Paul Garrin
| Paul Garrin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1957 (age 59–60) |
| Alma mater | Cooper Union A'82 |
| Occupation | Media Artist, Internet Social Entrepreneur |
| Years active | 1981–present |
Paul Garrin (born 1957) is an interdisciplinary artist and social entrepreneur whose work explores the social impact of technology and issues of media access, free speech, public/private space, and the digital divide. Starting as his assistant in 1981, Garrin eventually emerged as one of the important collaborators of video art superstar Nam June Paik, working closely from 1982 to 1996.
Since the 1990s, Garrin has carried his politicized style of action art-making onto the Internet, founding companies and projects that work to free the Internet from corporate and government control. His work spans between the highest technology available and hands-on street video, all for a common political cause.New York Times art critic Grace Glueck describes Paul Garrin as a politically active video artist.
Founded in 1996, Garrin's social enterprise Name.Space is among the earliest Internet top-level domain registries offering affordable and expressive TLDs. Manifested in the Name.Space.Charter, Name.Space champions freedom of speech, and free, self-supporting commerce as an important counterbalance to government's monopoly powers. Presently, Name.Space is challenging the status-quo in an antitrust lawsuit with ICANN.
In 2003, Garrin launched WiFi-NY, an independent, cooperative community wireless broadband network that serves downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. He continues to live and work in the Lower East Side since the borough's last decades of creative production.
Garrin grew up in Camden, New Jersey, in what he describes as a 50's cheap housing boom neighborhood, like something out of an archetypal twilight zone landscape. His understanding of hard times has its roots in childhood experience, when it became necessary for his family to seek public assistance due to his father's joblessness. A registered nurse, his mother got his family through hard times. Surrounded by a conformist mindset that seemed to care for little beyond sports, Garrin studied art as a way out. He took night classes at the Philadelphia College of Art, and worked at an offset printing shop in the day to support himself.
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