EPISODE 1

Aziz al-Turi, a Bedouin activist, is a resident of the village of al-Araqib in the Naqab desert, Israel where he was also born. Aziz is a member of the village committee and has been the leading coordinator of the villages resistance activity against state led displacement in Israel and abroad.

Noit Banai Arthistorian and critic, Noit Banai, is Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna; Her book on Yves Klein was published in the ‘Critical Lives’ series by Reaktion in London in 2014 and she is currently at work on a book project titled “Imagining Europe between Nation State and Border State: Public Disorder and the Search for a Universal Subject,” which examines the aesthetic mediation of ‘Europe’ from the post-war years to the present.

Ariel Caine is an artist and researcher currently living in London where he is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University and a researcher at Forensic Architecture. Utilizing cutting-edge computational photographic and photogrammetric processes in combination with analogue archival media, Ariel’s artistic practice and conceptual research explores the co-constitutive relations of state, religious nationalism and imaging technologies, seeking to both expose and challenge the ways in which the photographic apparatus is embedded in the logic of the construction of physical reality. Ariel’s works have been exhibited and collected internationally. Ariel is a project coordinator and lead researcher for the Ground Truth Project.

Manu Luksch is an intermedia artist and filmmaker who interrogates conceptions of progress and scrutinizes the effects of network technologies on social relations, urban space, and political structures. Her works have ended up everywhere from street protests in Hong Kong and independence movements in the Golden Triangle, to the Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Core Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. As visiting fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, Open Society Fellow, Manu is currently developing new film works drawing attention to the insidious threat posed by the rise of quantified, algorithmically-managed societies.

Mukul composes music for leading artist filmmakers and contemporary dance companies. As former resident DJ at Anokha (Blue Note, London), birthplace of the sound of the Asian underground, and ambient.space, host of telematic and sonified data performances, he developed signature sets exploring narrativity and form, and spanning up to 12 hours. In his sound tapestries, Mukul explores the encoding and decoding of meaning especially in relation to space, language and mathematics. He holds degrees in mathematics at Imperial College, London, and Social & Political Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge, and is continuing student of Indian classical music.

Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His books include Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017), The Conflict Shoreline (with Fazal Sheikh, 2015), FORENSIS (with Anselm Franke, 2014), Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press, 2012), Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of All Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1, 2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide, and was a member of the B’Tselem board of directors. He lectured, curated and organized conferences in many institutions worldwide.

EPISODE 2

Laboria Cuboniks is a working group of six women based in five countries who met in Berlin during a philosophy workshop held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2014. The following year they collaboratively wrote a manifesto entitled Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. The text has since been translated into 8 languages with 2 more currently underway. In the years since its publishing, the original members have been working both collaboratively and independently to further develop the ideas and claims of the original text. The Future of Demonstration. Series 1: VERMÖGEN is one example of this collaborative elaboration.

Diann Bauer is an artist and writer based in London. She is part of the working group Laboria Cuboniks and the collaborative A.S.T. whose focus is Urbanism and climate change. Bauer has screened and exhibited internationally at Tate Britain and The Showroom, London; The Sharjah Biennale 13, UAE; Deste Foundation, Athens; The New Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. She has taught and lectured widely at universities and cultural institutions including: Cornell University, Yale University and Cooper Union (US), HKW (DE), Ashkal Alwan (LBN), Goldsmiths, The Baltic and the ICA (UK).

Katrina Burch is electronic music producer and xenofeminist composer Yoneda Lemma. She exhibits and collaborates internationally under different aliases. As Katrina Joosten, the archaeologist, she is training in Paleoanthropology, specializing in the implementation of digital techniques and creative computational method, for modelling Paleolithic technological evolution and the semiotics of sound amongst early hominins. She is studying for an MSc in Digital Archaeology at Leiden University, writing her thesis on the archaeoacoustics of the Upper Paleolithic, while completing an MMu in Sonology at the University of the Arts in The Hague, researching ultra-terrestrial feminist epistemologies for computer music composing.

Helen Hester is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the University of West London. Her research interests include technology, social reproduction, and the future of work, and she is a member of the international feminist working group Laboria Cuboniks. Her books include Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), and After Work: The Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2019, with Nick Srnicek).

Patricia Reed is an artist, writer and designer based in Berlin. Reed has exhibited internationally, with selected shows at The Museum of Capitalism, Oakland; Homeworks 7, Beirut; Witte de With, Rotterdam; HKW, Berlin; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. Recent writings have been published in e-flux Architecture; _AH Journal; Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic); Reinventing Horizons (Tranzitdisplay); and Moneylab (Inst. of Networked Cultures). She has lectured widely including those at Sandberg Institute (NL); Institute of Modern Art (AU); Strelka (RU); transmediale (DE); The New Museum (US); KM-Graz (AT); and Tate Britain (UK).

