Manuel Schmalstieg is an artist, designer and educator, operating on the borderline between media art and hacker communities. A graduate of HEAD Geneva and ASP Kraków, he founded multiple collaborative entities, including N3krozoft Ltd (2001), a technological think tank; realtime online performance group Aether9 (2007); post-digital publishing house Greyscale Press (2008); and many others.

As a web designer and CMS expert, he his busy building websites, contributing to the WordPress user interface, writing plugins, and kickstarting a local community in Switzerland around that free publishing platform.