• Amy Youngs, Ohio State University, USA
• Annick Bureaud, Leonardo/OLATS, FR
• Catarina Pombo Nabais, CFCUL, PT
• Charissa N. Terranova, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
• Cosima Herter, writer and science consultant, CA
• Dalila Honorato, Ionian University, PT/GR
• Dolores Steinman, University of Toronto, CA
• Hege Tapio, i/o/lab, NO
• Isabel Burr-Raty, Artist, CH/BE
• Jenifer Wightman, The New School – Parsons School of Design, USA
• Jennifer Willet, University of Windsor, CA
• Joan Linder, University of Buffalo, USA
• Kathy High, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – Troy, USA
• Kira O’Reilly, University of the Arts Hensinki, IE/FI
• Laura Beloff, IT University of Copenhagen, FI/DK
• Lena Ortega, UNAM, MX
• Louise Mackenzie, Baltic & Northumbria University, UK
• María Antonia González Valerio, UNAM, MX
• Maria Manuela Lopes, Instituto de Ciências Educativas do Douro, PT
• Maria Teresa Cruz, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, PT
• Marie Pier Boucher, MIT, CA/USA
• Marta de Menezes, Cultivamos Cultura, PT
• Mary Maggic, Artist, USA/AT
• Minerva Hernandez, Bioscénica, MX
• Mónica Mendes, Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, PT
• Monika Bakke, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, PL
• Nina Czegledy, University of Toronto, CA
• Nina Sellars, Artist, AU
• Polona Tratnik, AME – ISH, SI
• Regine Rapp, Art Laboratory Berlin, DE
• Roberta Buiani, York University, CA
• Sarah Blissett, University of Roehanpton, UK
• Shannon Bell, York University, CA
• Tagny Duff, Concordia University, CA
• Tarsh Bates, University Western Australia, AU
• Victoria Vesna, UCLA, USA

Amy Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures, and digital media works that explore relationships between technology and our changing concept of nature and self. Research interests include: interactions with plants and animals, technological nature follies, constructed ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines. Youngs has exhibited her works nationally and internationally at venues such as the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre in Norway, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. She has lectured widely at venues such as the Australian Center For the Moving Image in Australia and the Walker Art Center. She has published articles in Leonardo and Antennae and her work was profiled in the book, Art in Action, Nature, Creativity & our Collective Future. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at The Ohio State University, where she teaches media arts and eco arts courses.

Annick Bureaud is a Paris-based art critic (collaborator to the French contemporary art magazine Art Press) and curator in art-science and technology. She is the director of Leonardo/Olats (www.olats.org), the French/European sister organisation to Leonardo/ISAST (www.leonardo.info). She wrote numerous articles and co-edited the ebooks Water is in the Air: Physics, Politics and Poetics of Water in the Arts, Leonardo/ISAST, MIT Press, 2014 and Meta-Life. Biotechnologies, Synthetic Biology, ALife and the Arts, Leonardo/ISAST, MIT Press, 2014. She organised many symposia, conferences and workshops among which Artmedia VIII: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art, Paris, 2002 and Visibility – Legibility of Space Art. Art and Zero Gravity: The Experience of Parabolic Flight, Paris, 2003. In 2009, she co-curated the exhibition (Un)Inhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments, Festival @rt Outsiders, MEP/European House of Photography, Paris. In 2012, she was the curator of the work Tales of a Sea Cow by Etienne de France at the PAV in Torino, Italy. www.annickbureaud.net

Catarina Pombo Nabais was born in Lisbon in 1976. Degree in Philosophy from the Classic University of Lisbon Faculty of Arts (1998), obtained the  Diplôme d’Études Approfondies in philosophy at Université d’Amiens, France (1999) and completed his PhD in Philosophy Université Paris VIII, under the guidance of the philosopher Jacques Rancière (2007) have obtained the maximum degree for a PhD thesis in France. In 2013, he published his first book, entitled  Gilles Deleuze: Philosophie et Littérature, the publisher  L’Harmattan, Paris. It scholarship Post-Doc at the FCT Center of Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon (CFCUL) that is integrated member since 2006. From 2007 to 2014 was head of the research group “Science and Art”. It is currently head of the subject line Sci Art Philo-LAB.

