Memo Akten | Media Arts | Berkeley, CA
Memo Akten is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and computer scientist working with emerging technologies both as a creative medium, and as subject of critical inquiry. He creates Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatizations that probe the cultural, social, and ecological impacts of our contemporary techno-lifestyles, and the collisions between science and spirituality, modernity and ritual, self and collective intelligence. For more than a decade, he has worked with AI, Big Data, and our Collective Consciousness as scraped and shaped by the internet, to reflect on the human condition. His work is ultimately driven by a profound curiosity into the nature of reality, the nature of life, and the nature of the mind. His highly collaborative practice spans moving images, sound, poetry, dance, light, performances, installations, and online interventions, often employing algorithmic, data-driven, and interactive processes.
He holds a PhD in creative explorations into Deep Neural Networks (aka ‘AI’) from Goldsmiths, University of London and he is widely regarded as one of the pioneers in this field. He is Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, and co-director of Superradiance Center for Entangled Intelligence & Planetary Consciousness, an interdisciplinary research lab investigating the nature of intelligence, consciousness and planetary systems through research-based art that bridges embodied experience with emerging technologies.
He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Biennale, Tribeca Film Festival, Barbican, Grand Palais, Mori Art Museum; presented at leading academic conferences such as NeurIPS and SIGGRAPH; and featured in major publications including Wired, Art in America, NY Times, and the Guardian.
Katie Hofstadter | Media Arts | Berkeley, CA
Katie Hofstadter is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work investigates the complex relationships between embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. Through her diverse practice, she explores the dynamics between knowing and feeling, and examines how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, shape both cultural narratives and direct experience.
Her work is exhibited internationally at galleries, museums, festivals, and public institutions, including Gray Area, Tribeca Film Festival, British Film Festival, Outernet London x Gazelli Art House, Xtopia Immersive, the Digital Body Festival, Taikang Art Museum, Jacob’s Pillow, Venice Biennale and Whitney Artport.
She has exhibited internationally and co-founded several international art campaigns, including the ARORA network, bringing together over 70 artists creating new AR monuments to diverse female and gender-expansive voices in public spaces; and the Climate Clock NYC, a monument to planetary time and global call to #actintime on the climate crisis.
She is co-director of Superradiance Center for Entangled Intelligence & Planetary Consciousness, an interdisciplinary research lab investigating the nature of intelligence, consciousness and planetary systems through research-based art that bridges embodied experience with emerging technologies.
Her art and public projects have been covered by major media outlets, including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Her essays and interviews appear in leading publications including Flash Art, The Believer, BOMB, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Lina Bondarenko | Choreography | San Francisco, CA
Lina Bondarenko is an artist, dancer, architect, and educator from Kyiv, Ukraine and San Francisco, California researching how sloped landscapes altered by urban infrastructures choreograph movement. Her practice produces site-specific participatory happenings, narrative performances, and interactive installations to embody decolonial ecological histories.
She developed Social Sensory Somatic Scores for Species, Spaces, Soils, and Structures of Steep Slopes (2025), a workshop series supported by MIT SA+P for experimental proprioception in Boston’s hill parks, and Steep Urbanists, a series of mobile dance tours through San Francisco’s public staircases, presented with the AIA National Conference (2023) and Architecture and the City Festival (2022). She has performed solo slope choreography as an artist-in-residence at Trastad, Norway (2025) and for a winter solstice ritual in San Francisco (2025).
Lina presented research on ecocide in Ukrainian soils at the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale (2024) and the 4S Society for Social Studies of Science Conference (Netherlands, 2025). She exhibited Ukrainian ceramic talismans and grew sunflowers in black earth for SF Design Week, LA Design Weekend, and the MIT List Art Center (2024). She directed and edited Infrastructures of Invisibility (2025), a video exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Lina was a fellow-in-residence at Strelka Institute’s The New Normal (2017) and the AA Visiting School at Salmon Creek Farm (2022). She practiced architecture with BIG, REX, and Red Dot Studio, urban planning with Ideo and Gehl, and taught design at MIT and Ruth Asawa School of the Arts High School, San Francisco. She holds an MS from MIT SA+P (2025) and a BArch from Syracuse University (2012).
Nina Elder | Visual Arts | Gardener, CO
Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on, and interruption of, the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. Because Nina is devoted to rural communities and often overlooked places, she regularly works outside of urban cultural centers and the commercial art world. Nina lectures as a visiting artist/scholar at universities, develops publicly engaged programs, and consults with organizations that seek to grow through interdisciplinary programming.
Recent solo exhibitions of Nina’s art have been organized by SITE Santa Fe, Indianapolis Contemporary, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and university museums across the US. Her work has been featured in Art in America, VICE Magazine, Hyperallergic, and on PBS. Her writing has been published by Routledge Press, American Scientist, Edge Effects Journal, and Dark Mountain. Nina’s research has been supported by the Warhol Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. When she is not traveling for research, exhibitions, and teaching, Nina lives off the grid in Colorado.
Sungjae Lee | Visual Arts | Chicago, IL
Sungjae Lee (he/they; Chicago, IL) is a visual artist, educator, writer, and dancer whose practice centers around the visibility and varied representations of queer Asians. He has presented his works globally in South Korea, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. He has had residencies at ACRE, High Concept Labs, HATCH Projects, Fire Island, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Arts, and Yaddo. He was selected for 2025 Queer | Art | Mentorship, the 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards Finalist, 2022-2023 Kala Art Institute Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund 2021-22, and the 2020 AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship. Lately, he has been collaborating with fellow queer BIPOC artists and presenting collective performance works at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (NYC), Co-Prosperity (Chicago), OUTsider Festival (Austin), and Human Resources (LA). He received his B.F.A. in Sculpture from Seoul National University and M.F.A. in Performance Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Christine Marie | Media Arts | San Francisco, CA
Christine Marie is an interdisciplinary media artist creating large-scale light installations and expanded cinema performances. Her work reflects on industrialization, oppositional forces, and the media’s gaze, weaving sensory narratives that explore the role of the feminine in sustaining integrity, beauty, and the preservation of the natural world. She bridges antiquated forms with contemporary AR/VR/XR and film technologies, investigating how early media continues to inform and shape our digital future.
