Michelle Thorne (@thornet) is a Senior Program Officer at the Mozilla Foundation and leads the Open Design of Trust Things (OpenDoTT) PhD program with Mozilla and the University of Dundee. She founded Mozilla’s Open Internet of Things Studio, the Mozilla Festival and Maker Party. She is currently interested in making the internet fossil-free.
Evan Raskob is an interactive artist, game designer, livecoding performer, and educator. Evan has worked for the past 10+ years on installation, concerts, live performances, games, and fine art. For the past 3 years he has developed games for understanding complex problems as part of his teaching and research, includingPeek. Evan, as BITLIP, also demonstrated how technology can creatively the arts by livecoding 3D printers to make techno music. He also teaches Physical Computing at Goldsmiths University, and previously taught design at the Royal College of Art in London.
pronouns :please use the Laadan male suffix -id when you are referring to meid and a male marker is lacking. e.g. you->youid, your->yourid, yours->yoursid, are->areid. if you are referring to a group of people of which Iid amid part, but the others do not adhere to such pronouns or copulas, please explicitly exclude meid from that group and reconjunct meid separately using myid ppacs. e.g. "they are my friends" -> either "theyid areid my friends" or "they, excluding him, are my friends, and he isid my friend".
I am Eyal Gruss, a new-media artist and a machine learning practitioner. I also hold a PhD in physics. My artistic works explore and exploit the relationship between poetry, technology and society. My works include poetry, algorithmic poetry, interactive installations, digital performances, AI art and online interventions. I give talks and workshops on machine learning and computational creativity, with focus on making them accessible to artist and to the general public. My works were exhibited in Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, Bat-Yam Museum, Herzelia Museum for contemporary arts, Meter- Al-Meter festival, Ars-Electronica festival, Print Screen festival, Fresh Paint festival, Karov theater, DLD in Tel-Aviv, SVA in New York, Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Midarom Festival, Utopia Festival, Petach-Tikva Museum, Stuttrart FilmWinter and most importantly the Internet, to name a few. I am also running a opportunities newsletter and mini-residency for new-media artists.
Yoav Lifshitz (IL) is an artivist and and curator. In his work, he combines activism, culture jamming, critical engineering, and journalism. Lifshitz is the co-founder of the Captive Portal platform at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv, and the Israeli Pirate Party collective. In his current position, he is ArtUp Nation’s (wemakemoney.art) Chief Strategy Artist and managing partner.
Showcased at Athens Digital Arts Festival, Finger Lake Environmental Film Festival (jury prize recipient), National Arts Festival of South Africa, SciArt Magazine, Jerusalem Art Conference, Art Meets Radical Openness, and more. Curated exhibitions and art projects at CCA Tel-Aviv, Musrara, Hayarkon 19 Gallery, Print Screen Festival, and more. Has taught art at Musrara multidisciplinary school of art and society New-Media department
Ollie was born in London and has lived, studied and worked in Canada, Brazil, Cuba, France, Belgium, and Italy. his academic endeavours began in Linguistics, but have since led him on an adventure across disciplines, taking in Anthropology, Political Economy, and Complex Systems, onto a Master’s in Sustainable Development, and then another in Economics. His work today calls on both a fluency in many cultures and languages, as well as on his previous studies, queerness, and a systems mindset. Currently balancing his time between a pro-bono role as a director of a social-arts enterprise in London, a research fellowship at a think tank in Rio, freelance foresight work focused on democratising cities, collaborator roles in a handful of global and local activist communities, and teaching an award-winning Futures Studies course at a UK university, he spends much of his time thinking and dancing at the nexus of pedagogy, participation and Futures.
Andrew is a designer and strategist currently working at frog; focusing on emerging markets and aesthetic futures in order to imagine brave new ventures.
Previously a graduate of Scandinavia’s preeminent experimental design institution, Hyper Island, and investigator/collaborator of mythopoetic modes of teaching in partnership with Barcelona’s Internet Age Media’s 2020 IAM Weekend.
