Adam Nocek is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. He is also the Founding Director of ASU’s Center for Philosophical Technologies. Nocek has published widely on the philosophy of media and science; speculative philosophy (especially Whitehead); design philosophy, history, and practice; and critical and speculative theories of computational media. He recently published Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology (Minnesota, 2021) and is working on his next monograph, Governmental Design: On Algorithmic Autonomy. Nocek is the co-editor (with Tony Fry) of Design in Crisis: New Worlds, Philosophies and Practices, The Lure of Whitehead (with Nicholas Gaskill), along with several other collections and special issues, including a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (with Cary Wolfe) titled, “Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity.” He is a visiting researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and previously held the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Professorship.

Stacey Moran, Associate Director of the CPT, is Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and English at Arizona State University. Stacey works at the intersections of feminist theory and technoscience, design research, and critical pedagogy. Her scholarship views gender politics as not simply being about men and women but focuses precisely on how to understand agency, body, rationality, and the boundaries between theory/practice and thinking/making. Stacey worked in the fashion industry for twenty years and enlists this expertise to engage new forms of speculative and critical design research. Her current research investigates how methods in the physical sciences provide a new foothold for thinking about the materiality of knowledge production in feminine writing practices.

As the owner of Banyan Tree Editorial Services, Jennifer Quincey provides book and grant proposal consulting and developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting services to academic authors in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. She earned her PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and received National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation funding for her research on Welsh language revitalization.

Silvia Neretti is a social designer and a doctoral candidate at The Design School and coordinator for the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from the Free University of Bolzano, Italy and a master’s degree in Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands. Her research focuses on attunement to healing by design, which continues her design practice. Her research aims to shape the field of Design for Mental Health. It adopts a speculative approach and participatory methods and is grounded in new materialism, specifically in an Actor-Network Theory framework. Her research interests move among material ways for relational change, artistic and activist practices for healing, and using design as a tool for critical reassembling of the norm and everyday life.

Gabriela Baka is a Polish designer creating specially tailored solutions in digital experience UI/ UX that help businesses grow and excite users and customers by challenging the best practices of user-centered design. Currently, she does great things with Owls Department.

Previously, she worked at Moby Digg studio as a senior designer. From 2015 to 2016, she was the Design Fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, US. She is a member of the editorial and design team at Fictional Journal, an online publication investigating design’s involvement within society. Baka holds a bachelor of Crossmedia Design from ArtEZ Academy of Art and Design and graduated with a Masters of Information Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2014.

website: http://bakagabriela.com

Gaymon Bennett is Associate Professor of Religion, Science, and Technology at Arizona State University. He works on the problem of modernity in contemporary religion and biotechnology: its shifting moral economies, contested power relations, and uncertain modes of subjectivity. His book Technicians of Human Dignity (Fordham, 2016) examines the figure of human dignity in twentieth-century international and religious politics and its current biopolitical reconfigurations. His co-authored book Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (with P. Rabinow, Chicago, 2012) chronicles an anthropological experiment in ethics with engineers re-imagining the boundary of biology and computation. And his co-authored Sacred Cells? Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research (with T. Peters and K. Lebacqz, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) critically engages the early days of stem cell research and the unwitting role of religion in the secularization of life.

Gaymon has conducted multiple experiments in cross-disciplinary collaboration with contemporary biologists and bioengineers. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Future of Innovation in Society and an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Jewish Studies, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at ASU. He is a co-founder and fellow of the Center for Biological Futures in the division of basic sciences at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He is also a principal of ARC (Anthropological Research on the Contemporary) and was a founding co-designer of the Human Practices Initiative at the multi-university Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He led Human Practices at the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BIOFAB) at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. These experiments emphasize collaborative empirical inquiry, a shift from theory to shared-concept work, and sustained attention to the culture and politics of knowledge production.

Ron Broglio is the Director of Desert Humanities at Arizona State University and Co-Director of the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU as well as Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cumbria School of Art. He is the author of Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life; Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art; and other books and edited collections, including the recently published Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. He is a collaborator and co-curator of Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories, in which artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson examine the cultural life of endangered species in the Grand Canyon. He has performed as Field Marshal of the Animal Revolution and created a number of animal art interventions, including “Teat Tweet” and “Santio’s Gift.” Currently, he is working on desert phenomenology experiments with the art/design group FoAM and is working on an artistic and theoretical treatise called Animal Revolution: Events to Come. And he is engaged in a number of long-term thinking-making experiments in the deserts of the American Southwest.

