Brian Holmes is an art and cultural critic with a taste for on-the-ground intervention. A polyglot living in Paris from 1990 to 2009, he collaborated with political art groups such as Ne Pas Plier, Bureau d'Etudes, Public Netbase, Hackitectura, and Makrolab. His texts have been published in Multitudes, Springerin, Open and Brumaria, as well as a large number of exhibition catalogues and posts to the mailing list Nettime. With Claire Pentecost and the 16 Beaver Group he co-organized the Continental Drift seminars. His essays revolve around art, free cooperation, the network society, political economy, and grassroots resistance. His books include Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009) and Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (2007), as well as Volatile Smile (2014) in collaboration with the photographers Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann. In Chicago where he now lives he is a member of the Compass group and teaches intermittently at the University of Illinois.

> http://southwestcorridornorthwestpassage.org
> http://midwestcompass.org/watersheds/map.html
> http://threecrises.org
> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com