Biographies

Hannah Adlide looks to expand outdated ideas of heritage and bring them into contemporary debates around culture, identity, and the climate, with a vision to better our collective futures. Her previous experience has spanned curatorial work, editing, and team management for creative projects. She received her B.A. in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins, London, and her M.A. in Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has worked with Digital Earth as an editor since 2020.

Sophia Al Maria is a Qatari-American artist who lives in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, film and screenwriting for TV, it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.

Artist Heba Y. Amin engages with political themes and archival history by using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture, performance, and installation. Her artistic research takes a speculative, often satirical, approach to challenging narratives of conquest and control; Amin was one of the artists behind the noted 2015 subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series “Home-land.” Amin is a Professor of Digital and Time-Based Art at ABK-Stuttgart, the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the Mizna journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. She was awarded the 2020 Sussmann Artist Award. She recently published Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork edited by Anthony Downey (Sternberg Press, 2020).

Lotte Arndt is a researcher, writer, and journalist living and working in Paris and Berlin. She is a PhD student at Humboldt University of Berlin and Paris Diderot University, researching African cultural magazines in Paris. She writes about literature, art and society in academic and journalistic contexts. Her main interest lies in the intersections of esthetics and politics. As a member of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, in 2011 she collaborated with Bétonsalon in Paris on a series of monthly conferences “Under the free sky of history.” Arndt works within multiple postcolonial conflicts, notably a project with the Berlin-based group Artefakte//anti-humboldt on restitution as a possible strategy for the contestation of colonial archives and of their contemporary repercussions, which leads her to question the collections of ethnographic museums.

Benjamin Bratton is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego and Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai, SCI_Arc and the European Graduate School. He is the author of several books, including The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, which established a political philosophy of planetary scale computation. He was formerly the director of The New Normal and The Terraforming think-tanks at Strelka Institute.

Kévin Bray completed the postgraduate course at the Sandberg Instituut's Design Department in Amsterdam and the DSAA at ESAAB of Nevers, France. He is an alumni of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited at Dordrecht Museum, FOAM Amsterdam, Showroom Mama, Rotterdam; Unfair, Amsterdam; K Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; De Appel, Amsterdam; OT301, Amsterdam; and De School, Amsterdam.

James Bridle is a writer and artist working across technologies and disciplines. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. They are the author of New Dark Age (Verso, 2018) and Ways of Being (Penguin, 2022), and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019.

Ingrid Burrington is the author of Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (Melville House, 2016).

Adriana Bustos was born in Argentina and graduated from Fine Arts and Psychology at the University of Córdoba. Her practice analyzes and reconfigures knowledge production systems, and in doing so creates alternative epistemologies, calling for more comprehensive and nuanced historical narratives. She has participated in a variety of biennials and international exhibitions such as, Dahka Art Summit 2020: Cosmopolis 2, Centre Pompidou (2019); Sharjah Biennal (2019); Bienal Sur Global, Argentina (2021); Site Santa Fé (USA); and Biennal of Montevideo 2014-2019. She has been awarded the Azquy First Prize in 2020, and First Prize Federico Klemm in 2016, as well as by Cultural Chandon in 2005, 2006 and 2009.

Catalogtree is a multidisciplinary design studio based in Arnhem (NL). It was founded in 2001 by Daniel Gross and Joris Maltha who met at Werkplaats Typografie, Arnhem (NL). Nina Bender was part of studio from 2011 to 2021. The studio works continuously on commissioned and self initiated projects. Highly interested in self-organising systems they believe in 'Form Equals Behaviour'. Experimental tool-making, programming, typography and the visualisation of quantitative data are part of their daily routine.

Ben Cerveny was one of the first users of the Web, and since the start of the digital era has amassed a vast wealth of knowledge and experience on computer-related issues, ranging from technical to conceptual. As information architect, he helped to make both Apple and Nike’s first websites and worked on various operating systems, programming with Pascal, Logo and HyperCard. As the digital became the context for many different processes, he started focusing on environments and cities and the rationalization of these processes. He has taught at CYARC, at UCLA, and USC at NYU, and various other schools, exploring the intersection between cultural production, society, and digital art.

Guo Cheng, born 1988 in Beijing, is an artist currently living and working in Shanghai. He received his bachelor's degree from Tongji University (2010) and his master's degree from the Royal College of Art (2012). His sculptures and installations focus on exploring the mutual impacts and influences between established/emerging technologies and individuals in the context of culture and social life. In recent years, his practice has dealt with themes such as the anthropocene and second nature, digitalized interobjectivity, and the ideologies behind various infrastructures. Cheng's works often use humorous yet subdued language to link grand issues with seemingly arbitrary objects, and to provide critical perspectives for discussion. Guo Cheng has worked as Executive Director at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai (2015-2017), the visiting researcher at Dept. Environment & Health, Vrije University, Amsterdam (2017) and has been teaching at College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai since 2013.

