Manuel De Landa was born in 1952 in Mexico City and has lived in Manhattan since 1975. He began his career in the mid-seventies as an independent filmmaker, showing his films in cine-clubs and museums around the world. In 1980 he aquired an industrial-grade computer and became a programmer and computer artist, writing his own software for several years.His philosophical essays have appeared in many journals and he currently lectures extensively in the United States and Europe on nonlinear dynamics, theories of self-organization, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. He is author of the books War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and Phylum: a Thousand years on Nonlinear History. He has contributed to numerous collections, including A Thousand Plateaus by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, and Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby and Self-Organizing Systems, edited by Eugene Yates.