Syllabus ([NYC] co-founder, board member), Oxford University Press ([NYC] editor), Pantheon / Schocken ([NYC] editor), Paradiso ([Amsterdam] speaker], Parsons School of Design ([NYC] professor, program director, chair), Pat Hearn ([NYC] artist), Performing Garage ([NYC] technician), Prado ([Madrid] speaker), Piet Zwart Institute ([Rotterdam] speaker), Pluto Press ([London] advisor), Public Netbase ([Vienna\ speaker, advisor), Random House ([NYC] editor), Real Art Ways ([Buffalo] artist), The Register ([London] writer), Richard Foreman ([NYC] technician), Rowman and Littlefield ([London] author), Shih Chien University ([Taipei] speaker), Schloss Solitude ([Stuttgart], speaker), Serpent’s Tail ([NYC] managing editor), Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art ([Tel Aviv] speaker), Society for Artistic Research ([academia] editor, writer), SRI ([Palo Alto] speaker), Steve (Buscemi) and Mark (Boone Jr.) ([NYC] technician), Survival Research Laboratories ([NYC/San Francisco] technician, operator), Tactical Tech ([Berlin / London / internet) consultant, advisor, speaker), TBTF ([internet] writer), Telepolis ([internet] writer), The Thing ([NYC / internet] consultant, advisor, board member), Todd Haynes / Apparatus Films ([NYC] technician), Union Theological Seminary ([NYC] student), US House of Representatives (I was quoted in Congressional testimony!), University of Amsterdam (speaker), Verso ([NYC / London] advisor), Vienna Akademie der bildenden Künste / Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (speaker), Vuelta([Mexico City], production consultant), De Waag ([Amsterdam] consultant, organizer, speaker), Wooster Group ([NYC] technician), WSIS ([Geneva] contributor), Yale Law School ([New Haven] visiting fellow), Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science ([New Haven] speaker), The Yes Men ([NYC / internet] contributor), Zone Books ([NYC] editor, researcher, translator), inter alia.
That’s a lot! And now?
Nowadays, much of what I do now is plan, specify, and document research networks for European universities. I focus on ways to effectively integrate art and design with the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields. All of these fields bring strengths and weaknesses — my aim is to “design” research programs, structures, and procedures that leverage their strengths without imposing their weaknesses. You can also find me on Mastodon (where I help run nettime’s instance), less so on Bluesky, and — for now — on Facebook.
That all sounds more interesting than I thought!
It is. If you’re interested, contact me. You can also find me on Mastodon (where I’m one of the admins of the tldr.nettime.org instance) and on Bluesky.
What is this site?
This is an archive-in-progress of some things I’ve written, made, and done.
It doesn’t seem very inviting.
That’s a fair criticism. But a lot of this site is about unpacking the assumptions involved in “normal” design.
What do you mean?
The net is only a few decades old, but it’s like a modern ancient city with shiny new structures rising amidst ruins: abandoned blogs, broken software, fading projects, out-of-date info, etc. One of my goals was to reverse that by gathering things I’d scattered around the world.
That doesn’t mean it needs to be inscrutable.
True — but the “pink slime” design that prevails now (say, Medium / Substack or Pixpa / Wix), didn’t feel right. And looks can be deceiving: Google has stuck to its light, bright visual style even as the entity behind it has grown into, arguably, the blackest box ever. I’m interested in the poetics of design — say, whether something looks and feels like a glossy brochure, the Pompidou Centre, or (in this case) a black box.
So how should I use it?
That depends on what you’re looking for — and how. This site isn’t really a blog (though it has one, sort of) or a brochure (though you can read it that way). Or you can try searching for something that interests you, or clicking around the table of contents on the left, or scanning some timelines (say, nettime or social media), or checking out pages dedicated to specific tags (for example, design, education, or law), hovering over links, or poking around in the galaxy visualization. Enjoy.