A program reorienting planetary computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force.
A program reorienting planetary computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force.
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google Research, where he leads an approximately 600 person organization working on both basic research and new products in Artificial Intelligence. His team focuses on the intersection of machine learning and devices, including Android phones, wearables, and the Internet of Things, developing embodied AI that extends human capabilities while preserving privacy. One of the team’s technical contributions is Federated Learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sending user data off-device.
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Memo Akten is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, musician and computer scientist from Istanbul, Turkey. He works with emerging technologies and computation as a medium, to create images, sounds, films, large-scale responsive installations and performances. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and expressive human-machine interaction from Goldsmiths University of London, and is Assistant Professor of Computational / New Media Art at University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
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Rafael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. He currently leads Alternatives at One Project, where they're working to design, implement and scale new forms of economics and governance that are equitable, ecological and effective. Previously, he led design for learners at Khan Academy, tackled ethical platforms of AI at IBM Research, taught media theory at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and designed over a hundred iOS apps with Apple.
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Konstantin Batygin is a Russian-American astronomer and Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech. His research and work addresses a wide range of problems related to the formation and evolution of the solar system, dynamical evolution of exoplanets, as well as physical processes that occur in planetary interiors and atmospheres. He has authored or co-authored over one hundred published works in his field..
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Feryal Behbahani is a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind where her research focuses on Reinforcement Learning. Previously, she led a research team at Latent Logic (now part of Waymo) in Oxford, where she worked on reinforcement learning for learning human-like behaviour for robotics, autonomous driving and games. Feryal’s doctoral research at Imperial College London focused on investigating underlying algorithms employed by the human brain for object representation and inference, the dynamics of uncertainty in sensorimotor perception, and building machine learning solutions.
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Juliana is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and by courtesy, of Political Science, at Stanford University, and the Faculty Director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab. Her book Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals (Oxford University Press, 2021) asks how we should respond to inequalities between persons at different stages of their lives. Her current work explores the kinds of egalitarian relationships we have reasons to value by looking at the modes of relating we have reasons to avoid.
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Jonathan Blake is a political scientist and the author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has previously worked at the RAND Corporation, Columbia Global Policy Initiative, and the Chumir Foundation. He holds a PhD and MA from Columbia University and BA from UC Berkeley, all in political science.
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Nicolay Boyadjiev is an architect, strategist and creative director working between Montreal, Copenhagen and Los Angeles. He was formerly the co-director of Strelka Institute's post graduate education program, where he co-led The Terraforming and The New Normal interdisciplinary design-research think-tanks. He is also a faculty at IAAC in Barcelona where he leads the “Platform Urbanism” thesis cluster.
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Raymond Brassier is a British philosopher. He is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. Brassier is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and the translator of Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Theoretical Writings and Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.
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Benjamin Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, technology and design. He is Professor of Philosophy of Technology at the University of California, San Diego and Visiting Professor at the European Graduate School, SCI_Arc, and NYU Shanghai. He is the author of several books including The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, The Terraforming, and The Revenge of the Real.
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Joanna is a transdisciplinary researcher on the structure and dynamics of human- and animal-like intelligence. Her research ranges from systems engineering of Artificial Intelligence, through autonomy, cognition, robot ethics, human cooperation on to technology policy and has appeared in venues ranging from a reddit to Science. She is presently Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School of Governance.
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Holly Jean Buck is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's Institute on the Environment and Sustainability. She's worked professionally in the geospatial industry, and as an editor and writing teacher. She has a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University, with minor fields in Science & Technology Studies and International Agriculture and Rural Development.
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Jimena Canales is an expert in 19th and 20th century history of the physical sciences, working for a better understanding of science and technology in relation to the arts and humanities. Her widely-acclaimed second book, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time has been translated in Chinese, Greek, Spanish and excerpted in other languages. Her scholarly work on the history of science has been published in Isis, Science in Context, History of Science, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the MLN, among others.