He obtained Ars Electronica Honorary Mentions, Linz (2020); CAC:// DKU Research & Creation Fellowship, Shanghai (2020); STARTS Prize Nomination, Linz (2020); the Digital Earth fellowship (2018-2019); the Special Jury Prize of Huayu Youth Award, Sanya (2018); the Bio-Art & Design Award, The Hague (2017).

Chimurenga is a pan-African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together myriad voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga operates as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans. Outputs include Chimurenga Magazine; a quarterly broadsheet called The Chronic; the Chimurenga Library–an ongoing intervention that seeks to re-imagine the library; the African Cities Reader–a biennial publication of urban life, Africa-style; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS)–an online radio station and pop-up studio. These activities express the intensities of our world, capturing those forces and taking action. Unless we push form and content beyond what exists, we merely reproduce the original, colonized form. It requires new practices and methodologies that allow us to engage lines of flight, of fragility, precariousness, as well as joy, creativity, and beauty that defines contemporary African life. As Fela puts it: who no know go know.

Cristina Cochior is a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. With an interest in automation, situated software and peer to peer knowledge production, her practice largely consists of investigations into the intimate bureaucracy of knowledge organization systems and more recently, collective and non-extractive digital infrastructures.

Sounak Das is a multimedia Artist based Dhaka, Bangladesh, his practice is predominantly comprized of photography, moving image, sound, and installation. He works to render ideas along the omnipresent lingering landscapes and aspects of urban scenario, with minimal representations of the convenient elements of time. His works embody community, cultural dilemma, spatial context, history, advancement of technology, and its Anthropocene. Experimenting within the parameters of physical reality, his expressions mostly focus on philosophy which questions the presence of reality.

Data Justice Lab is a space for research and collaboration at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC). They seek to advance a research agenda that examines the intricate relationship between datafication and social justice, highlighting the politics and impacts of data-driven processes and big data. This research examines the implications of institutional and organizational uses of data, providing critical responses to potential data harms and misuses. Areas of research include, but are not limited to: data discrimination, digital labor, data ethics, algorithmic governance, social justice-informed design, uses of data by social justice groups, and data-related activism and advocacy.

Leonardo Dellanoce is a cultural entrepreneur working in and around art, technology and theory. He collaborates with artists, designers and thinkers in bringing to life a variety of projects including books, think-tanks, films, exhibitions and conferences. Among others, he co-founded Digital Earth, a research grant and support program for artists from Africa, Asia and South America; and he directed the interactive documentary Trust in the Blockchain Society.

Pablo DeSoto is an experimental architect and radical cartographer with years of experience in working with diverse communities across geographical and disciplinary borders. His research uses fieldwork and critical epistemologies to produce spatial knowledge and investigate the urgent political and environmental conditions of our time. A co-founder of hackitectura. net, he is the editor of three books and coauthor of the Critical Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar. He has been awarded NTNU ARTEC AiR, LAB_Cyberspaces, UBA Elinor Ostrom, among others. He holds a Master's Degree in Architecture from the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm and a PhD in Communication & Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Alexis Destoop lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Brussels, Belgium. He has a background in photography and philosophy. His productions examine the experience of time, elements of storytelling, and procedures of identification and memory. Informed by the strategies of minimalism, his works are often seductive in appearance, functioning as lures that explore the deceptive nature of images. Destoop regularly works in collaboration with writers, performers and musicians. His latest project re-signifies Australia’s desert landscape and its history through a science fiction narrative, resonating with colonial history and the omnipresent actuality of the mining industry, questioning the relationship between fiction and reality.

Marjolijn Dijkman lives and works in Brussels, Belgium and Saint-Mihiel, France. Her practice is research-based and multi-disciplinary, including film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her works can be seen as a form of speculative-fiction, partly based on facts and research but often brought into the realm of the imagination. Her work is concerned with residues of enlightenment ideology, manifestations of collective memory, and blind spots of representation. The works propose alternate knowledge systems through their entanglement of different temporalities and geographies. Collaborations with other artists, thinkers, and experts are an important part of her life and practice as an artist and have been a key motivation to co-found Enough Room for Space in 2005. Marjolijn Dijkman’s recent solo shows in 2021 include: Electrify Everything at NOME, Berlin; and Shifting Axis at Edith Russ Haus, Oldenburg, Germany.