Marie is a pioneer in live stereoscopic performance, using her original stereoscopes to cast 40-foot 3D anaglyph shadows, a technique she calls Antiquated AR. She has studied and assisted in traditional wayang kulit shadow theater from Indonesia, which roots her work in longstanding cultural histories of projection and performance.
A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts’ Experimental Theater and Integrated Media master’s programs, Marie is also a TED Fellow. Her projects have been commissioned and presented by Sundance New Frontier, YBCA, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, REDCAT, and the Exploratorium, among others.
She has worked as a shadow consultant and collaborator supporting projects by The Residents, Jordan Wolfson, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Pee-wee Herman. Based in San Francisco and Buffalo, Christine Marie is a Professor of Media Study.
Anna Madeleine Raupach | Media Arts/Sculpture | Canberra, Australia
Anna Madeleine Raupach is a multidisciplinary artist based on Ngunnawal/Ngambri land, Australia, and a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art & Design. Through multimedia installations and mixed media artworks, her practice engages with science and technology to critically address socio-political issues enmeshed with climate change. Her current focus is on the cultural, ethical and scientific implications of orbital satellite networks.
Anna has a PhD in Media Arts from the University of New South Wales Art & Design (2014), a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from ANU School of Art & Design (2007). In 2024 she undertook a Fulbright Scholarship in Expanded Animation at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her research has developed through an Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) Synapse Residency with Mount Stromlo Observatory (2022); a Research Fellowship at the Powerhouse Museum (2019); a Cité Internationale des Arts Studio Residency through the Art Gallery of NSW (2018); and an Asialink Arts Residency with Common Room Network Foundation, Indonesia (2017).
Her recent works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Goulburn Regional Art Gallery; in group shows at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, QUT Art Museum and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre; and in international festivals at the Bandung Photography Triennale, Indonesia, and the ANAT Spectra Triennale, Australia.
Harpreet Sareen | Media Arts | New York, NY
Harpreet Sareen is an Associate Professor of Interaction and Media Design at Parsons School of Design, The New School (New York), where he directs the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab. He has held visiting professorships internationally at several institutions and most recently is a Visiting Associate Professor at MIT. Sareen earned graduate degrees from MIT Media Lab and The University of Tokyo. His research explores post-anthropocentric design, developing hybrid technologies that integrate living organisms with digital systems to reimagine human-nature relationships.
Sareen has lived and worked across six countries including Austria, India, Japan, France, Singapore, and the USA, with experience spanning Google Creative Lab, Microsoft Research, MIT Media Lab, Ars Electronica Museum, National University of Singapore, Keio University, Telecom Paris, and The University of Tokyo. previously a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (Los Angeles) and INK Fellow (India). His projects include Elowan, a plant-robot hybrid that autonomously moves toward light, and BubbleTex, which uses carbonation bubbles as an interactive medium. This work has earned prestigious awards including CHI Golden Mouse, Edison Gold, SXSW Interactive Innovation, MIT Technology Review Under 35 Innovator, and Fast Company World Changing Ideas.
His research has been published at premier venues like CHI, SIGGRAPH, and DIS, and exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica Festival, Somerset House, CID Grand Hornu, and MIT Museum. Sareen serves as advisor to venture-backed startups and has been consulted by government offices including the Abu Dhabi Executive Office. He regularly lectures at universities and innovation centers worldwide and has been invited to TEDx and INK Talks.
Saul Villegas | Media Arts | Hanford, CA
Saul Villegas is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work bridges scientific taxonomies, digital media, and speculative storytelling. As Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience (CCCR) and the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) at UC Santa Cruz, he develops immersive “living archives” that translate environmental research into multi-modal installations, photography, video, and interactive environments. His practice examines perception, optics, and memory as tools for reimagining how art can embody scientific knowledge and lived experience.
Born and raised in Avenal, California, Saul divides his time between Santa Cruz and the Central Valley. He is a Lecturer in the Art & Art History Department at San José State University, where he is part of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media. Through his teaching, he mentors students in 4D visual art practices—including digital video, animation, and experimental media—encouraging interdisciplinary approaches that merge technological fluency with critical and environmental awareness.
Lisa Walker | Music Composition | BC, Canada
Lisa Walker is a whale researcher and composer whose work explores radically different forms of intelligence. She is the host and producer of the video podcast Whales & Aliens and the composer of album Beyond Human: Songs Between Species.
For more than two decades, Walker has studied humpback whale song, one of the most complex non-human communication systems in the natural world. Intrigued by their evolving patterns, Walker explores the underlying logic of their compositions, examining the foundational architecture that allows a song to remain coherent while under constant pressure to change.
Her research extends naturally into SETI, where the central challenge is not decoding messages, but recognizing intelligence at all. Humpback whales offer a wonderful example of advanced non-human intelligence that does not share human culture, environment, or language. Studying how whales communicate provides practical insight into what intelligent signals might look like beyond Earth.
Building on this foundation, Walker’s METI-focused work explores how signal patterns can be constructed to travel across vast distances and endure deep time while carrying information and clear markers of intelligence. Her work proposes a communication framework based on shared mathematical structures found in both human music and humpback song, forming the basis of her Universal Communication Protocol.