H.A.U.S. – Humanoid Robots in Architecture and Urban Spaces:

Clara Haider is a biomedical engineering student at the TU Wien. In early 2017, she was an intern at the university’s Automation and Control Institute (ACIN). Her resulting bachelor thesis focused on object tracking and inverse kinematics with the humanoid robot Pepper. Haider is a member of H.A.U.S. and took part in planning and implementing the performance The Robot is Present at the Ars Electronica Festival 2017. She continues as a scientific project assistant at the ACIN’s Vision for Robotics group.

Christoph Hubatschke is a political scientist and philosopher. He is a scientific researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he writes his PhD thesis on the role of new technologies in social movements. His doctoral research project is funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Currently, he is a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths University (London), funded through the Marietta-Blau-scholarship from the OEAD. He is founding member of the interdisciplinary research group H.A.U.S. His research interests include poststructuralist political theories, the politics and ethics of humanoid robots, theories of democracy, philosophy of technology, social movement studies, Deleuze-Studies, and Monster-Studies.

Christoph Müller is a researcher and lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology, The University of Art and Design Linz and the University of Innsbruck. He holds a doctorate with distinction in interactive robotic architecture (supervised by Manfred Berthold). The thesis focuses on artificially intelligent, movable robotic modules that assemble into an adaptive spatial-installation and explores swarm intelligence, self-assembly, robotic and human-robot interaction. His works have been shown at Innovation by Art Process in Montpellier and discussed at international conferences such as the Advanced Building Skins in Graz or the Rese Arch Meetups in Bratislava and Prague.

Oliver Schürer is a curator, editor and author as well as Senior Scientist and Deputy head at the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology. He has curated and produced several conferences, symposia and exhibitions as part of his research projects in Vienna, Berlin and London, and co-founded the Media Architecture Biennale. He did numerous research projects, guest lectures and international publications mainly on the cultural relations of technology and media in architecture. In 2015, he founded the transdisciplinary research group H.A.U.S. that fuses humanities, engineering and the arts for research on Humanoid robots in Architecture and Urban Spaces.

Christiana Tsiourti is a PhD-candidate at the Institute of Service Science of the University of Geneva and a member of the Doctoral School at the Swiss Center for Affective Science. She is a visiting researcher at the Vision4Robotics group at the ACIN Institute of Automation and Control at the Vienna University of Technology, supported by a Doc.Mobility Fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research is focused on the design and evaluation of affective socially intelligent agents (robots and avatars) that autonomously integrate into daily life environments and possess social skills, such as the automatic understanding of the user’s actions and emotional states, and the production of coherent emotional feedback.

Mark Coeckelbergh is Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna and part-time Professor of Technology and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, UK. Currently, he is the President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. His publications include Using Words and Things (2017); New Romantic Cyborgs (2017); Environmental Skill (2015); Human Being @ Risk (2013); Growing Moral Relations (2012) and numerous articles in the area of philosophy of technology, including topics such as language and technology, financial technologies, and machine creativity. He explores questions concerning technology through collaborations with artists and curators.

Janina Loh (née Sombetzki) is university assistant (Post-Doc) in the field of philosophy of technology and media at the University of Vienna. She studied at the Humboldt University Berlin and wrote her dissertation (2009-2013) on the issue of responsibility (Verantwortung als Begriff, Fähigkeit, Aufgabe. Eine Drei-Ebenen Analyse, Springer 2014). Currently, she writes an Introduction to Trans- and Posthumanism (Junius 2018) and an Introduction to Robot Ethics (Suhrkamp 2019). She is habilitating on The Posthumanist Elements in Hannah Arendt’s Thinking and Work (working title).

Michael Loizenbauer is a director and artist. He studied digital art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, directing at the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar and computer science and economics at the University of Vienna and Vienna Technical University. He has collaborated extensively with performers, dancers and musicians internationally and is a member of Liquid Loft Dance Company (Golden Lion, Venice Biennale). He acquired expert skills in TV real time-visualization and is a freelance camera operator. His interest in the faculties of people and societies span a wide range of subjects, such as systems in general, automation, communication, information, and economics.

