Leonardo Electronic Directory

Jon Phillips

Jon Phillips
Jon Phillips is an artist and developer devoted to contributing to society and building meaningful relationships. He is notable for creating communities, growing successful media projects and leading in the Free Software, Open Source and Open Content movements. His artwork, projects and research are presented internationally including at Cantocore Import/Export Guangzhou (2008), Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts (2008), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (2008), Inter-Society for Electronic Arts Singapore (ISEA, 2008), Wikimania Taipei (2007), Pixelodeon Conference American Film Institute (LA, 2007), Berkeley Museum’s Digital Culture 0101 Public Lecture (2006), SF MoMA (2004), University of Tokyo (2004), Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (2004), UCLA Hammer Museum, USC AIM Festival IV (2003), and the Institute for Contemporary Art London (2002).

At age 14, he started professionally working in the multimedia production industry on the early web by creating motion graphics, web projects, and film/video productions for STP and the Cyber-Site New Research Center. Later he created “digital happenings” and experimental media mixing software in Southern California with the MESH.FM soundsystem collective and open access journal, Scale. He helped launch Inkscape, an open source drawing tool in 2002 and co-founded the Open Clip Art Library, Open Font Library and the San Francisco-based experimental media label, Overlap.org. In 2005 he taught at San Francisco Art Institute in the Design + Technology department. From 2005 until 2008 he built the community + business development strategy for Creative Commons, worked with hundreds of businesses through Creative Commons 50+ international jurisdictions to integrate Creative Commons licensing, and managed globally successful projects such as ccSalons, the Case Studies, Metrics, and CC+ projects. He recently completed the special project, the Public Domain Wiki, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Access Copyright, and Internet Archive.

Phillips is published widely in Leonardo, is a prior columnist for Linux Format, and has written for Wired Magazine. He lives between San Francisco and Beijing and is building up the Fabricatorz company projects while generating expansive new works bridging software culture, experimental media arts, and communities. Recent projects include the Cantocore Art exhibitions and the Laoban Open Sound System.

Phillips completed his MFA in June of 2004 at the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Lev Manovich and additionally with Sheldon Brown, Geof Bowker, Jack Greenstein and Joseph Goguen. He completed a BFA, New Media, at the Kansas City Art Institute where he studied with Patrick Clancy. He is affiliated with Fabricatorz and is a part of the Creative Commons Network.

Web: http://www.rejon.org/

Updated 11 November 2009