ARTISTS EXPERIMENT

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna is the founder and director of Torolab, a collective workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, with a focus on the realm of lifestyles and the idea of "quality of life." He holds a degree in architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana and a MFA from the University of California, San Diego.

Osuna's work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; LA(X)ART, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Havana Biennial; Liverpool Biennial; Beijing 2004 Biennial of Architecture; Mercosur Biennale, Brazil; and Lyon Biennale, France. His work is in private and public collections including the Musuem of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Jumex collection in Mexico. He has twice received the American Center foundation award and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. His writing has been published in The New York Times, Time, Harvard Political Review, The Boston Globe, Surface, Wallpaper, and i-D, among others. He has taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana's School of Architecture, Mexico; the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of the Arts; and Rennes2 University, France.

In October 2011, Osuna was awarded for best arts-intervention project with social impact by Harvard's Cultural Agents Initiative, and in December 2011 he was named Person of the Year by Tijuana's Frontera newspaper. He is currently director of the nonprofit organization Sociedad de Agentes de Cambio, and he is director of the Digital Table for the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Tecate-Rosarito-Tijuana, were he currently lives and works.

Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of 10 books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, "Trans-Warhol," that premiered in Geneva in 2007. A documentary on his work, Sucking on Words, was first shown at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009–10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In May 2011, he was invited to read at The White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2011, he co-edited Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, and published a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. In 2012, dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, published his Letter To Bettina Funcke as part of their "100 Notes - 100 Thoughts" book series.

Xaviera Simmons produces installations, sculptures, photographic, audio, and performative works. Born in New York, Simmons received a BFA in photography from Bard College in 2004 after spending two years of walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) and a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio (2006). Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art (2011); Greater New York at MoMA PS1, (2010); The Studio Museum In Harlem (2010); Zacheta National Art Gallery, Warsaw, Poland; and Art in General, New York. She is a recipient of The David Driskell Prize, a Jerome Foundation Travel Fellowship and an Art Matters Fellowship, and was a 2012 AIR at The Studio Museum In Harlem. Selected exhibitions on view in 2012 include: The Utah Museum Of Fine Arts; The Corcoran Gallery Of Art, D.C.; The Miami Art Museum; and The CIC, Cairo. Simmons will be a visiting critic and lecturer in the Graduate Department of Sculpture at Yale University in 2012–2013. Her works are in major collections including Deutsche Bank, The Guggenheim Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Caroline Woolard is a co-founder of OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop, two barter economies for cultural producers. Exploring the political economy and civic engagement, her work is often collaborative and takes many forms: sculptures, websites, workshops, installations and performances. This work has been supported by the Walker Art Center, Cooper Union, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, a Watermill Center residency, Esterni Milan, the optimism of strangers, unemployment benefits, upper class etiquette, and grants from iLAND, The Field, and the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund. Woolard is currently teaching at the New School, doing a Fellowship at Eyebeam: Art and Technology Center, and coordinating media efforts for SolidarityNYC.org, an organization that seeks to connect, support, and promote grassroots economic justice groups in New York City.