Charissa N. Terranova is a writer and educator. Terranova researches complex biological systems from a cultural purview, focusing on the history of evolutionary theory, biology, and biocentrism in art, architecture, and design. She is author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and coeditor with Meredith Tromble of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016).Terranova is currently coediting with Ellen K. Levy D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press, 2019, and writing a monograph titled Biology in the British Bauhaus: Morphogenic Modernism in Art, Science, and Design. Associate Professor of Aesthetic Studies, she lectures and teaches seminars at the University of Texas at Dallas on modern and contemporary art and architectural history and theory, the history of biology in art and architecture, and media and new media art and theory. www.charissanterranova.com

Cosima Herter is a science consultant who specializes in the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine. She is known for her science and story consulting on the award-winning BBC America sci-fi television series Orphan Black.

Dolores Steinman was trained as a Paediatrician and, upon relocating to Canada, obtained her PhD in Cell Biology. Currently she is a Research Associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto and a volunteer Docent at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In her research she observes the rapport and the connection between medical imagery and its non-scientific counterparts. Her pursuit is driven by her keen interest in placing the ever increasingly technology-based medical research in the larger context of the humanities.

Dalila Honorato, Ph.D, is a facilitator of safe spaces for hosting the interaction of ideas around liminal issues in the frame of Art&Sci. Her research focus is on embodiment, monstrosity, the uncanny and the acrobatic balance between phobia and paraphilia. She is Assistant Professor in Media Aesthetics and Semiotics at the Ionian University, Greece, guest faculty at Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, collaborator at the Center of Philosophy of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal and member of the Steering Committee of the conference “Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science”. http://ionio.academia.edu/DalilaHonorato

Hege Tapio is based in Stavanger, the oil capital of Norway. During her artistic and curatorial practice she has for a long time pursued her interest in the intersection of art, technology and science. With a kitchen bench DIY attitude and through artistic practice she has been inspired to how apparatuses, new technology and life science opens to renewed interpretation, creative misuse and critical thinking. She is the founder and director of of i/o/lab – Centre for Future Art since 2001, where she has established and curated Article biennial – a festival for the electronic and unstable art. Her work has been exhibited and presented in Greece, China , Latvia, Denmark, England and several places in Norway, along with public commissions and several curatorial projects. http://tapio.no

Isabel Burr-Raty is a Belgian-Chilean independent filmmaker and performance artist based in Brussels since 2013. She is interested in the ontological crack between the native and the engineered, between the un-licensed knowledge of the resettled, the relocated, and the official facts. ​Her ethnographic and experiential approach brings her to explore and embody the inner topography of isolated landscapes in the planet, in the human body and in the scientific lab, in order to develop hybrid bio-artistic-narratives that: dig up chapters left out of history books, blur the limits between fiction and reality and speculate about the memory of the future. ​​In her film work Isabel embodies human Cosmo-visions that are in eco-survival resistance, bringing the imaginative realisms of the camouflaged and their subversive sense of chronology into the screen. ​​In her performance work she is researching on the operational supra-sensitive principles of totemic anthropomorphism from the lens of bioengineering, combining new media and new materials to create sculptures and lectures that play with synthetic magic and propose bio-autonomy practices.

Trained as a Toxicologist, Jenifer Wightman is a research scientist specializing in greenhouse gas inventories and life cycle analysis of agriculture, forestry, waste, and bioenergy systems at Cornell University, funded by DoE, USDA, NYS DA&M, and NYSERDA. Her art practice began in 2002 and employs scientific tropes to incite curiosity of biological phenomena and inform an ecological rationality. Her art has been commissioned by NYC parks, featured at the Lincoln Center, BAM, and Imagine Science Festival, and is held in collections such as the Morgan Library, Library of Congress, Gutenberg Museum, Bodmer Museum, and the Danish Royal Library.