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AA Cavia is a computer scientist and researcher based in Berlin with a studio practice centered on speculative software, engaging with machine learning, algorithms, protocols, encodings, and other software artifacts. They have lectured and exhibited internationally, at institutions such as Jan van Eyck Academie, ZKM, The New Centre for Research, SPACE Studios, Seventeen Gallery and Medialab Prado. They are the author of one book, Logiciel (2022) and have over a decade of experience building platforms for the arts, including lead roles at Artsy and Last.fm.
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For over 25 years Ben Cerveny has worked as an executive, strategist, and designer in the context of operating systems, media applications, web services, products, the built environment, and digital games. Before founding the Foundation for Public Code, he was a Design Fellow at Samsung, leading a project on room-scale programmable environments. Previously, he helped design the massively multiplayer game that became Flickr [and also named it], founded the Experience Design Lab at Frogdesign, and was CEO of Bloom Studios, whose data visualization iPad app Planetary was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution.
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Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s latest book is entitled The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production
(MIT Press, 2018). His professional interests lie in the history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the international context, with a focus on Africa. Mavhunga joined MIT as an assistant professor in 2008 after completing his PhD at the University of Michigan.
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Dipesh Chakrabarty holds a BSc (physics honors) degree from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, a postgraduate Diploma in management (considered equivalent to MBA) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a PhD (history) from the Australian National University. He is the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School. His work focuses on modern South Asian history and historiography; postcolonial studies; theory and history; globalization; climate change and human history.
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Manuel DeLanda is a New York-based cross-disciplinary theorist and artist. Currently a lecturer at the School of Architecture at Princeton University, as well as at The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program at Pratt Institute, he previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, among others. In his latest book, DeLanda, together with Graham Harman, analyses “The Rise of Realism” (Polity, 2017) within continental philosophy.
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David Delgado is a Cultural Strategist for JPL Lab Engagement and a Visual Strategist in the JPL Studio. He previously co-led NASA’s Imagine Mars Project, a STEAM-based “boot camp for the imagination” where students worked with NASA scientists and engineers to imagine and design communities on Mars. Outside of JPL, David works as an independent artist.
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Daniel has 20-years of experience in strategic planning and execution of humanitarian and development activities in Africa. From within African Governments, UN agencies, private sector corporations, and non-governmental organizations, his work has included design, execution, operations, monitoring, evaluation, facilitation, and educating. He currently serves as Team Lead for Community Partnerships at One Project, an Operating Non-Profit/Donor organization committed to co-creating alternative economic systems in partnership with communities worldwide.
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A public policy entrepreneur, open government activist and negotiation expert, David is a Lecturer of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. At HKS, he teaches on digital transformation, service delivery, open government and open data. David is also a co-founder of ReCollect Systems, a company that provides software services to hundreds of municipalities and is used by tens of millions of residents.
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M. Beatrice Fazi is Reader in Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD and an MA from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths (University of London), and a Laurea in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Macerata (Italy). Her work explores questions located at the intersection of philosophy, technoscience and culture, and her research interests include media philosophy and theory, digital aesthetics, continental philosophy, computation and artificial intelligence, critical and cultural theory.
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Yakov Feygin is the Associate Director of the Future of Capitalism Program at the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles based think tank and academic institute. He holds a PhD in economic history from the University of Pennsylvania and has experience working as a consultant with multiple governments and private firms. His book, Building a Ruin: The International Politics of Soviet Economic Reform is forthcoming with Harvard University Press.
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Peter Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is a co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative, an interdisciplinary center for the study of these most extreme objects. His current research is on the history and philosophy of black holes and, in a second project, on the changing relation of technology to the self.
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Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a READER IN THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF DIGITAL MEDIA (loosely equivalent to associate or w2 professorship). Bernard's book CODE: FROM INFORMATION THEORY TO FRENCH THEORY examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. Bernard's current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space.
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Nils Gilman is the Senior Vice President of Programs at the Berggruen Institute, where he leads the Institute’s research program and is Deputy Editor of Noema Magazine. He has previously worked as Associate Chancellor at the University of California Berkeley, as Research Director and scenario planning consultant at the Monitor Group and Global Business Network, and at various enterprise software companies. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004) and Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (2011) among other works.