Founded in 2012 by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska, DISNOVATION.ORG is an art collective and international workgroup engaged in the intersection between contemporary arts, research, and hacking. Artist and philosopher Baruch Gottlieb joinedthe collective in 2018. Together, they develop situations of interference, discussion and speculation that question dominant techno-positivist ideologies in order to foster post-growth narratives. Their research is expressed through installations, performances, websites and events. They recently co-edited A Bestiary of the Anthropocene (Onomatopee 2021), an atlas of anthropic hybrid creatures, and The Pirate Book (Aksioma 2015), an anthology about media piracy.

Maarten Vanden Eynde is an artist and co-founder of Enough Room for Space. He graduated in 2000 from the free media department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL), participated in 2006 in the experimental MSA^ Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles (US) and finished a postgraduate course in 2009 at HISK in Ghent (BE) where he is a regular guest tutor. His practice is embedded in long-term research projects that focus on numerous subjects of social and political relevance such as post-industrialism, capitalism and ecology. Currently he is investigating the influence of transatlantic trade of pivotal materials like rubber, oil, ivory, copper, cotton and uranium, on evolution and progress, the creation of nations and other global power structures. Since 2020 he is a PhD candidate at the UiB / University of Bergen in Norway.

Beijing-based artist Cao Fei reflects on the rapid changes occurring in Chinese society today. She mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Cao Fei’s first solo exhibition took place at MoMA PS1 (2016) and since then her work has been included in numerous international biennials and triennials. Her recent projects include a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2020), a major retrospective at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021), and solo exhibition at the National Museum of 21st Century.

Shuang Lu Frost is an ethnographer of technology and innovation, she works as an Assistant Professor of Digital Innovation and Business Transformation at Aarhus University. She recently completed her PhD of Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Science, Technology and Society (2020). She is currently working on her monograph Moralizing Disruption: China’s Ride-Hailing Revolution, which explores the emergence, contestation, and moralization of ride-hailing platforms in contemporary China. During 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork spanning six years, she immersed herself in communities of computer engineers, corporate managers, on-demand drivers, hackers, and labor contractors, exploring how different groups of actors participate in and make sense of the changes brought on by ride-hailing platforms. Her recent publications include “Taxi Shanghai: Entrepreneurship and Semi-Colonialism” (Business History, 2021) and “Platforms as if People Mattered” (Economic Anthropology, 2020).

Maya Indira Ganesh is a tech and digital cultures theorist, researcher, and writer. She co-leads a new Masters program on AI, Ethics, and Society at the University of Cambridge, UK. Maya has a Drphil in Cultural Sciences from Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. Her research examined the computational, social, and cultural conditions of media technologies re-shaping the ‘ethical’ and the place of the human in data-fied worlds of the driverless car. Maya is part of an advisory board on AI and the arts to the Junge Akademie at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin. She continues to be associated with gender justice and digital rights movements that she worked in prior to academic work. She is on the board of Arrow, a feminist reproductive health and rights policy organisation working in the Asia-Pacific region.

Pélagie Gbaguidi is a self-proclaimed "contemporary Griot" living and working in Brussels. Her work is an anthology of the signs and traces of trauma. A readjustment of the imaginary arouses in the artist an urgency to give it form, writing to liberate images, drawing a corpus of contemporary forms. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions including, Stadtmuseum, Munich, Germany (2013), MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2014), “Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C., USA (2015), Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), and Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age at Wiels, Brussels (2019).

The artist collective GCC has been making arab contemporary art that addresses the contemporary culture of the Arab Gulf region. Consisting of a “delegation” of nine artists, the GCC makes reference to the English abbreviation of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an economic and political consortium of Arabian Gulf nations. Founded in the VIP lounge of Art Dubai in 2013, the GCC makes use of the ministerial language and celebratory rituals associated with the Gulf. The collective consists of Nanu Al-Hamad, Khalid al Gharaballi, Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Fatima Al Qadiri, Monira Al Qadiri, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Amal Khalaf.

Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva, Solveig Qu Suess) is a collective that explores the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Based in Berlin and Kyiv, their practice has been concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. Their work has been shown internationally, including their first solo show Making of Earths at Kunsthall Trondheim Norway (2020) and group shows such as Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-21) and Re-thinking Collectivity at Guangzhou Image Triennale (2021). They have given lecture-performances at the Ashkal Alwan Beirut, ICA London, HKW Berlin, NYU Shanghai, Matadero Madrid and have taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, FAMU Prague, Central Saint Martins London among others. They were 2018–19 Digital Earth Fellows and have been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020) and the Golden Key Kasseler Dokfest (2021).

John Gerrard was born in North Tipperary, Ireland. Gerrard received a BFA from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. Best known for his sculptures and installations, Gerrard is widely regarded as a key figure in the development of simulation within contemporary art. His works typically take the form of digital simulations, displayed using real-time computer graphics.