Alfredo Gutiérrez B. is Associate Professor of Industrial Design at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano of Bogotá and PhD Candidate in Design and Creation at the Universidad de Caldas, Manizales (Colombia). He is interested in opening “the future” to other pasts and “the past” to other futures.

Photo credit: @oscarperfer

Vera Bühlmann is a Swiss writer. She is Professor of Architecture Theory and Director of the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Vienna University of Technology. Together with Ludger Hovestadt, she founded and since 2010 has directed the Laboratory for Applied Virtuality at the Architecture Department at ETH Zurich and co-edits the Applied Virtuality book series (Birkhäuser, Basel/Vienna, since 2012). From 2012–2013 she was a guest researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory at NUS Singapore. After studying philosophy and English language and literature in Zurich, Switzerland, she obtained a PhD in media theory/philosophy from Basel University (2009). Her latest monograph is entitled Information and Mathematics in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Bloomsbury, 2019).

She is the author of Die Nachricht, ein Medium: Generische Medialität, Städtische Architektonik (Birkhäuser, 2014) and co-author with Ludger Hovestadt and Sebastian Michael of A Genius Planet (Birkhäuser 2017). She co-edited a special volume of Minnesota Review together with Iris van der Tuin and Felicity Colman on Genealogies of New Materialism (Duke University Press, 2017), as well as the Metalithikum Books (all Birkhäuser, together with Ludger Hovestadt): Printed Physics, (2012), Domesticating Symbols (2014), Coding as Literacy (2015), and Symbolizing Existence (2016). Among her publications are also Sheaves, When Things Are Whatever Can Be the Case (together with Ludger Hovestadt; Birkhäuser, 2014); A Quantum City (together with Ludger Hovestadt; Diana Alvarez-Marin, Miro Roman, and Sebastian Michael; Birkhäuser 2015); as well as with Martin Wiedmer Pre-Specifics: Some Comparatistic Investigations on Research in Art and Design (JRP|Ringier, 2009); and with Association MetaWorx, MetaWorx, Young Swiss Interactives (Birkhäuser, 2003). She is also the author of many articles on media culture, technology, philosophy, and architecture.

Dr. Cala Coats is an Assistant Professor of Art Education in the School of Art at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on intersections of ethics and aesthetics, with an emphasis on public pedagogy, nomadic inquiry, and socially engaged art. Dr. Coats has published in a range of books and journals, including Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change (Routledge) and Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art (Routledge). She recently organized the symposium Imaginative Futures: Arts-Based Research as Boundary Event and a week-long curriculum and studio workshop for regional art educators at ASU.

Grisha Coleman is a time-based artist working in performance and experiential media. Her work explores relationships between physiological, technological, and ecological systems. As faculty, she holds the position of Associate Professor of Movement, Computation, and Digital Media in Arizona State University’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering, with affiliations in the Schools of Dance and Design. Her art and scholarly work, echo::system, is a springboard for re-imagining the environment, environmental change, and environmental justice. Her research in movement and somatic methods informs her teaching as well as supporting transdisciplinary research; she is a member of the International Somatic Movement Education & Therapy Association (ISMETA) and works with modalities of Body-Mind Centering™ and The Feldenkrais Method™.

Coleman is a New York City native. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally, including a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts in Media Grant (NEA), the 2014 Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University, a fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and multiple grants from the Rockefeller Multi Arts Project Fund, The Surdna Foundation, and The Creative Capital Foundation. She performed as a member of the acclaimed dance company Urban Bush Women and founded the music performance group HOTMOUTH, toured extensively nationally and internationally, and was nominated for a 1998 NYC Drama Desk Award for “Most Unique Theatrical Experience.”

Duncan Fairfax is a Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the program leader for the MA in design and environment and a director of the Prospect and Innovation Research Studio (Pi) at Goldsmiths. He is also an international research associate of the recently established design consultancy and think tank The Studio at the Edge of the World, started by renowned design philosopher and sustainability theorist Professor Tony Fry. His principle areas of research and teaching cover the discourses of contemporary ecology, sustainability, environmental ethics, system and service design, innovation, leadership, and change management. His most recent work is focused on the development of a new, more ethically appropriate and responsible understanding of the nature of the “praxis” of design, as it can be derived from contemporary sociological theories of practice; extended and embodied, or enactive theories of mind within contemporary neuroscience; and ontological theories of design.