Jennifer Willet, Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts at The University of Windsor (Canada) is an internationally successful artist and curator in the emerging field of bioart. Her work resides at the intersection of art and science, and explores notions of representation, the body, ecologies, and interspecies interrelations in the biotechnological field. In 2009 she opened a bioart research and teaching lab INCUBATOR: Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Ecology, the first biological art lab in Canada. In 2018, Willet and INCUBATOR Lab launched a state-of-the-art BSL2 theatre/laboratory facility where audiences can view live multimedia bioartperformances through a glass wall.

www.jenniferwillet.com  / www.incubatorartlab.com

Joan Linder. Known for drawings packed with thousands, even hundreds of thousands of tiny, energized marks, Linder’s large-scale images of quotidian subjects find inspiration from her immediate surroundings. Her most recent project, Operation Sunshine, explores the toxic chemical and radioactive waste sites on Buffalo / Niagara Falls. The work was exhibited in solo exhibitions at Mixed Greens Gallery, NY; the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, The Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, IA. Other past notable exhibitions venues include Kunstahallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark; the Aldrich Museum, the Gwanjgu Art Museum, the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She has received residency fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, Villa Montalvo, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. Linder is Chair and Associate Professor of Drawing in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo SUNY and is co-curating an exhibition Hot Spots: Radioactivity in the Landscape, opening at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in September 2018. https://www.joanlinder.com

Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist, educator working with technology, art and biology. She collaborates with scientists and other artists, produces videos, performances and installations and considers living systems, empathy, animal sentience, and the social, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. She has received awards including Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her artworks have been shown at documenta 13 (Germany), Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center and Exit Art (NYC), UCLA (Los Angeles), Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Esther Klein Gallery (Philadelphia) and Para-site (Hong Kong). High is Professor in the Arts, and has a lab in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. She hosts bio/ecology+art workshops and is creating an urban nature center in North Troy (NATURE Lab) with community media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media. She is an ongoing Vivo Art artist in resident with the Center for Microbiome Sciences & Therapeutic, DePaolo Lab, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle. www.kathyhigh.com

Kira O’Reilly is a London based artist; her practice, both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, stems from a visual art background; it employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing with which to consider speculative reconfigurations around The Body. But she is no longer sure if she even does that anymore. Since graduating from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in 1998 her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK, Europe, Australia, China and Mexico. She has presented at conferences and symposia on both live art and science, art and technology interfaces. She has been a visiting lecturer in the UK and Australia and U.S.A in visual art, drama and dance. Most recent new works have seen her practice develop across several contexts from art, science and technology to performance, live art and movement work.

Laura Beloff  is an internationally acclaimed artist and researcher who has been actively producing art works and exhibiting worldwide in museums, galleries and art events since the early 1990’s. She has been a recipient of various grants, art residencies and awards. In 2014 she received with partners the largest art grant within Nordic countries from the Nordic Cultural Fund. Her artistic and research interests include practice-based investigations into a combination of information, technology and organic matter, which is located in the cross section of art, technology and science. The research engages with the fields of: art & science, biotechnologies, biosemiotics, and information technology in connection to art, humans and society. The outcome of the research and artistic practice is in a form of process-based and participatory installations, programmed conceptual structures and networked wearable objects, additionally to publications and papers. Additionally to her work as an artist she has worked in academic positions as a Professor in Oslo, Norway, Visiting Professor in Wien, Austria and currently as Associate Professor and Head of PhD School in Copenhagen, Denmark. http://www.realitydisfunction.org/