Kristian Lukić is a curator, artist and researcher. He is a PhD fellow at the Knowledge Cultures group, Leuphana University, Germany, as well as the co-founder of the Institute for Flexible Cultures and Technologies (NAPON), Novi Sad (www.napon.org). He works at the intersection of art, technology and politics. In recent years, his research has focused on algorithmization in general, as well as the increase in occult research and ‘post-reality’ conditions. From 2010–2013, he ran the research project Autonomies, addressing machinic regimes in art and society. Recently, he participated in Share Lab’s Facebook research project.

Robert Trappl is the head of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), a non-for-profit independent research institute that has coordinated or partnered more than 30 EU-funded projects and is a partner in the Human Brain Project. He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Vienna, and lectures there, at the Vienna Medical University and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In his spare time, he performs contemporary dance. He published more than 180 scientific papers and co-wrote, edited and co-edited 35 books, most recently A Construction Manual for Robots’ Ethical Systems (Springer, 2015). He is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics and Systems.

Marlies Wirth is a curator and art historian with a background in contemporary art. Since 2006, she has been working at MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna where she was appointed curator in 2009 and Curator Digital Culture & Design Collection in 2017, and had a key role in programming the VIENNA BIENNALE 2017. Besides her institutional practice she develops independent exhibition projects with international artists, and writes essays and texts for artists and publications. She focuses on conceptual, site-specific, research-, and time-based art and a particular interest in the cultural-anthropological contexts of artistic production.

EPISODE 3

a.ACHAT is a Berlin-based fashion label that understands itself as a platform, rather than a clothing brand. It aims to establish an interface between contemporary art, fashion, food and music. Its projects are often based on collaborations with artists, illustrators and graphic designers. Costumes design and concept for Naurutica in collaboration with Malte Gruner.

Daniel Colucciello Barber is an expert on political and philosophical questions of negativity, fabulation and non-relational aesthetics, and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Pace University in New York. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God and On Diaspora. His current research critically addresses the logic, history, and politics of conversion.

Stefan Becker is a Cultural and Media Studies scholar, who studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar where he wrote his thesis on the cultural phenomenon of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. He is currently living in Erlangen, Germany. He teaches at the university of Nurnberg where he holds seminars on urban walking, space and knowledge production and reflection. En passant, he organizes festivals and exhibitions, and he travels.

Hannes Broecker is an artist and a chef. He was awarded the Hector Prize for Young Artists and appointed assistant professor for interdisciplinary painting at the Dresden Academy of Arts in 2012. Increasingly skeptical of painting, the former graffiti and Hip Hop-artist started cooking in kitchens around the world, e.g. for Relae and Amass in Copenhagen, or Nobelhart and Schmutzig in Berlin, where Broecker lives and is currently working.

Nikolaus Gansterer is an artist, performer, and researcher, who is interested in the relational field between drawing, thinking, and action. He maps ephemeral, emergent processes and their immanent connections, questioning the imaginary threshold between nature and culture, art and philosophy. He is co-founder of the Institute for Transacoustic Research and the sound collective The Vegetable Orchestra, and currently a guest professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

James Hoff is a New York based artist, who works mainly with sound and painting. He is also a poet and, as co-founder of Primary Information, a publisher of art-books. Musically, he is best-known for BLASTER, released by PAN in 2014. The album features sound files infected with computer viruses Hoff collected. His latest audiovisual project Hobo UFO combines the sounds of radio frequency signals with a cracked version of Google Street View maps of Pripyat, a city in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone.

Barbara Imhof is a space architect, design researcher, and educator. Her projects deal with spaceflight parameters such as living with limited resources, minimal and transformable spaces, resource-conserving systems, and the imperatives of sustainability. She is Executive Board member and on the board of directors for Women in Aerospace and has received, among other awards, a nomination for Austrian of the Year 2016.

Margarete Jahrmann is a researcher and artist who focuses on artistic research and the exploration of insight through playful mechanisms in the arts. She works on experimental systems in neuroscience, film, digital theatre and game design, and the development of a Ludic Method as an artistic research methodology. She is Professor of Game Design at the Zurich University of the Arts, and currently guest professor at the Zentrum Focus Forschung at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Marian Kaiser is a media theorist and author. He studied Cultural Studies, Literature, Philosophy, and South East Asian Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin, and is currently working on a book entitled Madness, Culture, Theory that explores psychiatric scenes and media between Europe and Asia around 1900 and their impact on 20th century theory. He also works as a curator and dramaturg, often with the Mobile Academy Berlin. In cooperation with Dimitri Kaufman, he runs The Category, a scriptorium for the 21st century.