Caroline Sinders is a machine-learning-design researcher and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, abuse, online harassment, and politics in digital, conversational spaces. Sinders is the founder of Convocation Design + Research, an agency focusing on the intersections of machine learning, user research, designing for public good, and solving difficult communication problems. As a designer and researcher, she has worked with Amnesty International, Intel, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. Currently, she is a fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School exploring trust patterns designed to trick users in social networks, and a senior fellow with the Mozilla Foundation exploring AI, ethics, and society. Sinders has held fellowships with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Slate, Quartz, and the Channels Festival as well as others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program
april vendetta (they/them) explores themes of control, labor, and sexual play through diy surveillance to relay the physicality and the resilience of the body.
An archive has the ability to overwrite the dominant narrative. An archive has the ability to give people access to ideas outside of a suppressed framework that has been put in place to keep the status quo. Having empathy is a small step in the long process of reconnecting with ourselves. Home movies or home recordings (if you were able to have them as a child) can be wonderful and nostalgic snippets of memories but can also contain a lot of grief as well as many other emotions. When something becomes fragmented it does not necessarily need to be put back together in the exact same way that it was taken apart. In fact, we would say that with the help of a self-defining intentional community that something much more compassionate can form. A fragmented archive is not an archive with missing pieces. A fragmented archive is a way to visually understand a complex set of numerous entangled connections and what it could mean to play a small part of a larger whole.
Max Haarich is a Munich-based freelance consultant on ethics in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ambassador of the Republic of Užupis. He studied communication science in Aachen (DE) and political theory in New York (US), and worked as a research assistant on innovative capability and general AI. During his time as a manager at Europe’s leading innovation and start-up center UnternehmerTUM, he founded the Munich Embassy of the Lithuanian artist republic Užupis. The embassy builds bridges between arts and technology and engages in policy making for ethical AI. [Here is a link to my favorite article about the Republic of Užupis any my ambitions in Munich](https://www.playboy.com/read/uzupis-utopia). My favorite two works are - the [Munich version of the Užupis constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U%C5%BEupis#Constitution_of_U%C5%BEupis). It is the worlds first constitution with an article on AI and the second Užupis constitution outside of Užupis. — [this prototyping project to destruct capitalist culture, that nobody ever liked but me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvlKBq5k4E) :)
Irini Papadimitriou is a curator and cultural manager, whose practice draws on interdisciplinary and critical discourse to explore the impact of technology in society and culture, and the role of art in helping us engage with contemporary challenges. Currently Creative Director at FutureEverything, an innovation lab and arts organisation in Manchester, she was previously Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A, where she initiated and curated the annual Digital Design Weekend festival and Digital Futures programmes; and Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans. Her exhibition, Artificially Intelligent, was on display at the V&A in 2018 exploring our complex relationships with technology, invisible technological infrastructures and boundaries of humanness. She has been a co-curator for the Arts & Culture experience at Mozilla Festival, with the most recent project ‘Trustworthy AI:Imagining Better Machine Decision Making’ in October 2019. She is a co-founder of Maker Assembly, a critical gathering about maker culture, and an Associate at IWM Institute. She has been a recipient of curatorial research programmes including MOBIUS (Finnish Institute), Art Fund, Mondriaan Fonds and British Council, and has served as a jury member for Prix Ars Electronica, Lumen Prize, EU STARTS and ACM Siggraph.
Benjamin Gaulon is an artist, researcher, educator and cultural producer. He has previously released work under the name "recyclism". His research focuses on the limits and failures of information and communication technologies; planned obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society; ownership and privacy; through the exploration of détournement, hacking and recycling. His projects can be softwares, installations, pieces of hardware, web based projects, interactive works, street art interventions and are, when applicable, open source.
He is currently director of NØ SCHOOL, a non profit organisation whose mission is to support and promote emerging art and design research and practices that address the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies, in France and beyond. Co-organiser of NØ SCHOOL NEVERS 2019. And he is the CEO of IoDT the Internet of Dead Things Institute.
He has been associate professor at Parsons Paris, where he was the program director of the MFA Design + Technology and the BFA Art, Media and Technology, program that he has developed and launched in 2013. Before that he was lecturer at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, associate researcher at CTVR / the telecommunications research centre at Trinity College and director of DATA (Dublin Art and Technology Association) in Dublin.