Barbara Formis, PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne University, is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the School of Arts of the University Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne. Barbara is the Co-Director of the collection Aesthetics at the University Press of the Sorbonne. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director, with choreographer Melanie Perrier, of the Laboratoire du Geste (The Gesture Laboratory), a platform that promotes research, publication, and experimental research in the interdisciplinary field between performance and the visual arts. In 2010, she published “Aesthetics of Ordinary Life” in the collection Lignes d’Art with Presses Universitaires de France. She has also edited two anthologies: Gestes à l’oeuvre (Gestures at Work), published by L’Incidence éditions in 2008 (republished in 2015), and Penser en Corps (Thinking through the Body), L’Harmattan, 2009.

Mainly influenced by pragmatism, Barbara works in the interdisciplinary field between philosophy and performance. Her research concerns the aesthetics and philosophy of the body, ordinary language, gestures, and expression with a particular focus on dance, happenings, performing events, and their relationship to social phenomena and everyday practices. She has been a dancer and has also worked as a dramaturge.

Margret Grebowicz is an environmental philosopher living in upstate New York. She is the author of five books—Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans; Mountains and Desire: Climbing vs. the End of the World; Whale Song; The National Park to Come; and Why Internet Porn Matters. She is interested in wilderness, animals, public lands, and the problem of desire. Her recent articles have appeared in Slate and The Atlantic, on topics ranging from Himalayan mountaineering to national parks on the southern US border to the utopian imaginaries behind dog training. She’s the founding editor of a new short book series, Practices, published by Duke University Press.

Ruby Hoette is a designer/researcher exploring fashion in context. She seeks to expand what constitutes “fashion practice” through her critical and experimental approach, which proposes alternate modes of engaging with and producing fashion by framing the garment as a unique artifact carrying traces of social, cultural, and economic interactions and transactions.

Ruby holds a BA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (NL) and an MFA from Parsons, The New School (USA). Ruby teaches on MA Design Expanded Practice and is a third-year tutor on BA Design.

Michael Hornblow is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and creative director based in Bangkok. He holds an adjunct role at the University of Tasmania, where he was previously a Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Design. Michael has a broad creative background across video, public art, performance, and design, including presentations at Melbourne Festival and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Sydney, Vancouver, and Hong Kong). He has a long history of creative work in Asia, including art residencies with Asialink and the Australia Indonesia Institute, and festivals in Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand, including artistic directing and co-founding Buffalo Field in Bangkok.

Luke Kautz is the Digital Design Fabrication Specialist in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University and is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Philosophical Technologies. His current explorations look at the illusory notion of regenerative-design, the cross-pollination of disciplinary techniques for new practices, and the use of design technologies to create mutual generosity between ourselves and our natural and built environments.

Before coming to ASU, Luke worked as a junior designer in the architecture office of Frank Gehry in Los Angeles; prior to that, he was a lecturer in the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Katerina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. She is also a professor of philosophy of law at the doctoral school of the University American College-Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communications-Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. Kolozova was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkley in 2009 and a Columbia University NY-SIPA Visiting Scholar at its Paris Global Centre in 2019. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice–Seattle and the first codirector and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004– ). Kolozova is the author of Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014).

Gregg Lambert is Dean’s Professor of Humanities at Syracuse University and Founding Director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center and the Central New York Humanities Corridor. He received a PhD in 1995 in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from University of California at Irvine under the direction of the late-French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Prior to this he was a Fellow in the Center for Hermeneutic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, where he completed a masters program in Theology and Literature and graduate studies in French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1996, Lambert joined the Department of English at Syracuse University and was later appointed as Chair in 2005, before leaving the department in 2008 to become the founding director of The SU Humanities Center. Between 2008–2019, he also served as Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a unique collaborative research network between Syracuse University, Cornell University, the University of Rochester, and the NY6 Liberal Arts Colleges in the CNY region. In 2014, he established the permanent endowment of the CNY Humanities Corridor program through a 3.55 million dollar matching award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the program through three permanent endowments housed at Cornell University, University of Rochester, and Syracuse University.