Oulimata Gueye is a Senegalese and French art critic and curator studying the impact of digital technology on urban popular culture in Africa. Since 2010, Gueye has been conducting a research project known as Africa SF which explores digital culture, science, and the potential of fiction to develop critical analysis and alternative positions.

The practice of French artist Camille Henrot moves seamlessly between film, painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The artist references self-help, online second-hand marketplaces, cultural anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, and social media to question what it means to be at once a private individual and a global subject. Henrot is interested in confronting emotional and political issues, and looking at how ideology, globalization, belief and new media are interacting to create an environment of structural anxiety. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute resulted in her film Grosse Fatigue, for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her acclaimed 2014 installation “The Pale Fox” at Chisenhale Gallery in London travelled to institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; Bétonsalon–Centre for art and research, Paris; and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition “Days Are Dogs."

Femke Herregraven investigates which material base, geographies, and value systems are carved out by financial technologies and infrastructures. Her work focuses on the effects of abstract value systems on historiography and individual lives. This research is the basis for the conception of new characters, stories, objects, sculptures, sound, and mixed-media installations. Her current work focuses on the financialization of the future as a “catastrophe” and uses language, the voice, and the respiratory system to examine these monetized speculative catastrophes within our social, biological, and technological ecosystems. She is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2017–2018). In 2016, she collaborated with Dutch investigative journalists on the Panama Papers. In 2019, she was nominated for the Prix de Rome. She is currently a Creator Doctus (practice-based PhD) candidate at Sandberg Instituut (2020–2023).

Yuk Hui wrote his doctoral thesis under the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths College in London and obtained his habilitation in philosophy from Leuphana University in Germany. Hui is author of several monographs that have been translated into a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China:-An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), and Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Since 2014, Hui has been the initiator and convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology and currently sits as a juror of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. He currently teaches at the City University of Hong Kong.

Sanneke Huisman was trained as an art historian, and works as a freelance writer, curator and teacher with a focus on media art and digital art. She collaborated with Marga van Mechelen on compiling and editing a comprehensive publication on the history of media art in the Netherlands, A Critical History of Media Art in the Netherlands: Platforms, Policies, Technologies (2019, Jap Sam Books). At LIMA, a platform for media art in Amsterdam, she is active as a programr and a project leader for various national and international exhibitions and projects, including the 2015 exhibition Talking Back to the Media (19852015), Cultural Matter (2017-2020), and Mediakunst op Wikipedia (Media Art on Wikipedia, 2021-2023). She writes about contemporary art for exhibition catalogues and magazines including Metropolis M and De Witte Raaf, and is a guest lecturer at various Dutch art academies and universities, including KABK, ArtEZ, Leiden University, Vrije Universiteit, and UvA.

Victoria Ivanova is currently Research and Development Strategic Lead at the Serpentine Galleries, a contemporary arts organization in London. In 2010, while working in the human rights field, she co-founded a cultural platform in Donetsk, Ukraine. In 2014 she founded Real Flow, a research and development platform for socializing finance. Her practice is informed by systems analysis and approaching infrastructures as mechanisms for shaping socio-economic and political realities. Her current research interests include possibile technological infrastructures which prototype post-Westphalian citizenship models.

Fieke Jansen is a PhD candidate at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Culture and the Data Justice Lab. She is interested in re-politicizing data and technology, by understanding its historical, social, cultural and political context in Europe. Her research focuses on the impact on targeted communites of implementing data-driven decision-making in European police forces. Prior to starting her PhD, Fieke worked as a practitioner exploring the intersection of human rights, the internet, and artificial intelligence.

Vladan Joler is a researcher and artist whose work blends data investigation, counter-cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualization, critical design and numerous other disciplines. He explores and visualises technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures and other contemporary phenomena in the intersection of technology and society.

Isaac Kariuki is a visual artist and writer whose work centres on surveillance, borders, internet culture and the black market, as they relate to the Global South. His work takes the form of image, video, lectures, writing and performance. He has exhibited at the Tate Modern, Kadist (Paris) and the Kampala Art Biennale, as well as holding lectures at the Tate Britain among others.

Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programs at Cubitt and Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries where she has worked on the Edgware Road Project since its inception in 2009. Here and in other contexts she has developed residencies, exhibitions and collaborative research projects at the intersection of arts and social justice. With an interest in radical pedagogy, collectivity and community practice, she has developed a migrant justice program through Implicated Theatre (2011-2019) using Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies to create interventions, curricula and performances with ESOL teachers, hotel workers, domestic workers and migrant justice organizers. She is a founding member of artist collective GCC, a trustee for not/no.w.here and on the artistic committee for Arts Catalyst. In 2019 she curated Bahrain’s pavilion for Venice and in 2016 she co-directed the 10th edition of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai.