Lena Ortega. Artist, researcher and designer based in Mexico City whose main line of research are the concepts of atmosphere and embodied experience. The exploration of such notions has led her to experiment through various types of media that range from immersive installations to sound and light art. Member of the Art+Science interdisciplinary research group based in the UNAM with inter national projection. She holds a Masters in Visual Arts from the UNAM and a specialization in Media and Design for Printing from SFSU. She has been part of the official selection and honorable mention of animation and video contests and has taught at the Faculty of Arts and Design of the UNAM and recently at La Salle University. Currently finishing a PhD in Art History at the UNAM and venturing into sound art exploring the intersections between culture and nature. www.leenalee.net

Louise Mackenzie is an artist and researcher, recently completing a PhD in fine art at Northumbria University, an Associate of the Institute of Genetic Medicine, Newcastle University and  a member of the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group. Louise explores notions of human drive, progress, production and waste. Drawn towards the mechanisms upon which consumer-led society is founded, elements of her work focus on technical processes and, increasingly, biotechnology. Her current research investigates the use of life as material, specifically, the insertion of synthetic DNA into living organisms and the emotional weight of working with life in the laboratory. Louise was a finalist in the Bio Art & Design Awards 2015 and recipient of the New Graduate Award at Synthesis, Manchester Science Festival, 2013. She has spoken at Transimage Edinburgh, Leonardo LASER London, ISEA2016 Hong Kong, Bodily Matters, UCL London, and Sonic Environments, Brisbane. Her artworks have been exhibited at the National Library of Spain (Madrid), Lumiere (Durham), Summerhall (Edinburgh), BALTIC39 (Newcastle), Bond House (London), Basement 6 Collective (Shanghai) and National Taiwan University of the Arts (Taiwan). www.loumackenzie.com 

María Antonia González Valerio. PhD in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with postdoctoral studies in the area of aesthetics. Full-time professor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and of the postgraduate programs in Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Art History and Fine Arts UNAM. She works within the research line of ontology-aesthetics and the interdisciplinary line of arts, sciences and humanities, specifically in the field of art that uses bio-media. Head of the research group Arte+Ciencia (Art+Science) which gathers artists, scholars and scientists in an interdisciplinary work that produces education at an under and postgraduate level, specialized theoretical research, artistic creation and exhibitions. www.magonzalezvalerio.com

Maria Manuela Lopes is a visual artist and researcher based in Portugal and the UK. Her current practice is transdisciplinar and based on issues of memory and self-identity informed by life sciences and medical research and presented in the form of time-based installations, occasionally including biological materials. She has been working and showing nationally and internationally and also teaching fine arts in Portugal since 1998. She has studied fine arts – sculpture at the FBAUP-Porto, Portugal and did an MA at Goldsmiths College in London. She is presently doing a practice based research degree at UCA Farnham, UK, working with representational strategies of Alzheimer’s disease in a neuroscience laboratory at Hospital Santa Maria and Molecular Medicine Institute in Lisbon.Maria is also assistant-Director of two residency programs: 1) ‘artists in Labs’ Ectopia – Lisbon, and 2) Cultivamos Cultura, an ecological oriented residency program in a farm in Alentejo. She has concurrently been presenting her work internationally at conferences and also publishing.

Maria Teresa Cruz teaches at the Communication Sciences Department, in Social and Human Sciences Faculty of the New University of Lisbon (UNL) in the fields of Image Theory, Media Aesthetics and Media Art Theory. She is the director of the Research Center on Communication and Language, where she also coordinated the research line on «Art and Communication» (2007-2012) and created the Journal Interact – Art, Culture and Technique (www.interact.com). Her research interests focus upon cultural techniques, as well as contemporary art and post-media aesthetics.

Marie-Pier Boucher’s work brings concerns with globalization, aesthetics, and politics to bear on the study of interplanetary habitation, environmental degradation, biotechnology, global health and architectural and urban infrastructures. Her specific focus is design for extreme environments such as outer space. Collaborator on Adaptive Actions, she co-edited Heteropolis (2013) and Adaptive Actions (Madrid) (2010) an participated in collective exhibitions (Tokyo Wonder Site (TWS), Japan, 2015; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, 2010; Biennale Madrid Abierto, Spain, 2010). Her research residencies include: Johnson Space Center, NASA, Houston, USA (2014); Banff Center for the Arts, Canada (2011); Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany (2010) and; SymbioticA, Western Australia (2006). She holds a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies from Duke University (2015) and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) + Program in Science, Technology and Society (2017-2019).

Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist with a degree in Fine Arts by the University in Lisbon, a MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture by the University of Oxford, and a PhD candidate at the University of Leiden.She has been exploring the intersection between Art and Biology, working in research laboratories demonstrating that new biological technologies can be used as new art medium. In 1999 de Menezes created her first biological artwork (Nature?) by modifying the wing patterns of live butterflies. Since then, she has used diverse biological techniques including functional MRI of the brain to create portraits where the mind can be visualised (Functional Portraits, 2002); fluorescent DNA probes to create micro-sculptures in human cell nuclei (nucleArt, 2002); sculptures made of proteins (Proteic Portrait, 2002-2007), DNA (Innercloud, 2003; The Family, 2004) or incorporating live neurons (Tree of Knowledge, 2005) or bacteria (Decon, 2007). Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, articles and lectures. She is currently the artistic director of Ectopia, an experimental art laboratory in Lisbon, and Director of Cultivamos Cultura in the South of Portugal. http://martademenezes.com

Mary Maggic is a non-binary artist working at the intersection of biotechnology, cultural discourse, and civil disobedience. Their work spans documentary video, scientific methodology, public workshopology, performance, and large scale installation. Maggic’s most recent projects Open Source Estrogen and Estrofem! Labgenerate DIY protocols for the extraction and detection of estrogen hormone from bodies and environments, demonstrating its micro-performativity and potential for mutagenesis, i.e. gender-hacking. They hold a BSA in Biological Science and Art from Carnegie Mellon University and a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab and have had the privilege to exhibit and/or perform at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), OK Center (Linz), Haus der elektronischen Kunst (Basel), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and Spring Workshop (Hong Kong).

Minerva Hernandez. Transdisciplinary artist. Her work revolves around collective memory, the relationship between body, technology, science, poetry and vitality. She studied Photography and Cinematography in Brussels, Belgium. She is an honorary member of the National System of Creators since 2010 and is part of the Art and Science research and creation group of the UNAM. She currently directs the transdisciplinary Bioscénica company, dedicated to creating, developing and producing proposals that combine arts, sciences and technology. http://bioscenica.mx

 

 

 

Mónica Mendes is a digital media artist, designer and professor at the University of Lisbon. She is currently coordinating the Multimedia Art PhD and collaborating in the Sustainability Sciences PhD of the University of Lisbon. She is also a researcher at LarSys / Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI), collaborator at Fine Arts Research Center (CIEBA) and a member of Food, Farming and Forestry College (F3). Additionally, she co-founded altLab, a hackerspace dedicated to independent experimentation in alternative media, and the Creative Coding Circle, an informal collective focused on creative programming. Interested in designing for a more sustainable world, Mónica created the ARTiVIS project, exploring real-time interactive systems at the intersection of Art, Science and Technology. The research has been carried out with multidisciplinary collaborations from research institutions, hackerspaces and local populations, and has taken place in community, culture and art events such as art residencies, meetings and workshops, conferences and exhibitions. Mónica holds a PhD in Digital Media (UT Austin-Portugal Program), a Master in Multimedia Educational Communication (Universidade Aberta) and a degree in Communication Design (Faculdade de Belas-Artes). http://monicamendes.info

Monika Bakke is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. She writes on contemporary art and aesthetics with a particular interest in posthumanist, transspecies and gender perspectives. She is the author of Bio-transfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010, in Polish) and Open Body (2000, in Polish) co-author of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics (2004, in Polish), Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006) and The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011). From 2001 till 2017 she was working as an editor of a Polish cultural journal Czas Kultury [Time of Culture].