César is a digital designer and architect hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. His personal practice explores the role of design and technology in the pursuit ofdecolonizing collective memory and identityin contemporary Latinx culture. He specifically investigates living Maya cosmologies and ontologies as a way to conceptualize alternatives to our hegemonic institutions, structures, and values.
His most recent work, Mexico 44, illustrates a fully westernized Mexican state in which indigenous ways of living and being are hyper-commodified and exported around the globe. The all too familiar urban strategies, graphics, and marketing schemes elaborated for the project hope to foster a critical dialogue that translate the argument currently put forth by the Zapatista communities of Southern Mexico in the face of rapid, capital-driven development.
Wet and sticky, antoine simeão schalk is a fluid creature interested in questions regarding queer and non-white bodies. active in the fields of post-colonialism, gender and queer studies, politics of representation, she used to read bourdieu as she reads dustan today. their recognition of privileges is fundamental and regards it as a prerequisite for any research. with a sun sign in cancer, he aims at blurring, breaking, burning the frontiers between activism, research and homage. co-curating artist-run-space one gee in fog in chêne-bourg, their work has been published in rosa mercedes, the magazine of the harun farocki institute and are currently collaborating on a publication with edition assemblage.
My research-led practice explores entanglements between technoscience and contemporary mythologies, at micro and planetary scales. Currently preoccupied with the subtleties and fictions of post-Cold War technopolitics and ecologically configured collaborations and fungi inspired parasitic structures. Interested in manifesting alternatives to systemic imbalances; planting intoxicating thought-weeds. I make digital art, design, and write.
I completed a Master of Creative Technologies (First Class Honours) at Colab, AUT and was selected to join Strelka’s The New Normal, a postgraduate research programme and think tank. My book essay, “Nooscope:The Political Myth of Planetary Scale Computation,” was published by the Digital Cultures Institute in late 2018.
2020:Currently based in London, UK
1998:Migrated to Tāmaki-makau-rau / Auckland,
Aotearoa / New Zealand
1988:Born in Rostov-na-Donu, (then) USSR / (now) Russia
Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee is a spatial practitioner and researcher based in New York. Her practice often explores the intersection of post-colonial anxiety and utopian labor systems in the built/non-built environment. Trained as an architect, Stephanie studied Cultural Anthropology and Studio Art at Wesleyan University. She worked in Tokyo, Beijing, Myanmar and Seoul before attending Rice University School of Architecture where she was a recipient of several fellowships and grants. Her most recent work, Ring-Around O’ Roses, proposed a hacking device against the extractive economy of floriculture in the Global South. She is the director of Office of Human Resources, a design studio operating under a community driven design approach.
I had the pleasure to study philosophy and social sciences at the Université of Lausanne and to continue diving into social philosophy through a master degree at the Universität Lucern. After 4 years working in the cultural sector all around Switzerland, i came back to Lausanne to studyInformation Systemsand assistProf. Solange Ghernaoutiat the HEC faculty of the university.
Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, an educator and a media activist based in Tel Aviv. His love/hate relationship with data informs his design work, art pieces, activism, research, lectures, workshops & city life. Among Mushon’s collaborations, he is the CO-founder of Shual.com – a foxy design studio; YouAreNotHere.org – a tour of Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv; Kriegspiel – a computer game version of the Situationist Game of War; the Normalizing Machine – exploring algorithmic prejudice; the AdNauseam extension – clicking ads so you don’t have to; and multiple government transparency and civic participation initiatives with the Public Knowledge Workshop; Mushon also designed the maps for Waze.com and led the design of Localize.city. Mushon is an alumni of Eyebeam – an art and technology center in New York. He teaches digital media as a senior faculty member at Shenkar School of Engineering and Design. Previously he taught new media research at NYU and Open Source design at Parsons the New School of Design and in Bezalel Academy of Art & Design. Read him at Mushon.com and follow him at@mushon