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Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley and an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist and popular public speaker on AI and robotics. He has published over 300 papers, 3 books, and holds 9 US Patents. Ken’s artwork has been featured in 70 art exhibits including the 2000 Whitney Biennial. He is a pioneer in technology and artistic visual expression, bridging the “two cultures” of art and science.
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Hayles teaches at UCLA and Duke University, and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her most recent book, Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, was published by the Columbia University Press (Spring 2021). Among her dozen books are How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, which won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines, which won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship.
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Holly Herndon is an American composer, musician, and sound artist based in Berlin. Her music is primarily computer-based and often uses the visual programming language Max/MSP to create custom instruments and vocal processes. Her most recent full-length album Proto was released on May 10, 2019.
Mat Dryhurst is a “medium-agnostic” artist, thinker, and educator at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute in Berlin whose work intersects with the worlds of music, tech, art, philosophy, and activism. He built a self-hosting publishing framework called Saga, and sits on the board of the streaming collective Resonate. His interests range broadly, but lately seem to condense around questions of the possible forms of human community under the conditions of informatic capitalism, the limits and powers of machine learning, and the significance of blockchain technologies.
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Helen Hester is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. She is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex and Xenofeminism, the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism and Dea ex Machina, and series editor for Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series.
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Yuk Hui is a computer engineer, writer and educator. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2012) and a visiting scientist at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin (2013). Since 2010, he has been teaching in various institutes including Goldsmiths College, Leuphana University, Bauhaus University, Strelka Institute Moscow, Chinese Academy of Art, and City University of Hong Kong.
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Matthew works as a freelance designer in Los Angeles. He works in and around interface design for software and
hardware, toys and games, graphics and animation, and music and sound. He also runs a small studio called
Extraordinary Facility, where he focuses on design for learning and play.
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Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer and scholar. Prior to her current role teaching at Cooper Union, Kallipoliti was an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she directed the MSArch Program, an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University and an Assistant Professor Adjunct at Columbia University [GSAPP]. Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics and more particularly on recycling material experiments, theories of waste and reuse, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments.
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Ed is the Director of the Center for Transformative Media at The New School, and Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design. He is a designer, educator, writer, musician and multimedia artist. With Carla Leitao he co-founded AUM Studio, an architecture and new media firm that has produced residential projects, competitions, and new media installations in Europe and the US.
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Aaron is an artist, designer, and the Co-founder and President of Within, a virtual and augmented reality company. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His projects have been shown at international festivals including TED, Sundance, Tribeca Film Festival, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and more.
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Bogna Konior is a writer and an academic, focusing on digital culture, philosophy of technology, and new media. She has a broad interest in the relationship between accelerating ecological and technological change, and its impact on digital culture. She is currently a research fellow at NYU Shanghai, Interactive Media Arts department and at the AI and Culture Research Centre.
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Kei Kreutler is an artist-researcher interested in how cultural narratives of technologies shape their use and whose work focuses on organizational design and utopian conspiracies. As Strategy Director at Gnosis, she oversees messaging as the company builds open, blockchain-based prediction market platforms, decentralized exchange protocols, and a secure wallet. Her project-based practice spans disciplines, from engagement with open source space technologies to synthetic biology research, and has been exhibited by organizations including the Victoria & Albert Museum, FACT Liverpool, and Ideas City at the New Museum.
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Xin Liu is an artist and engineer. She creates experiences/experiments to take measurements in our personal, social, and technological spaces in a post-metaphysical world: between gravity and homeland, sorrow and the composition of tears, gene sequencing, and astrology. She is the Arts Curator in the Space Exploration Initiative in MIT Media Lab, a member of the inaugural ONX studio program founded by New Museum,Onassis NY and Silver Arts Project in the World Trade Center, and an artist-in-residence at SETI Institute.
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Cécile Malaspina is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and principal translator of Gilbert Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, with the collaboration of John Rogove (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). She is directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris (Ciph), where she is also a member of the executive board. She trained as an artist, art historian (Goldsmiths) and curator (RCA) before turning to philosophy, where her main interest lies in the normativity of concepts, especially with regard to the aesthetic and ethical implications of conceptualising contingency and uncertainty.