Francois Knoetze is a scavenger, sculptor, performer, and video artist with an interest in the connections between social histories and material culture. His roaming costumed performances and experimental videos pick at the socio-spatial force-fields that attempt to rigidly order the contaminated, folded, and entangled worlds of people and things. His videos create narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of a global digital machine at the brink of collapse. Knoetze is a co-founder of the Lo-Def Film Factory. Based in South Africa, the collective’s work involves archival research, dramaturgy and visual strategies associated with video art, collage, sculptural installation and Virtual Reality, to explore and create space for collaborative, experimental community storytelling.

Srinivas Kodali is a interdisciplinary researcher based in India, where he is part of several internet movements and communities. His work focuses on governance and the internet, advocating for data standards, open data and cyber security.

Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Arts department at NYU Shanghai, where she teaches classes on emerging technologies, philosophy, humanities and the arts. She also co-directs the university's Artificial Intelligence and Culture Research Centre. She is the co-editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic).

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer is senior researcher in digital culture at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and teaches theory at the Gerrit Rietveld and other academies. Since the late 1990s, he has researched, curated, and lectured on the intersections of art, design, technology, and ecology. In the early 2000’s he set up and curated the Mediamatic research workshops on the cultural significance of new digital technologies. He co-curated the Transnatural festivals (2010–2013) and worked in the field of cultural policy of digital culture at Virtueel Platform (2009–2013). Through his work he convergences different knowledge practices: technological, artistic, legal, organizational, scientific, and more-than-human. In recent years, he curated, among other programs, Garden of Machines (2015), Gardening Mars (2017), Bot Club and the Neuhaus Temporary Academy for more-than-human knowledge (2019). He co-edits the Vertical Atlas and in 2019 he initiated the Zoöp project.

Lukáš Likavčan is a philosopher focusing on technology, ecology and visual cultures. He is a Global Perspective on Society Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai, and an author of Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019).

Abu Bakarr Mansaray is a devoted autodidact of visual arts, industrial design, engineering, mathematics, and physics who persistently studies these disparate knowledge systems to give order to the physical world. Growing up in Sierra Leone, he witnessed the country’s most brutal period of civil war, which left fifty thousand dead and many more injured, raped, or mutilated and faced with impending economic, political, and social collapse. The artist narrowly escaped the 1999 Freetown massacre but has since returned to his country, fostering within his work a desire to alter the sinister political forces at play by revealing their concealed mechanisms and suggesting methods for disrupting their devious courses.

Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis at the SFU School of Communication. Her research and teaching focus on information and cyberwar, the political economy of information, media and environment, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies. She writes about practices of resistance and mobilization, digital militarism, disand misinformation, internet history, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, Soviet and post-Soviet techno-politics, and nuclear cultures, such as the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. She is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019).

Emo de Medeiros is a Beninese-French artist living and working in Cotonou, Benin and Paris, France. His work has been shown internationally at Centre Pompidou, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; MARKK Hamburg, Germany; Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival São Paulo, Brazil; LagosPhoto, Nigeria; as well as in the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and the biennales of Marrakech, Dakar and Casablanca.

His practice hinges on a single concept he calls “contexture,” a fusion of the digital and the material, of the tangible and the intangible, exploring hybridizations, interconnections and circulations of forms, technologies, traditions, myths and merchandises. He investigates the new perspectives and conversations happening in a novel space: the current context of the post-colonial, globalized and digitalized world of the early 21st century. Within his practice, Medeiros employs an array of media including drawing, sculpture, text, video, photography, assemblage, performance, electronic music, installations, painting and appliqué fabric.

The work of the Amsterdam-based artist collective Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design. Films by Metahaven include Chaos Theory (2021), Hometown (2018), Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018), and Information Skies (2016). Metahaven has participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, the Busan Biennale, Busan, the Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, and M HKA, Antwerp, among others, andheld solo exhbitions exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Izolyatsia, Kyiv, ICA London, e-flux, New York, and State of Concept Athens, among others. Their work is featured in collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. Recent publications include the book-length essay Digital Tarkovsky (2018), and PSYOP: An Anthology (2018), edited with Karen Archey.

Philippa Metcalfe is a PhD candidate at the ERC funded DATAJUSTICE project, based at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, UK. She has conducted empirical research in Greece and the UK, conceptualizing the datafied border and asylum regimes of Europe. Her primary focus is to (re) politicise data driven governance, by critically engaging with the ways which technological advances work to entrench historical bordering practices. Her work has been published in First Monday and Geopolitics peer-reviewed online journals.