D. Kaufman is a poet, critic, and classicist. Among other things, he previously worked on natural language processing algorithms. His latest work, Phineus, combines poetic études to create a modern retelling of Greek myths in various literary forms. He has broken numerous Oulipo world records, e.g in his re-writing of The Baby Pineapple, in which he exchanged every single word of the original novel for another.

Jonas Loh is a designer, electronic musician and modular synthesizer tinkerer who holds an M.A. in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, London. As co-founder of Studio NAND in Berlin, he directs design projects in the fields of information visualization, interaction, and exhibition design. His work reflects on the impact of future technologies by creating design fictions based on technical props and has been presented at Siggraph L.A., MoMA New York, V2 Rotterdam, the Venice Biennale, and Ars Electronica.

Fred Rapid is a musician, composer and music publisher. After graduating from HfMT Cologne and playing double bass with the Niederrheinische Sinfoniker for a while, he founded the record labels Haute Areal and Keep It Business, and the music publishing company Gorgeous Fork. He just released his latest EP Agile Mitten on KIB.

Klaus Schafler is a Vienna-based artist who studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, economics at the University of Graz, and political science at Facolta di Scienze-Politiche Messina. Working in various formats, including site-specific installations, video and performative lectures, his art-based research and projects mainly refer to phenomena and fictions of transition in different geopolitical landscapes and sub-urban situations. He is a member of the team that runs Kunsthalle Exnergasse at the WUK, Vienna, and co-initiated the collaborative project Grammar of Urgencies, which is currently researching “Fleeting Territories”.

Claudia Schötz creates books, films, sculptures, bacteria, fungi, foods, and menus. She works in a kitchen-studio-laboratory, where she experiments with bio materials and ponders about a series of performances that could excavate gold from sewage sludge to help finance the clean-up of the Pacific Ocean. She was Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and won the Marion-Ermer-Price in 2011.

Christina Wessely is a professor for Cultural History of Knowledge at the Leuphana University (DE). She has published on cosmic ice theories, zoological gardens, aquariums, and other strange ecologies and hostile environments. Her current research is concerned with the historical crossings of natural science, critical theory and political philosophy, theories which insinuate that life does not emerge within a given environment, but rather, in resistance against it.

Emma Rosa Simon is a cinematographer and filmmaker. She studied at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb). Her latest work, as cinematographer, is Liebesfilm by German director Robert Bohrer, with whom she won the Bavarian Documentary Film Award for Horizonte Perdido. She is currently working on L’Amour, a docu-fiction centered around her childhood in Sevran, in the Parisian Banlieus of Seine-Saint-Denis.

EPISODE 4

Ildiko Babos is an actress. She was born in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to Hungarian parents and moved to Vienna in 1987. She was a violin student at the Vienna Conservatory when she was in secondary school and later studied acting at the drama school Krauss. She is a freelance actress (since 2000) with engagements at the Theater an der Josefstadt, Theater Drachengasse, Ensembletheater, Stadttheater Walfischgasse and the Volkstheater/Rote Bar. Recently, she played in stagings of works by Woody Allen, Carlo Goldoni, Arthur Schnitzler, William Shakespeare, amongst others.

Haymon Maria Buttinger studied acting at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He was a member of the Burgtheater ensemble from 1993-1999 and has had numerous engagements at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Volkstheater Wien, Theater an der Wien and the Ronacher, amongst others. He was awarded the NESTROY price for best actor for Woyzeck (in an adaptation by Robert Wilson/Tom Waits) and has played in many cinema and TV productions, such as Schindler’s List, Before Sunrise, Tom of Finland and various Tatort episodes.

Julius Deutschbauer is a performer, visual and poster artist who lives in Vienna. He founded the performance group Theater des Verhinderns (theater of obstruction) in 2008. He has had exhibitions at Kunsthalle Vienna; Kunstverein Hamburg; Shedhalle Zurich; MAK Vienna; Galeria Zacheta Warsaw; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Belvedere Vienna; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and performances and theater productions at Tanzquartier Vienna; Thalia Theater Hamburg; Politik im Freien Theater Berlin; Volksbühne Berlin; brut Vienna; Garage X Vienna; Spielart Munich; and Kampnagel Hamburg, amongst others.

Nehle Dick is a Vienna-based director and actress. Among her productions are revue intim at the Kosmos Theater and Die Nacht ist jung! and How to murder your wife – Ich lebe mich at TAG Theater, both Vienna. She staged plays at Werk X, the Vienna Volkstheater and the Lower Austria Provincial Theatre, where she heads the Bürgertheater (since 2016). She was awarded the Kabuki theatre grant of the Ueno University Tokyo (2002) and worked for the Manchester street and performance festival x-tracks. She has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences.