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Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent and forthcoming publications include, as author, ContraContemporary: Modernity’s Unknown Future (Urbanomic, 2020) and “The Ontology of Finance” in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2014). Malik is co-editor of The Flood of Rights (2017), a special issue of the journal Finance and Society on “Art and Finance” (2016), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), and Realism Materialism Art (2015).
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Geoff is a writer and known, among other things, as the author of BLDGBLOG, one of the most acclaimed architecture and design sites on the web. In addition to writing, Geoff lectures on topics related to architecture, technology, and landscape at venues and academic institutions around the world. Geoff Manaugh is the author of the New York Times-bestselling A Burglar’s Guide to the City and co-author of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine.
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Matilde's work spans across mathematics and theoretical physics: (i) on the mathematical side, her work began in low dimensional topology, and later branched out to include non-commutative geometry, and algebraic and arithmetic geometry; and (ii) on the physics side, her work focused mostly on quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics, geometric models for cosmology and particle physics, and quantum Hall systems. Her more recent work involves the application of methods from geometry and statistical physics to coding theory and to mathematical and computational linguistics, as well as geometric aspects of quantum information.
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Achille is a philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual. Mbembe is a Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University. Among Mbembe’s most important written works are: Les jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985); La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920-1960); Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996); De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (2000); Sortir de la grande nuit : Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2003); Critique de la raison nègre (2013).
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Lauren Lee is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. In addition to being an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, she is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users.
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Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive installations, sneaky interventions, playful websites, workshops, and toolkits for other artists working with code. He was previously adjunct professor at NYU's ITP, member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, and artist in residence at STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, and YCAM in Japan.
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Kenric McDowell has worked at the intersection of culture and technology for over twenty years. Kenric co-leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google, where he facilitates collaboration between artificial intelligence researchers, artists, and cultural institutions. Kenric is a regular conference speaker and consultant to think-tanks and arts organizations, helping groups connect artistic practice and technology production with larger traditions of human understanding.
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Based in Los Angeles, Lucy is a visiting professor at architecture school SCI_Arc, is a World Economic Forum, Young Global Leader and TED Fellow. World acclaimed science fiction artist and body architect, Lucy considers how human biology might be augmented by a mixture of physical design, modification of genes and emotions –– technology transforming the body and ethics.
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Lisa Messeri is an assistant professor of sociocultural anthropology at Yale University. Her research concerns how science and technology stretch our imagination of what place is and what it means to be in place and in the world. Messeri’s first book, Placing Outer Space (Duke 2016), is an ethnography of planetary science, studying how scientists transform planets into worlds. Her current research, supported by an NSF Scholars Award, focuses on the virtual reality community in Los Angeles.
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Nicholas de Monchaux is a designer and author, and currently Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT. He is a partner in the architecture practice modem, and a founder of the design technology company Local Software. De Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize, as well as Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016).
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Thomas Moynihan is a UK-based writer. He is a visiting research associate in history at St Benet’s College, Oxford University and has worked with Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. His research looks at the historical development of ideas surrounding human extinction, existential risk, and the long-term potential of our species. Through his writings, he aims to tell the story of how -across the ages- people have woken up to the vastness of humanity’s potential in step with learning about its sheer fragility.
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Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer, representing new speculative philosophy and neo-rationalism. He is a pioneering figure in the history of “theory fiction”—a genre introduced by his 2008 book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, listed by ArtForum magazine in the best of 2009. Negarestani is the author of multiple works on horror, decay, inhumanism and intelligence, and is the head of the program Critical Philosophy at the New Centre for Research and Practice (Seattle).
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Jussi is a writer and professor in digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University. He is also Visiting Professor at FAMU in Prague and Winchester School of Art. In 2021, he was elected as a member of Academia Europaea.
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Robert Gerard Pietrusko is a designer, composer, and educator. His teaching and research focus on geographic representation and simulation, narrative cartography, and the history of spatial data sets. His design work is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in over fifteen countries at venues such as MoMA, ZKM Center for Art & Media, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others.