Nina Czegledy, artist, curator, educator, works internationally on collaborative art & science & technology projects. The changing perception of the human body and its environment as well as the paradigm shifts in the arts informs her collaborative projects. She has exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork and has initiated, researched, lead and participated in forums and symposia worldwide.

Nina Sellars is a visual artist and researcher who works across the disciplines of art, science and humanities. Her practice is focused on the way anatomy shapes our understanding of the body, identity and subjectivity. Sellars’ interest in anatomy has taken her from working in classical art studios and wet anatomy labs to working in physics labs and medical imaging facilities – here she critically engages with the cultural implications of anatomy. Essentially, her research questions how concepts of anatomy appear meaningful to us in the 21st century – an era defined by discourses of the posthuman. Sellars’ artwork has been exhibited widely, including most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia – New Romance: Art and the Posthuman (2016); ArtScience Museum, Singapore – Human+: The Future of Our Species (2017); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art – HyperPrometheus (forthcoming, 2018). In 2017, Sellars was artist in residence at SymbioticA, biological arts laboratory, The University of Western Australia, to further her research on human adipose tissue (aka fat), assisted by funding from the Australia Council. Previously, Sellars was a Research Fellow at the Alternate Anatomies Lab, an arts and robotics lab directed by the performace artist, Stelarc, at Curtin University, Perth, WA (2014 – 2016).

www.ninasellars.com

Polona Tratnik, Ph.D., is Dean of Alma Mater Europaea – Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Faculty and Research Institute for Humanities, Ljubljana, where she is a Professor and Head of Research as well. She also teaches courses at the Faculty for Media and Communication at Singidunum University in Serbia, at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana, at the Faculty of Education of the University of Maribor and at the Faculty for Design of the University of Primorska. She used to be the Head of the Department for Cultural Studies at the Faculty for Humanities of the University of Primorska. In 2012 she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar, as well as a Guest Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. She was a Guest Professor also at the Capital Normal University Bejing (China), at the Faculty for Art and Design Helsinki TAIK (Finland), and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México(Mexico City). She is president of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics (since 2011) and an Executive Committee Member of the International Association of Aesthetics. She has authored seven monographs and one proceeding as single author, including the Hacer-vivir más allá del cuerpo y del medio(Mexico City: Herder, 2013), Art as Intervention(Sophia, 2017) and Conquest of Body. Biopower with Biotechnology(Springer, 2017). Polona Tratnik is a pioneer bio artist exhibiting worldwide at shows such as Ars Electronica festival and BEAP festival in Perth.

http://www.polona-tratnik.si

Regine Rapp is an art theoretician and curator. Her specific fields of research for 20th and 21st century art are installation art, image text theory, artist books, and art & science collaborations. She worked as Assistant Professor for Art History at the Burg Giebichenstein Art Academy Halle until Autumn 2013. She is co-director of Art Laboratory Berlin, which she co-founded in 2006. Regine curated over 30 exhibitions (exhibition series on Time and Technology, Synaesthesia and macro/microbiologies) and has published several books. Concurrent to the exhibition Sol LeWitt. Artist’s Books in 2011 she conceived and realised the international Sol LeWitt_Symposium at Art Laboratory Berlin. Together with Christian de Lutz she developed the international transdisciplinary conference Synaesthesia. Discussing a Phenomenon in the Arts, Humanities and (Neuro-)Science, 2013 at Art Laboratory Berlin. Her publication [macro]biologies & [micro]biologies. Art and the Biological Sublime in the 21st Century reflects theoretically Art Laboratory Berlin’s last series from 2014-15. In 2016-17 together with Christian de Lutz she conceived the series Nonhuman Agents with exhibition, workshops, performances, and an international interdisciplinary conference (Nov 2017), which is now published online.

