Julian Priest is an artist and independent researcher living in New Zealand and working internationally. He was co-founder of early wireless free network community Consume.net in London U.K.. He became an activist and advocate for the free networking movement and has pursued wireless networking as a theme in fields of arts, development, and policy.

He has written and lectured through Informal - an informal independent research framework. He was one of the instigators of WSFII, the world summits on free information infrastructures, an international series of events to promote grass roots information infrastructures.

Priest has commented on radio spectrum policy and co-founded policy intervention OpenSpectrum U.K. to advocate an open spectrum in the public interest, in Europe and the U.K.

Since 2005 he has developed an artistic practice around participatory and collaborative forms and has shown works internationally in the U.K., Latvia, Germany and New Zealand. He has worked with post graduate students and been peer advisor at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada

He is currently focused on art practice and his current interests are around the physical and cultural boundaries between technology and the environment particularly energy issues. He is director of The Green Bench project room in Whanganui, New Zealand and board member of the Aotearoa Digital Atrs trust.

current project: http://greenbench.org/project/slowflow
past projects:
http://informal.org.uk
http://consume.net
http://picopeer.net