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Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) is an award-winning Chinese speculative fiction author, translator, creative producer, and founder of Thema Mundi Studio. 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 and, co-authored with Kai-Fu Lee, the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future.
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Venkatesh Rao is an Indian-American author and consultant. He has previously worked as a researcher at Cornell University and Xerox. After resigning from Xerox in 2011, Rao worked as an independent consultant in Seattle and published his popular Breaking Smart newsletter series while writing his blog Ribbonfarm.
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Martin Rauchbauer is a senior Austrian diplomat and a tech governance expert who currently is on a sabbatical in the San Francisco Bay Area after having served for two years as Austria’s first Tech Ambassador to Silicon Valley and more than five years leading Open Austria in San Francisco. Martin shaped the emerging field of tech diplomacy, engaged in transatlantic tech diplomacy and digital human rights. Martin co-founded Open Austria’s Art + Tech Lab, and the European art + tech + policy initiative The Grid.
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Casey Reas has had software, prints, and installations featured in exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world. His work ranges from small works on paper to urban-scale installations, and he balances solo studio work and collaborations with architects and musicians. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001, a programming language and environment for the visual arts.
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Patricia Reed is an artist, writer and designer based in Berlin. Her recent writings have been published in Pages Magazine, Glass Bead Journal, The New Normal (Strelka Press), Construction Site for Possible Worlds (Urbanomic), e-flux Journal, Making & Breaking, Para-Platforms (Sternberg); e-flux Architecture; and Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic). Reed is also part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group whose Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) was republished by Verso Books in 2018.
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Tobias Rees is a philosopher and anthropologist. He is the Founding Director of the Transformations of the Human program; Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at Parsons/The New School in New York; and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He is the author of three books: Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (Duke), Plastic Reason (California Press), and After Ethnos (Duke).
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Jasmine Roberts is a researcher, software engineer, and cognitive designer in the field of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality reality. Currently, she is building A.I.-driven tooling at Microsoft Research. Jasmine has worked at PlayStation on PlayStation VR, Unity on Unity MARS, and at Google on ARCore.
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Justin Rosenstein is a co-founder of Asana, and a former product lead at Facebook and Google. At Facebook, he was the tech lead for projects including the Like button and Facebook Pages, and designed the in-house project management system that Facebook relies on to this day. He is also the founder of One Project, a non-profit initiative working globally with communities to design, implement, and scale new forms of governance and economics that are equitable, ecological, and effective.
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Lois Rosson received her PhD from the History Department at UC Berkeley in 2022, where she specialized in the History of Science. She has since been a Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, a research associate at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and holds the 2023 – 2024 Octavia E. Butler Fellowship at the Huntington Library. By focusing on illustrators as a group with tangible influence over the “look” of space in the twentieth century, her current project explains why certain visual tropes—such as the persistent characterization of space as a type of western frontier—continue to permeate contemporary aerospace.
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Mindy Seu is a designer and researcher who holds an MDes from Harvard's Graduate School of Design and BA in Design Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. Formerly she was a designer on 24's Interactive Media team and the Museum of Modern Art's in-house design studio. Seu joined the faculty of California College of the Arts in 2016, and Mason Gross School of the Arts and Yale's School of Art in 2019.
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Stephanie Sherman is a director, writer, and strategist who designs and develops collaborative systems across technology, urbanism and culture. Her research traverses speculative histories, organizational architecture, platform automation, human-computer interaction, social intermediation, radio technologies, and Urban AI. She is an Associate Director of Antikythera and directs MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins, University Arts London.
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Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal is the Ruth and Paul Idzik Collegiate Chair in Digital Scholarship and Assistant Professor of English and Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He researches and teaches about the aesthetic and politico-economic entanglements of our technological cultures. His award-winning writing appears, or is forthcoming, in Critical Inquiry, Configurations, American Literature, and Design Issues, among other venues.