Ellen Lapper is a British visual anthropologist, artist and researcher exploring different mediums to move away from traditional text-based research. She largely engages in participatory projects in an attempt to redistribute hierarchies between researchers and subjects. Currently Ellen is pursuing two projects, both stemming from personal experiences within the relevant communities. One is committed to telling stories with the aim of widening the discussion on colonised peoples and challenge homogenised and racialised ideologies of British identity. This research explores postcolonial memory and place-making through a long-term ethnography and has been made into an ongoing film. The second project investigates the digital afterlife – an area of interest stemming from the death of her father in 2015. So far, an article on how social media has changed the way we grieve has been published https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839434970-010 and research is still ongoing, with a visual element in progress. Both projects have been recently presented at the EASA 2020 conference, and the work on postcolonialism contributed to the RAI Film Festival and Forecast Forum Berlin, both 2019. Ellen holds an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology (Freie Universität Berlin) and a BA in Fine Art (International) from the University of Leeds. She has long-term professional experience from previous employment at Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, and is also a translator and writer in the fields of contemporary art and anthropology.In a time in which death is moving rapidly online (funeral streaming services during COVID-19, #RIPcelebrity hashtags trending on Twitter), we all have to face the question of what happens to our own digital afterlives, as well as those of our loved ones. Digital death is the ultimate clash of familiar human concepts of time with the ubiquitous computational time. Facebook and Instagram offer possibilities for “immortalisation” with a memorialised profile, Twitter only offers deactivation. The need to humanise algorithms is now vital; Facebook friend suggestions and birthday reminders of the deceased aren’t exactly perceptive. Cue capitalising companies offering to use AI to analyse activity and learn how to post for you after death. But are their promises really immortal? And if, as predictions suggest, the dead soon outnumber the living on Facebook, who’s going to pay for their upkeep? Dead people aren’t very useful consumers; they won’t be clicking on those targeted ads. So what happens to the feedback loop when it’s the deceased generating the data? And who ultimately owns this data? This research began from a personal note following the death of my father. Unprepared, I found myself clinging to the digital traces that remained of him. Using participatory methods, I conversed with Facebook users who were vocalising a death on the platform. This research explores the presentation of the self across public platforms and negotiates a physical absence in light of a persistence digital presence. Anthropological research into death and grief online faces new challenges:omnipresent online traces, ethical algorithms, data storage and an online field-site. Essentially death is an inevitable accompaniment to our existence and, like in other fields, we are constantly catching up with technology and surrendering our control; this is no exception, perhaps we just need to acclimatise quicker than the companies.In a time in which death is moving rapidly online (funeral streaming services during COVID-19,#RIPcelebrity hashtags trending on Twitter), we all have to face the question of what happens to our own digital afterlives, as well as those of our loved ones. Digital death is the ultimate clash of familiar human concepts of time with the ubiquitous computational time. Facebook and Instagram offer possibilities for “immortalisation” with a memorialised profile, Twitter only offers deactivation. The need to humanise algorithms is now vital; Facebook friend suggestions and birthday reminders of the deceased aren’
Guillaume Slizewicz is a French designer working at Urban Species, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on citizen participation in the city of Brussels. His research is at the crossroad of social sciences and design. Having completed Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Kent in Canterbury and Sciences-po Lille, he specialized in Product development and design at KEA Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. He is interested in the interstices offered by electronic objects in the urban spaces, the unexpected behavior that glitches provoke and the surprise created by misused hardware systems and hijacked algorithms. He is a member of Algolit, a workgroup around FLOSS-literature, free code and texts, recently focusing more on machine learning and AI.
I am an ethnographer and design researcher, working both as co-founder of The Near Future Laboratory, a design fiction consultancy based in Europe and California, and Associate Professor at the Geneva School of Arts and Design (HEAD – Genève). I have a multidisciplinary background in social sciences, information technologies, design and natural sciences. I have been involved in and identified with hybrid design / futures practices such as “design fiction” for 10 years, and have been instrumental in bringing this approach to wider attention through presenting, teaching and writing, as well as speculative projects. Most of them can be found online:http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/
I’m a designer and researcher studying how the environmental crisis modifies ways of designing products, services and systems. Within this framework my practice and my research questions focus mostly on digital design and environmental impacts of the digital industry. I advocate for transition design in France and create open source and free education for designers.