Dorine Mokha (1989-2021, based in Lubumbashi, DRC): Dorine was a Congolese dancer, choreographer and author, artistic co-director of ART’gument Project in Lubumbashi and associated artist with Studios Kabako in Kisangani. Open to multidisciplinarity, he has participated in numerous workshops in theatrical improvization, film initiation, theatre writing, project writing and more recently in visual criticism and artistic production. He participated in international programs such as the Pan-African PAMOJA Residencies (2013-2015), the TURN Fund Meeting (2014), the Berlin Platform–Goethe Institute Coproduction Fund (2018); Avignon Festival, the Ruhrtriennale, the Theater der Welt or the Theaterformen. Scholar 2014-2015 of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Laureate 2016 of the Triennial Dance. Dance of Africa Dance of the French Institute, Jury 2017 of the Zurcher Kontal Bank Prize or Laureate 2019 of the Pro Helvetia Research Residence.

Jean Katambayi Mukendi is a visual artist based in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His practice lies at the intersection of technology, mechanics, geometrics, and electricity. He fuses his training as an electrician with influences from his daily life within his works.

Edmond Musasa Leu N'seya is specialised in figurative painting, focussing on habits, rules and systems that are part of life in rural environments and ancient societies. He developed most of the visual language used in the National Museum of Lubumbashi explaining the origin and use of a variety of natural and industrial materials and processes. Musasa’s work has been exhibited over the last 40 years in DR Congo in local exhibition in Lubumbashi, Likasi, Kolwezi and Kolwezi.
Musasa and Maarten Vanden Eynde have been collaborating since 2015. Their collaborative works have been presented at Mu.Zee, Ostend, Belgium (2021); Jean-Cocteau Cultural Centre, Paris, France (2020); Tallinn Photomonth Contemporary Art Biennial, Estonia (2019); 6th and 4th Lubumbashi Biennale, Lubumbashi, DRC (2019 and 2015); Contour Biennial #9, Mechelen, Belgium (2019); Cargo in Context, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019); Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France (2019); Egmont Palace, Brussels, Belgium (2018); Belgian Art Prize, BOZAR, Brussels, BE (2017)

Katja Novitskova, born 1984 in Tallinn, Estonia, lives and works in Amsterdam. Novitskova’s work tackles the complexity and failures of depicting the world through technologically driven narratives. Novitskova’s work focuses on the mapping of biological territories that are no longer outside but rather “inside” biological bodies. By uniting art and science at the level of nature, Novitskova brings awareness to tools of mediation and representation used to depict these realms, such as microscopes or brain scans, and how they are able to merge datasets and biology. Novitskova has published three books, If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes (Sternberg, 2018), Dawn Mission (Kunstverein, 2016), Post Internet Survival Guide (Revolver, 2010). She has had solo shows internationally at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018) the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), among others.

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is the author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya (Zed. 2018) and Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move (Hurst.2020).

Trevor Paglen was born in 1974 at an Air Force base in Maryland, where his father worked as an ophthalmologist. He grew up on bases in the USA and Germany. A former prison-rights activist, Paglen's photographs often depict classified military activity. Previous series have featured a National Security Agency's eavesdropping complex, an Israeli nuclear weapons facility, and a secret CIA prison. The images are always shot from public land, and consequentially are often blurred, sometimes indecipherable. This tendency is embraced by Paglen as an emphasis on the secretive nature of the establishments from which he is attempting to gather information.

Alice Piva is an undergraduate architecture and urban design student and researcher at Federal University of Paraiba, Brazil. She works through more-than-human perspectives, interweaving digital, physical, and biological systems in data-driven cartographies, algorithms, and speculative designs, to which she applies post-anthropocentric and technopolitical discussions.

Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) is an award-winning Chinese speculative fiction author, translator, creative producer, and curator. He is honorary president of the Chinese Science Fiction Writers Association, and has a seat on the Xprize Foundation Science Fiction Advisory Council. His works include the novel Waste Tide (Tor, 2019) and, co-authored with Kai-Fu Lee, the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future (Currency, 2021). He currently lives in Shanghai and is the founder of Thema Mundi Studio.

Dr. Nii Quaynor pioneered Internet development and expansion throughout Africa for nearly two decades, establishing some of Africa's first Internet connections and helping set up key organizations, including the African Network Operators Group. He also was the founding chairman of AfriNIC, the African Internet numbers registry.

Elia Rediger was born in 1985 in Kinshasa, Congo. As the son of Swiss development workers, he grew up in Basel after returning to Switzerland, where he performed as a child singer at the Basel Theater. After staying in Denver, USA and studying media art, he founded the music group The bianca Story with Fabian Chiquet in 2006, in which he was a lyricist, front man and singer and has released four albums.

Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself in human form. Her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and soon-to-be farmer is geared towards manifesting the divine in herself and beyond. As an eternal seeker, Tabita’s yearning for connection finds expression in her cross-dimensional practices, which envision network sciences– organic, electronic and spiritual–as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart-consciousness. Embracing digital, corporeal and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle colonial wounds and energetic imbalances that affect the songs of our bodymind-spirits. Through screen interfaces and healing circles, her offerings aim to nurture our collective growth and expand our capacity for togetherness. Tabita is based near Cayenne in French Guyana, where she is currently studying Agriculture and birthing AMAKABA, her vision for collective healing in the Amazonian forest. Tabita is devoted to becoming a mother to the world.

Lucas Rolim is an architect who graduated from the Federal University of Paraiba, in Brazil, his homeland. Focused on transdisciplinary relations between advanced computational design and social and environmental responsibility, he is especially interested in employing these techniques and methods in the Global South sociopolitical context. Currently, he is doing his Master of Science in Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, where he studies in the M-ARCH-Typology Program in which he focuses on the development of emerging building types and construction paradigms, in particular, circular and sustainable modes that attempt to address multiple stacks of planetary scale architecture.

Renée Roukens is an arts organizer and creative producer. She is COO at Strietman Espresso Machines. As an executive she builds institutional capacity, helping creative people share ideas and achieve their goals. She has developed exhibitions, residencies and discursive programs at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture, MU Hybrid Art House, Baltan Laboratories and Hivos. She is co-founder of Digital Earth, a fellowship for artists thinking through questions of digital futures.

Bassem Saad is an artist and writer born on September 11 and trained in architecture. His work explores objects and operations that distribute violence, pleasure, welfare, and waste. Through video, sculpture, and writing, he investigates and record strategies for maneuvering within and beyond governance systems. His writing appears in Jadaliyya, Unbag, and The Funambulist, and he is an editorial team member at Failed Architecture. He was a resident fellow at Eyebeam in New York and at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut. He is currently a fellow at the Leslie Lohman Museum.

Nanjira Sambuli is a researcher, policy analyst, and strategist working to understand the unfolding, gendered impacts of ICT adoption on governance, media, entrepreneurship, and culture. Nanjira is a Fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Ford Global Fellow. She is also a co-chair of Transform Health, and board member at The New Humanitarian, Development Gateway, and Digital Impact Alliance. Nanjira advises the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms, and the Carnegie Council’s AI and Equality Initiative. She is also a Diplomacy Moderator at the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA). Nanjira has served as a Commissioner on the Lancet & Financial Times Governing Health Futures 2030 Commission, as a panel member on the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, and as a deputy on the United Nations Secretary General’s HighLevel Panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment.

Georges Senga (1983, Lubumbashi, DRC) is a photographer. He develops his photographic work around history and the narratives revealed by “memory, identity and heritage,” illuminating our actions and the present. Three of his projects explore memory, looking for the resonances that people, their facts and their objects leave behind, and the resilience of memory in his country, Congo. Georges Senga is part of the artistic dynamic of the city of Lubumbashi at the PICHA art centre in DR Congo and at the Photo Market and Phototools workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work has been exhibited internationally in institutions; in 2021 he developed a project at the Villa Medici.

Nzilani Simu is a visual artist specializing in illustration, hand lettering, infographics, identity design and visual advocacy. She finds inspiration in the African landscape, its animals, plants, and flowers. She enjoys learning and conveying African stories in her art. Her hand-lettering practice engages with everything from music lyrics to inspirational quotes. Her art brand Kulula is an outlet for creative expression where she also sells art goods and holds occasional workshops. She is passionate about design for social impact, particularly when it comes to an African lens and projects focused on women's rights.

Andrej Škufca’s work presents itself as a network characterized by fiction, technological design, industrial fabrication processes and synthetic materials. His installations not only combine technological and fictional elements, but produce immersive and seemingly animated environments, in which human agents are no longer central. He has had solo shows in Aksioma, Ljubljana; The International Center of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, Zagreb; Karlin Studios, FUTURA, Prague; DUM Project Space Ljubljana. And participated in group shows in MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome; Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest; Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana; Gallery of Modern Art, Ljubljana. He is also an editor at Šum journal.

Arthur Steiner is an art historian passionate about the role of arts, culture and digital tech in tackling 21st century challenges. He has led various innovative strategic programs for Hivos, working to develop the cultural sector and its social impact in over 25 countries. Through his work he has connected musicians in Zimbabwe, game designers in Egypt, VR storytellers in China and impact investors in the United Arab Emirates. He is co-founder of New Silk Roads and Digital Earth, a fellowship for artists to reimagine the dominant narrative of our digital futures. He has curated various art exhibitions and public programs around the world. Together with the Prince Claus Fund and the European Culture Foundation he initiated the publication Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World (Valiz, 2020).

