Ted Byfield worked for over a decade as a freelance book editor, with an emphasis on cultural, intellectual, and technical history, for numerous academic and public-interest publishers including the Dia Center for the Arts, the New Press, and Zone Books. His collaborative artwork (1989-1994) was exhibited in across the U.S. and Europe, including an unprecedented double show at American Fine Arts and the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York City. However, his attraction to the rarefied atmosphere of the "art system" gave way to a much more vigorous interest in the communicative potential of transnational networks. In that vein, he has served for several years as co-moderator of the well-regarded Nettime mailing list, editing co-edited two of its proceedings (README! Brooklyn: Autonomedia,
1999 and NKPVI Venice/Ljubljana: MGLC, 2001), and co-organizing several conferences, among them Tulipomania: A Critique of the new Economy (Amsterdam, 2000), blur_02 (New York, 2002), and the Next 5 Minutes 4 (Amsterdam, 2003). He has written extensively about the politics of internet governance, including serving as a co-editor of ICANN Watch. His writings on a variety of subjects, from space photography to intellectual property, have appeared in publications as diverse as the Cook Report, First Monday, Frieze, Le Monde Diplomatique, Movement Research, Mute, and Stanford Humanities Review; and he has consulted for the BBC, The Kitchen, KPN, Location One, the Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the "Waag" Society for Old and New Media, among others. Awards and honors he has received include contributing to the winner of the 1997 Rotterdam Design Prize, the 2002 Design Trust for Public Space Fellowship in Journalism, a 2003 grant from the Open Society Institute to develop community networking training programs in Sri Lanka's "post-conflict" environment, and contributor in 2003-204 to the Social Science Research Council's "Information Technology and International Cooperation" workgroup. His current research interest centers on the problem of developing a coherent curriculum oriented toward analyzing and designing the invisible "spaces," systems, networks, and protocols that increasingly define the fabric of everyday life.
He currently serves as Associate Chair of the Communications Design Department at the Parsons School of Design, New School University.