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Benedict Singleton and Marta Ferreira de Sá founded Rival Strategy in 2016 to maximize the strategic potential of services, technologies, places, and organizations. The question that gives the firm its direction is: What is contemporary strategy? This is pursued by bridging the gap between strategic imagination and operations for a variety of clients and partners spanning public, private, and less easily-classified organizations.
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Bing Song is a Vice President of the Berggruen Institute and Director of the Institute’s China Center. Prior to joining the Berggruen Institute, Ms. Song was a senior executive with Goldman Sachs China for over a decade, and prior to Goldman, an experienced capital markets lawyer for many years. Earlier in her career, Bing undertook academic and policy research and published in the areas of administrative law, competition law, and comparative procedural laws.
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Nick Srnicek is a Lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) and co-author of Inventing the Future (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams). With Helen Hester he is currently writing After Work: The Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2020).
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Dr. Molly Wright Steenson is Vice Provost for Faculty at Carnegie Mellon. Molly is the author of the book Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which explores the radical history of design, architecture, AI and cybernetics from the 1950s to the present. She cofounded Maxi, an award-winning feminist pop culture webzine in the 90s, and was one of the earliest user experience and content strategy professionals.
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Nicola Twilley is co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and an award-winning contributor to The New Yorker. She wrote, with Geoff Manaugh, “Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine,” which was chosen as one of the best books of 2021 by the Financial Times, NPR, Time, and the Guardian. Her next book, about the artificial winters that are built to house our food, is forthcoming from Penguin Press.
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Professor Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, with research interests in the origins of life, artificial life, life and detection on other worlds. Since joining ASU in 2013 she has built a highly interdisciplinary research program to tackle the origin of life problem from all sides. She is also heavily invested in public engagement in science, and has reached thousands in-person, and hundreds of thousands remotely through lectures, podcast interviews and other activities.
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Claire earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program in 2020. Informed by her ongoing work with the SETI group Breakthrough Listen at U.C. Berkeley, Webb’s current book project historically and ethnographically tracks how scientists have investigated extraterrestrial life forms—both microbes and beings—since the Space Age. She uses feminist and decolonize frameworks of analysis to theorize historical and current scientific imaginations of alien life.
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As CPO, Matt heads up product and design at an early stage social startup, currently in stealth mode, exploring the realtime and multiplayer web, making intelligent use of what’s happening in web3. Since 2020, as a consultant, Matt has also been part of the editorial team on an internal publication with the Google AI group, bridging the research and product organizations. Matt has worked as MD of two London startup accelerators with R/GA Ventures, served as CEO and co-founder of design studio BERG, and was also founder of Job Garden, a tool for investors to source talent for their portfolio startups.
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Isabella is a political economist working on China, global trade and the history of economic thought.
She is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Research Leader for China at the Political Economy Research Institute. Her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize 2021 and the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award, and has been recommended on best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, ProMarket and Folha de S.Paulo among others.
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Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2010, he founded the research agency Forensic Architecture and has directed it ever since. The work of the agency is documented in the exhibition and book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014), as well as in Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Zone/MIT, 2017) and in numerous exhibitions worldwide.
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Dr. Peter Wolfendale has a broad base of philosophical interests that span both the analytic and continental traditions. His research focuses upon the methodological interface between the philosophical analysis of rationality and metaphysics, with the ultimate goal of elaborating a systematic transcendental approach to the philosophy of the mind. His most recent work, The Revenge of Reason, to be published by MIT Press in 2023, will explore the fate of Reason in the twenty-first century.
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Liam Young is an architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He runs an M.A. in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and has taught internationally including with the Architectural Association and Princeton University. He is a founder of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today — a London-based think tank exploring the consequences of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms — and was named by Blueprint magazine as one of 25 people who will change architecture and design.