Ksenia Tatarchenko is an assistant professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Singapore Management University. She received her PhD from the History of Science Program, History Department, Princeton University (2013), and an MA in history from University Paris-Sorbonne (2006). Her dissertation “A House with the Window to the West: The Akademgorodok Computer Center, 1958-1993” was awarded the Charles Babbage Institute 2012-2013 Erwin & Adelle Tomash Fellowship. She has held positions as a lecturer at the Global Studies Institute, Geneva University, as a visiting Assistant Professor of History at NYU, Shanghai, and as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.

Suzanne Treister lives and works in London and the French Pyrenees. She has been a pioneer in the new media field since the early 1990s, working simultaneously across video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour. Treister has evolved a large number of projects, many spanning several years, which engage with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research. In 1988 she was making work about video games, in 1992 virtual reality, in 1993 imaginary software and in 1995 she made her first web project and invented a time travelling avatar, Rosalind Brodsky, the subject of an interactive CD-ROM. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

Unknown Fields (UK/AU) is a nomadic design research studio directed by Kate Davies and Liam Young. By venturing out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, they uncover the industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness its technology and culture set in motion. These distant landscapes–the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated, and the pristine–are embedded in global systems connected in surprizing and complicated ways to our everyday lives. Unknown Fields make provocative objects and films from this expedition work, exploring the dispersed narratives that coalesce to form a contemporary city. They chronicle their expeditions in a book series titled Unknown Fields: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (Architectural Association, 2016). Their projects have been collected by institutions internationally, and their work has been published extensively in The Guardian, BBC, Wired, New Scientist and many more.

Jordi Vallverdú, PhD, MSci, BMus, BPhil, is ICREA Acadèmia Tenure Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Catalonia), where he teaches Philosophy and History of Science and Computing. His research is dedicated to the epistemological, cognitive, ethical and educational aspects of Philosophy of Computing and Science and artificial intelligence. He leads his own MICINN funded research group on Innovation and Medicine, is research member of the Caixabank funded AppPhil project, as well as research member of TECNOCOG Philosophy, Technology and Cognition Research Group. He is also head of UAB team of the consortium that has obtained the CSI-COP H2020 EU project. He has been involved in the publication of nearly 20 books, as author or editor.

Richard Vijgen is an artist and designer whose work focuses on artistic data visualization. He creates multi-sensorial data experiences that visualize the invisible technological dimensions of reality. His work provides poetical interpretations of data and proposes a dialog between the human perspective and the disembodied world of digital networks, algorithms and wireless communication.

Sarah Waiswa is Ugandan-born, Kenya-based documentary and portrait photographer with an interest in exploring the New African Identity on the continent. Her work has been exhibited around the world, most recently at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. Her photographs have been published in The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Zhan Wang is a visual artist currently based in Berlin. Having been trained in architecture at the Architectural Association in London, Zhan’s works focus on creating spatial consequences of technology and politics. In his work “Lunar Economic Zone,” he uses visual references from Chinese propaganda posters from the 60s and 70s to create an animated “technotopia” driven by resource monopoly. The overly saturated visual language of the animation contrasts with the more complex reality of a development-driven economy. The “Lunar Economic Zone” has been shown in Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich etc. Zhan works with various media including animation, coding and VR.

Kedolwa Waziri is a writer, dreamer, and community organizer at Trans Queer Fund Kenya. She is a student of radical social movements, and her work lives at the intersection of social justice, art, and feminist politics. In her practice she is an emerging voice on the histories of marginalization, identity, and digital justice.

Mi You is an interim professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel/documenta Institut. Her longterm research and curatorial projects spin between the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic. She works with the cultural and economic idea of Silk Road as a figuration for nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. She has curated programs at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), and with Binna Choi, she is co-steering a research/curatorial project Unmapping Eurasia. At the same time, her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on “actionable speculations,” articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fi-a-thon “Sci-(no)-fiction” at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her function as chair of committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum. She is one of the curators of the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021).

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China. As an artist, writer, curator, and teacher he has earned critical recognition worldwide for his concept and practice of “total art,” which forges new cultural meaning from various philosophies and systems of thought from anytime, anywhere. Since 2016, Qiu has served as dean of the School of Experimental Art, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He has co-curated several exhibitions of experimental art in China, including Image and Phenomena: ’96 Video Art Exhibition (1996), and Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion (1999). He was chief curator of the Shanghai Biennial (2012) and curator of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017).

Dan Zhu is a visual artist born in 1985 in Jiangxi, China, currently living and working in The Hague. For Dan Zhu work with pencil and paint on paper or linen is the beauty of necessity, the wonder of medium, there since the explosion of space itself. Circle after circle, round after round, the hour glass is turning.