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Derrick de Kerckhove
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| Derrick at his home in Wicklow, May 2007 (Photo: Frieda A. Luk) |
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| Derrick with fellows at CH, July 2007 |
Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology since 1983, is a Full Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed at the Faculty of Information Studies and the Knowledge Media Design Institute. He received his Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Doctorat du 3e cycle in the Sociology of Art from the University of Tours (France) in 1979. He was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology from 1972 to 1980 and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author. He has worked on two collections of essays on McLuhan, culture, technology and biology, namely Understanding 1984 (UNESCO, 1984) and McLuhan e la metamorfosi dell'uomo (Bulzoni, 1984). Other publications include The Alphabet and the Brain (Springer Verlag, 1988), La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne (Feltrinelli, 1991), both books on the impact of the alphabet on mind and society, research taken further in Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Bosch & Keuning, 1991). The Skin of Culture (Somerville Press, 1995) is a collection of essays on the new electronic reality, which stayed on Canadian best-sellers lists for several months. Connected Intelligence (Somerville, 1997) introduced his research on new media and cognition. Both were translated in a dozen languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Slovenian. The Architecture of Intelligence was conceived and supported by and for networks. It was first issued in Dutch in December 2000, and in English in June 2001, in Italian and German in September 2001. Two books were then published in Italy. La conquista del Tempo (Editori Riuniti, 2002) presents commissioned essays from many contributors on the management and perception of time in past and present technologies. La Carta di Zurigo discusses space transformed by networks and screens with architects Peter Eisenman and Antonino Saggio. His most recent book, McLuhan for Managers, in collaboration with Mark Federman, was published in September 2003. He is also contracted to work on La fenice virtuale, a book about the history of stage performance from early Greek theatre to modern Opera, in collaboration with Francesco Monico. Three new books are in preparation for publication in the fall of 2007, L'uomo letterato (translated by Antonio Caronia), Le psicotecnologie (Uninettuno, with Maria Amata Garito) and The Point-of-Being (with Edith Ackermann, Maria Luisa Malerba, Antonio Mirabella, Cristina Miranda and Loretta Secchi). Still in progress are The Era of the Tag, with Andrea Cruciani and Matteo Ciasterllardi, and The Objective Imaginary with Vincenzo Susca.
Derrick de Kerckhove has offered Connected Intelligence® workshops worldwide. In the same line, he has contributed to the architecture of Hypersession, a collaborative software now being developed by Emitting Media and used for various educational and administrative situations. This project has now evolved into ThinkTag, software that adds the numerous benefits of tagging data to the standard collaborative instruments.
As a consultant in media, cultural interests, and related policies, Derrick de Kerckhove has participated in the preparation and brainstorming sessions for the plans for: the Ontario Pavilion at Expo '92 in Seville, the Canada in Space exhibit, and the Toronto Broadcast Centre for the CBC. He was involved in plans for a major exhibit on Canada and Modernism at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris for 2003-4 and has been working on The Global Village Square, a global architecture project proposing a permanent public video-meeting point between Toronto and two Italian cities, Naples and Milan. He was a member of several government task forces on developing a telecommunications policy for Ontario, designing a cultural policy for the francophone community in Ontario, and also appeared before the CRTC Public Hearing Committee on the Information Highway.
A World Economic Forum Fellow, de Kerckhove was decorated by the Government of France with the order of “Les palmes académiques” and has been a member of the Club of Rome since 1995. In the Fall of 2003, he was appointed co-chair, as the Canadian representative, for ICT trade between Canada and Italy by the Department of External Affairs in Canada and the Ministero delle attivita produttive of the Italian government. For 2004-6, he was awarded the Papamarkou Chair in Technology and Education at the Library of Congress in Washington, where he was running a series of conferences and seminars on “Managing creativity in the digital context”. This series was covered live by C-Span. Starting in January 2007, he returned to Italy to engage in the last of a three year national Fellowship “Rientro dei cervelli”, at the Faculty of Sociology of the University Federico II in Naples. He has been invited to return to the Library of Congress for a further engagement during the Spring of 2008.
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