The CNY Humanities Corridor has been widely acknowledged as one of the most unique and successful collaborations of its kind and has served as a model for other regional consortia, such as “Humanities without Walls.” Since 2008, Professor Lambert has directed several other major multi-institutional research and interdisciplinary initiatives, including the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures (with Cary Wolfe, Rice University), the Trans-Disciplinary Media Studio (with SU School of Architecture), and The Perpetual Peace Project, a multilateral curatorial initiative partnered with Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), the European Union National Institutes of Culture, the International Peace Institute, and the United Nations University, Utrecht University Centre for Humanities, and the Treaty of Utrecht Foundation (the Netherlands). In 2013, he was elected as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Lambert is the author of eighteen books and critical editions and over a hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals and collected volumes. He is internationally renowned for his general writings on the future of the humanities as well as his numerous scholarly writings on contemporary theory and continental philosophy, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, and especially for his critical writings on the late-French philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. He frequently lectures and teaches internationally and has been invited as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University, Ewha University, Seoul National University, and the University of California at Irvine. In 2010–2011 he was appointed as a BK21 Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, and, since 2016, as an International Scholar at Kyung-Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and a Visiting Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in India. He is a member of the advisory board for the International Deleuze and Guattari Studies in Asia and the board member of the International Consortium of Critical Theory (ICCT). He is also a member of the Asia Theories Network (ATN). He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and published articles in various journals such as Telos and Philosophy Today and chapters in Back to the ’30s?: Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism and Democracy (2020) and Balibar/Wallerstein’s “Race, Nation, Class”: Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times (2018).

Jimmy Loizeau is a Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths University of London. His projects are intended to exist on or just inside the peripheries of possibility. These new systems, schemes, or products provide an altered view on how we might interact with infrastructural systems or technologies, for better or for worse, exploring design possibilities through inclusive speculation. Projects like the “Afterlife Project” (2002) explore contemporary faith systems, while the “Audio Tooth Implant” (2001) proposes the next stage in body communications technology, and “The Illegal Town Plan” (2013–) looks at inclusive structures and strategies for local engagement in large-scale town planning schemes.

Stephen Loo is an architect, philosopher, and artist. He is Professor of Design at UNSW. For more than twenty-five years, he has researched, taught, and practiced in the transdisciplinary nexus of design, philosophy, art, performance, and science. He has published widely in architecture and design theory, biophilosophy, posthumanist ethics, ecological humanities, and experimental computational and digital thinking. He holds a PhD in architecture and philosophy from the University of Sydney. Recent books include Deleuze and Architecture (edited with Helene Frichot, 2012) and Poetic Biopolitics (edited with Peg Rawes and Tim Mathhews, 2016); he is currently working on Speculative Ethologies (with Dr. Undine Sellbach) on the relationship between entomology, psychoanalysis, and ethics. Stephen is a founding partner of the award-winning design, architecture, interpretation, and exhibition practice Mulloway Studio, whose projects featured in the Venice Biennale in 2008 and 2014. He has a performance-philosophy and expanded painting art practice and has shown in Paris, Berlin, London, Sydney, Hobart, and Adelaide and is part of an international collective, The Food Project. Stephen has held Visiting Professor positions at University College London, RMIT, University of Tasmania, and has served as external examiner at Goldsmiths College London.

Ania Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia (Poland) and a former Senior Fulbright Fellow at the New School of Social Research in New York. She is a co-editor of (with Karolina Lebek) Materiality and Popular Culture: The Popular Life of Things (Routledge, 2017); (with Michael Gratzke) The Materiality of Love: Essays of Affection and Cultural Practice (Routledge, 2018); and (with Toby Miller) “Media and Emotions. The New Frontiers of Affect in Digital Culture” (a special issue of Open Cultural Studies, 2017). She has authored many papers and chapters in cultural and media studies with regard to love, social norms, codes of feelings, and technology. She is currently working on a monograph, Love in Contemporary Technoculture (under contract with CUP), and an edited collection, Data Dating (under contract with Intellect).

Betti Marenko is a design theorist, academic, educator, public speaker, and consultant. Her work is located at the intersection of philosophy and design. Influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Marenko’s research examines the tension between design, taken as a way of speculating on and instigating the future, and thought that addresses materiality, affect, the virtual, and the nonhuman.

Her interest is in repositioning design in the twenty-first century as a problematizing tool for thinking, making, and creating change. Marenko’s interdisciplinary approach brings together design studies, philosophy, and the analysis of digital cultures. She is the co-editor of the volume Deleuze and Design (Edinburgh University Press, 2015, with Brassett), and her writing is published in Design and Culture, Design Studies, and Digital Creativity.

Marenko is currently writing a book titled Digital Uncertainty. Between Prediction and Potential in Algorithmic Culture, which investigates the new contingent logic of planetary computation and its impact on society and subjectivities. She is Contextual Studies Leader for Product Design at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, having previously held teaching posts at the University of Essex and the University of Urbino, Italy.