Vice President & Fellow at Google Research Cerebra
Artist, Programmer, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD
Designer, Researcher, & Artist, Alternatives Lead at
One Project
Astrophysicist & Professor of Planetary Science at Caltech
Neuroscientist, Programmer & Research Scientist at DeepMind
Political Scientist & Fellow at the
Berggruen Institute
Architect, Creative Director & Studio Director, Antikythera
Philosopher & Author of
Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction,
Beirut
Philosopher of Technology, Professor at UC San Diego & Director of Antikythera
Professor of Ethics and Technology, Hertie School of Governance
Professor of Environment & Sustainability, University of Buffalo
Professor of History of Science at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
Artist, Computer Scientist & Author, Logiciel, Berlin
Strategist, Designer, President of the
Foundation for Public Code
Professor of Science, Technology and Society, MIT
Historian, Professor & Author, University of Chicago
Philosopher & Professor, Princeton, UPenn (retired)
Strategist and Team Lead for Community Partnerships at One Project
Policy Entrepreneur, Activist & Educator, University College
London
Philosopher & Reader in Digital Humanities, University of Sussex
Historian & Economist, Berggruen Institute
Historian, Physicist & Philosopher, Harvard
Historian & Author, King’s College London
VP of Programs at
Berggruen Institute & Deputy
Editor at Noema Magazine
Artist & Roboticist, UC Berkeley
Professor of Literature, Duke (retired)
Artists, Musicians, Software Designers & founders of
Interdependence
Associate Professor at the University of West London & Author of
Xenofeminism
Philosopher, Professor at the City University of Hong Kong & Jury
member of the
Berggruen Prize
Interface, Interaction & Hardware Designer, Los Angeles
Architect, Engineer & Scholar, The Cooper Union
Artist, Educator and Co-founder of AUM Studio
Artist, Designer & Co-founder of
Within, Los Angeles
Philosopher & Writer, Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts,
NYU Shanghai
Writer, Artist, & Researcher
Artist and Engineer, MIT Media Lab
Philosopher & Directeur de Programme, Collège International de
Philosophie
Co-director MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths College
Writer & Co-Author of
Until Proven Safe: History and Future of Quarantine
Mathematician, Physicist & Author of
Lumen Naturae, Caltech
Political Philosopher, Founder of Innovation for Democracy Foundation, Johannesburg
Artist and Creator of p5.js
Artist, Coder & Educator, Los Angeles
Writer & Designer, Google AMI, Author of Pharmako-AI
Artist, Body Architect, Visiting Professor, SCI_Arc
Anthropologist, Author of
Placing Outer Space, Yale
Artist collective working in filmmaking, writing, and design
Designer & Head of Architecture, MIT
Historian & Author of
X-Risk,
University of Oxford
Philosopher & Author of
Intelligence and Spirit, New York
Media Theorist, Writer & Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture,
Aarhus University
Architect, Composer & Educator, UPenn
Science Fiction Writer & Author of
Waste Tide, Shanghai
Engineer, Strategist & Consultant, Los Angeles
Senior European Cultural and Tech Diplomat
Programmer, Artist, & Co-Creator of
Processing, UCLA
Artist, Writer & Designer, Berlin
Philosopher, Anthropologist & Director of
Transformations of the Human
Virtual Reality Engineer at
Microsoft Research
Co-founder of Asana & Founder of
One Project
Historian, Artist & Fellow at the
Berggruen Institute
Designer, Artist, Assistant Professor of Art & Design, Rutgers
Strategist, Writer, Director of
MA Narrative Environments UAL
& Associate Director at Antikythera
Associate Professor of Digital Scholarship and English, University of
Notre Dame
Strategists & Founders of RIVAL STRATEGY
Vice President at
Berggruen Institute &
Director of
Berggruen Institute China Center
Lecturer in Digital Economy, King’s College London
Professor of Design, Carnegie Mellon
Writer, Podcaster & Co-Author of
Until Proven Safe: History and Future of Quarantine
Astrobiologist & Theoretical Physicist, Arizona State
Historian, Anthropologist, & Director of
Future Humans
at Berggruen Institute
Designer, Writer & Consultant, London
Assistant Professor of Economics, University of
Massachusetts-Amherst
Architect, Writer & Founder of
Forensic Architecture
Philosopher & Researcher, author of
The Revenge of Reason
Speculative Architect, Filmmaker & Director of
MS Fiction and Entertainment, SCI_Arc