Architecture graduate working with speculative narratives, new media on science, art and technology. Press link:https://www.clotmag.com/news/insight-inside-reina-suyeon-muns-space-time-artworks
Emma Stamm holds a Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Thought from Virginia Tech, where she teaches courses in digital media studies. Her interests include continental philosophy, critical technology studies, and political theory, and her current research theorizes the normative impact of digital methods on scientific knowledge. She is also a freelance writer and musician.
Emily Twines is an interdisciplinary performance and technology artist with experience directing, writing, designing and programming interactive theatrical elements, and working both solo and in highly collaborative atmospheres. She earned her MA in Theatre History and Criticism as well as her MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College (2017, 2020). As an artist and a leftist, it is important to her that her artwork contribute to society in constructive and explicit ways. Her current project, lookingGlass, which she is thrilled to be continuing with the help of Adrian Cameron and Michael Redman, thus strives to introduce the idea of “better” back into mainstream cultural imaginaries, to strengthen autonomous communities, and to open a new venue for pointed political conversation. Other recent works include I heard an echo, a collaborative installation at The Weeksville Heritage Center, for which she provided video and interactivity elements as well as “On Progress” With Professor Steward Orwell Teric III, a solo drag satire that interrogated western progress narratives through performance and video interactivity
Researcher and teacher at Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1, PhD in Art, specialized in Media & Technology. My research focuses on the intricate relation of crowds and coercion, particularly the technical and technological aspects of crowd behavior. I also work as a programmer/designer and adviser for the development of services. As both a professional and an academic, my work tends to favor the theoretical implications of misunderstood technical aspects of digital culture leading to crowd manipulation. I am also a FOSS advocate.
I studied postindustrial design at Hyperwerk Basel and right now I’m doing a master in design research at MAD until 2022, focusing on technology and animism. Currently, I’m working as senior webdeveloper in Bern and until recently also as junior researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures in Basel, Switzerland.
My interests lay in the fields of critical thought on software and technology, design research, intersectional issues and the non- and more-than-human discourses. I’m active in these fields of inquiry through curatorial and artistic practices, design research as well as events focusing on knowledge transfer and participation.
I’m somewhat entangled in the DYI, hacking, queer and art scenes and I have a sensuous interest in the multispecies discourse. These struggles and poetics inform what I do, who I feel I am and where I feel home. It’s a mess, but a beautiful one.
Furthermore, I’m a 🐝 beekeeper (Warré), love to engage the world through 🍲 cooking and have a good hand with 🌱 plants.
Cade is the founder of the New Design Congress, a research group developing a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He spent ten years embedded in digital infrastructure and security projects in six countries. After his studies, he consulted with government and telecommunications clients with Deloitte Australia. He prototyped Signal, the secure messaging app, with Open Whisper Systems in 2014, led design and strategy at the early cryptocurrency fintech CoinJar and was Chief Creative Officer at SpiderOak, a Snowden-approved cloud storage company. Prior to founding the New Design Congress he led design and information security research at Tactical Tech, a Berlin-based NGO that works to raise awareness of issues of data, privacy and technology in societies.
Materia Inestable (Unstable Matter in english) is a Colombian Art Collective Studio formed two years ago by three transdisciplinary professionals who experiences Arts from different perspectives. Our academical background merged Arts, Design and Physics on experiences where the technology becomes a new media able to push boundaries of our disciplines on different scenarios. Although our collective group stayed together one year for research purposes, it is officially our first work as a collective.
The members of the group met in an educational project focused on promoting the critical and empathetic use of technology, for example in the use of so-called tangible programming to improve life in new ways, up to the idea of possible worlds in augmented and virtual reality. All this in the context of official schools and universities in Bogotá. Thus, in the continuous search to innovate in didactics, methodologies and strategies to promote the curiosity and creativity of our students, it was inevitable to find fundamental questions about the technique.
Azadbek Bekchanov born 1996 in Tashkent, nowadays based in Lausanne is a visual artist, studying in the [inter]action option of the Fine Arts Bachelor department of HEAD-Genève. He is guided by questions surrounding queer identities and their overlapping with migration. As a "millennial-artist", he explores social media platforms such as Tumblr, as localities allowing for free, subversive expression. He seeks to transfigure the banality of daily posts, unveiling intersectional oppressions. In parallel to his artistic practice, Azadbek also has a curatorial approach linked to domestic spaces.