Patricia Pisters is Professor of Media Studies (with specialization in film studies) at the University of Amsterdam. From 2015 until 2019 she was Director of Research of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the Faculty of Humanities. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW), and of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). From 2010 until 2013 she was Chair of the Department of Media Studies. Between 2011 and 2015 she was elected member of the steering committee of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). She is one of the founding editors of the peer-reviewed, open access journal NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies and co-editor (with Bernd Herzogenrath) of the series Thinking I Media at Bloomsbury. In 2019 she was Scholar in Residence at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands and Senior Rellow at Cinepoetics, Institute for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universitat in Berlin. As a film philosopher, her work investigates the idea of the brain as the screen in relation to neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychedelics; another field of research investigates media ecologies, eco-critical media, and elemental media. Her latest book is on the poetics of horror in the work of a new generation of women directors. An overview of her publications can be found here and on her ORCID page.

Selena Savić is a researcher and trained architect. Her research interests revolve around the mixture of computational processes with the built environment, exploring ways to communicate communication processes. After her PhD at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a postdoc at the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Vienna University of Technology, she joined the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, where she is currently Head of the Make/Sense PhD program and lecturer at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures. She has edited two books (Ghosts of Transparency, 2019 and Unpleasant Design, 2013). In 2013 she co-founded Contour, a journal for interdisciplinary research in architecture, for which she recently edited a special issue on Politics and the City (2020). She writes about computational modeling, feminist hacking, and posthuman networks in the context of design and architecture.

Sha Xin Wei, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering (AME) at Arizona State University. He directs the Synthesis Center for responsive environments and improvisation with colleagues in AME and affiliate research centers.

From 2001 to 2013, he directed the Topological Media Lab (TML), an atelier-laboratory for the study of gesture and materiality from computational and phenomenological perspectives. He established the TML at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001 and moved the lab to Montréal in 2005 with the support of the Canada Fund for Innovation and the CRC. From 2005–2013, Sha was the Canada Research Chair in Media Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. From 2014 to 2019, Sha directed AME as ASU’s transdisciplinary department fusing sciences and humanities with experimental media arts practices.

Sha’s research concerns ethico-aesthetic improvisation and a topological approach to morphogenesis and process philosophy. His particular areas of study include the real-time, continuous mapping of features extracted from gestural instruments (such as woven or non-woven fabrics) into parameters modulating the continuous synthesis of video, sound, and physical or software control systems. This technical work supports the expressive improvisation of gesture in dense, palpable fields of sound, video, and structured light, and animated materials.

Sha’s art research includes the TGarden responsive environments (Ars Electronica, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, MediaTerra Athens, SIGGRAPH), Hubbub speech-sensitive urban surfaces, Membrane calligraphic video, Softwear gestural sound instruments, the WYSIWYG gesture-sensitive sounding weaving, Ouija performance-installations, Cosmicomics Elektra, eSea Shanghai and the IL Y A video membrane, and Einstein’s Dreams time-conditioning instruments. Sha collaborated with choreographer Michael Montanaro and the Blue Riders ensemble to create a stage work inspired by Shelley’s Frankenstein, with experimental musicians, dancers, and responsive media.

Sha co-founded the Sponge art group in San Francisco to build public experiments in phenomenology of performance. With Sponge and other artists, Sha has directed events/installations in prominent experimental art venues, including Ars Electronica Austria, DEAF / V2 The Netherlands, MediaTerra Greece, Banff Canada, Future Physical United Kingdom, Elektra Montréal, and eArts Shanghai. He has also exhibited media installations at Postmasters Gallery New York and Suntrust Gallery Atlanta. These works have been recognized by awards from major cultural foundations, such as the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology; the LEF Foundation; the Canada Fund for Innovation; the Creative Work Fund in New York; Future Physical UK; and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Sha was trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford Universities and worked more than twelve years in the fields of scientific computation, mathematical modeling, and the visualization of scientific data and geometric structures.

In 1995 he extended his work to network media authoring systems and media theory, coordinating a three-year-long workshop on interaction and computational media at Stanford. In 1997 he co-founded Pliant Research with colleagues from Xerox PARC and Apple Research Labs, dedicated to designing technologies that people and organizations can robustly reshape to meet evolving socio-economic needs.

MIT Press has published Sha’s book, Poiesis, Enchantment, and Topological Matter.