http://www.artlabotatory-berlin.org

Roberta Buiani is an interdisciplinary artist, media scholar and curator based in Toronto. She is the co-founder of the ArtSci Salon at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Toronto) and a co-organizer of LASER Toronto. Her research-creation work is mobile, itinerant and collaborative, exploring how scientific and technological mechanisms translate and transform the natural and human world, and what happens when they are taken outside of their traditional context and relocated through artistic and cartographic practices. Her work was exhibited in Toronto at the Ryerson University Faculty of Architecture and Artscape Youngspace; and was featured at Transmediale, the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Immigrant Movement International (Queens), and RPI among other. Recently, she has launched a series of curatorial experiments in “squatting academia”, aiming at repopulating abandoned spaces inside the university with collaborative works in art and science and at filling formal spaces of research with site-specific installations and performances. She teaches communication and cultural studies at York University. http://atomarborea.net

Sarah Blissett is an artist, writer and dramaturg, currently studying for a PhD in Performance Studies at the University of Roehampton. She holds a BA from the University of Cambridge and an MA from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Her research explores Food and Ecology in Performance, through an investigation into algae organisms and ecosystems as ‘active ingredients’ in planetary ecology. Ecological and philosophical issues of multispecies entanglement and trans-corporeal relations are core to this food-based practice, where material/semiotic subjects are digested in a variety of ways. Her work considers the implications of these ideas through performance studies research, which draws on Poetic Biopolitics, Ecomaterialism and Posthuman Feminism.

Shannon Bell, a Canadian performance philosopher who lives and writes philosophy-in-action, is a Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her books include: Fast Feminism (2010), Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (1994), Whore Carnival (1995), Bad Attitude/s on Trial co-authored (1997, republished 2017), The Book of Radical General Semantics co-edited (2016), Subversive Itinerary: The Thought of Gad Horowitz, co-edited (2013) and New Socialisms co-edited (2004). Bell is currently working on shooting theory ––video-imaging philosophical concept such as Heidegger’s ‘stillness’, Husserl’s ‘epoché’, Batialle’s ‘waste’ and ‘expenditure’, Weil’s ‘attention’, Deleuze’s ‘deterritorialization’, Virilio’s ‘vision machine’ and ‘accident’ and Levinas’ ‘elemental’.

http://www.yorku.ca/shanbell/    https://vimeo.com/user1866723

Tagny Duff is an artist and scholar working across media art and microbiology, with a particular interest in microbial interaction and scientific practices from a cultural point of view. Duff has exhibited biological art works nationally and internationally in venues such the Science Gallery in Ireland (2011) and Espace Multimedia Gatner, France (2015).  She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on the overlap between art and science methodologies and approaches including the recent publication “Mangling Methods Across Performance Research, Biological Arts and Life Sciences” published by Media-N Journal of the New Media Caucus. Duff is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and since 2009 is the director/founder of Fluxmedia, a network for researchers engaging in collaboration across art and the life sciences and Speculative Life Lab at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University. https://tagnyduff.com 

http://www.fluxnetwork.net / https://speculativelifebiolab.com / https://tagnyduff.blog/

Tarsh Bates is an artist/researcher interested in the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a multispecies ecology. She has worked variously as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, a toilet paper packer, a researcher in compost science and waste management, a honeybee ejaculator, an art gallery invigilator, a raspberry picker, a lecturer/ tutor in art/science, fantasy, art history and gender & technology, an editor, a bookkeeper, a car detailer and a life drawing model. Tarsh is a postdoctoral research associate at SymbioticA, UWA, supported by The Seed Box, an international environmental humanities collaboration based at Linköping University in Sweden and funded by Mistra and Formas. She is particularly enamoured with Candida albicans. http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au

Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts (North campus) and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) (South campus). Although she was trained early on as a painter (Faculty of Fine arts, University of Belgrade, 1984), her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, CAiiA_STAR, University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students. Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Societyjournal (Springer Verlag, UK) and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minnesota Press) and another in 2011 — Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy) Intellect Ltd, 2011. Currently she is working on a series Art Science & Technology based on her online lecture class. http://victoriavesna.com