Iris van der Tuin is Professor in Theory of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies). She is also Director of the School of Liberal Arts and Program Director of the interdisciplinary bachelor’s program, Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her research is part of the Transmission in Motion group of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. Together with Nanna Verhoeff, she has initiated the development of the Creative Humanities Academy for LifeLong Learning.

Trained as a feminist epistemologist and working as an interdisciplinarian, she works at the intersection of philosophies of science and the humanities (including science and technology studies), cultural theory, and critical and creative practices of cultural inquiry. These fields meet in humanities scholarship that traverses the “two cultures” and reaches beyond the boundaries of academia out to the field of art and culture. Iris is interested in the new and interdisciplinary humanities and in so-called “SoITL”: the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. She co-authored New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012) with Rick Dolphijn; wrote Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (Lexington Books, 2015); and edited Nature for Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016); as well as, for example, the special journal issue (with A. J. Nocek) “New Concepts for Materialism” of Philosophy Today (2019). Iris chaired the COST Action New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter comes to Matter’ (2014–18) and worked in the H2020 project “Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition” (2017, chaired by Felicity Colman). Iris is founding editor with Rosi Braidotti of the book series New Materialisms of Edinburgh University Press. She is editor of Somatechnics with Holly Randell-Moon. Iris serves on several editorial boards and is a member of the advisory board of ECOLAS, the consortium of European Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Michael Waller is the Head of Design at Goldsmiths University of London. Mike has been a designer and teacher for twenty-five years, designing objects, services, exhibitions, products, and new technologies, such as for the Internet of Things (IoT). He holds a range of patents from his time as a director at Studio Dillon to his work in the Knowledge Lab, an emerging technology research lab, and continues to develop design innovation research through Goldsmiths Prospecting and Innovation Studio (Pi Studio), which focuses on innovation research for a wide range of international organizations. Mike is very interested in helping organizations use design to build capability in both industry and society. With the team in the Pi Studio, he has worked with governments on supporting start-ups and with community psychologists on amplifying innovations in communities from the street level to larger scales using design. The studio has run live research projects for Goldsmiths staff and students with the BBC, LG Electronics, Microsoft Research, Kodak, BT Labs, and others. Connecting research and teaching is at the core of his approach to educating designers. He supervises PhDs with subjects connected to design innovation and technology.

Matt Ward is a Senior Lecturer in the Design Department at Goldsmiths University of London. His research spans a wide range of interests from speculative design to radical pedagogy. He’s a practicing designer, writer, and founding member of DWFE, a post-disciplinary, semi-fictional design syndicate. DWFE’s work searches for meaning in the construction of the extraordinary; they design activities, objects, and incidents to reconfigure people’s perceptions. Matt holds three international patents on the work he did at NCR’s Advanced Research and Development Department on the emerging contexts of the Internet of Things and Urban Computing. Matt has been a research affiliate of MIT Media Lab and Interaction Design at The RCA. He consults for a range of organizations, such as Nokia, BERG, Dentsu, and the Design Council. He lectures internationally about design, technology, and education; writes a blog; and takes a lot of photographs.

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English and Founding Director of the 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University. Wolfe’s most recent projects are Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’ Birds (Chicago, 2020) and a special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, on “Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity” (2020), focused on the work of the multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional Ontogenetics Process Group, of which he is a member. His books and edited collections include Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, 2003); the edited collections Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003); (with Branka Arsic) The Other Emerson (Minnesota, 2010); What Is Posthumanism? (Minnesota, 2010); and Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago, 2012). He has also participated in two multi-authored philosophical collections: Philosophy and Animal Life (Columbia, 2008), with Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell and The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue (Columbia, 2009), with philosophers Paola Cavalieri, Peter Singer, Harlan Miller, Matthew Calarco, and novelist J. M. Coetzee. He is founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press, which has published over fifty volumes to date by noted authors such as Donna Haraway, Roberto Esposito, Isabelle Stengers, Michel Serres, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Derrida, and others.

Kasama Yamtree is a community architect based in Bangkok, working in the areas of knowledge management, community architecture, and development. She uses co-design processes involving design, art, architecture, planning, communication, environment, public health, food security, and climate change. Kasama is Senior Architect and Director of Openspace, an open ground for interdisciplinary collaborations in community development, and Tar Saeng Studio, which aims to promote Universal Design knowledge and adaptation across Thailand. In addition to her work at Openspace, Kasama has coordinated projects at the regional level through her work with the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights and Community Organizations Development Institute.