Thomas Feuerstein lives in Vienna and works as artist and author in the fields of fine art and media art. He studied art history and philosophy at the University of Innsbruck and has had assignments as lecturer as well as visiting professor at several universities and art schools since 1997. Some of the crucial aspects of Feuerstein’s works are the interplay between verbal and visual elements, the unearthing of latent connections between fact and fiction, as well as the interaction between art and science. For his purposes, Feuerstein has come up with an artistic method he calls “conceptual narration.”

Swintha Gersthofer was born in St. Gallen (CH) and grew up in the Appenzell region and in Germany. She graduated from the Max Reinhardt Seminar, Vienna, in 2011 and subsequently played at the Schauspielhaus Graz, the Theater an der Wien, the Opéra National de Lorraine and the Shakespeare-festival Rosenburg, before she became an ensemble member at the Lower Austria Provincial Theatre. She played leading roles under the direction of Bettina Herings and was nominated for the NESTROY prize for young talents in 2014. Since the 2016/17 season, she has been engaged at the Josefstadt Theater, Vienna, where she is currently appearing as Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love.

Jens Hauser is a Copenhagen and Paris based media studies scholar, author and art curator. He holds a dual research position at both the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and at the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, and directs the (OU)VERT research center for “Greenness Studies”. He is also a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE Artist in Residency Program. Hauser is also the chair of the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts’ annual 2018 conference in Copenhagen.

Didi Kern is a classically trained drummer and percussionist who played eight years in a marching band. His music spans genres from folk, free jazz, improvisation to hardcore electronic. While he is best known as the drummer of the two most celebrated underground bands in Austria, Bulbul and Fuckhead, he also works in collectives, such as DEK-TRIO, Poisonous Frequencies, Broken.Heart.Collector and in duos with Philipp Quehenberger or Mats Gustafsson.

Bernhard Loibner is a composer of electronic music, a musician and a media artist from Vienna, Austria. His musical compositions are characterized by the use of computer instruments based on software he writes himself but also analog electronics and “real” instruments. The result of his ongoing experiments are intricate sound textures and harsh noises, often implying a pulsating moment. His work has been released on Vinyl, CD and DVD, and has been presented in the last 15 years in live concerts, performances and screenings in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.

Christian Rainer narrates poetry, prose, and experimental texts for film, radio and television. He has performed in theatre pieces since 1999 and works on radio and theatre plays, readings, concerts and CD-recordings. He has also been a singer in various rock bands. After a classical singing education, he studied Phonetics at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich (from 1994) and speech art/speech education at the State University of Music and the Performing Arts Stuttgart (1995-1999) where he combined spoken word and music, performed in various ensembles and developed his first radio play. Rainer was a grantee of the Arts Foundation Baden-Württemberg (1999).

Wolfgang Rebernik studied documentary filmmaking and cinematography at “Zelig” School for Documentary, TV and New Media in Bolzano, IT. He graduated in 1993 and has since been making documentary films in Europe, Asia, South America and the Antarctica. Rebernik’s films include his own production, Tara, the portrait of a young Austrian woman raised in rural India; Die Wilden Siebziger (The Wild Seventies) for ORF/3Sat; The Quest for the Holy Turtle for NDR/ARTE. Besides commercial work, he produces art films and exhibition-DVDs in collaboration with artists such as Stefan Bidner, Thomas Feuerstein, Richard Jackson, Raymond Pettibon and Hans Weigand.

Walter Seitter is a philosopher based in Vienna. He studied philosophy, political sciences and art history in Salzburg, Munich and Paris and translated works by Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski and Francis Ponge. He is the co-founder of Tumult. Schriften zur Verkehrswissenschaft and the first Viennese Philosopher-Café. Among his publications are Physik des Daseins. Bausteine zu einer Philosophie der Erscheinungen (Vienna, 1997); Physik der Medien. Materialien, Apparate, Präsentierungen (Weimar, 2002); Aristoteles betrachten und besprechen (Metaphysik I-VI) (Freiburg, 2018).

Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker develop transdisciplinary performances/installations on the subject of biopolitics. They run the cross-disciplinary Arts in Medicine program at the Medical University Vienna, where Klaus Spiess is Associate Professor. Lucie Strecker is an artist and researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she conducts the FWF Elise-Richter-PEEK project The Performative Biofact. Spiess/Strecker performed at Budascoop Kortrijk; Tanzquartier Vienna; Belvedere/21er Haus, Vienna; Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Omaha; Click Festival, Copenhagen; among many other venues. Their installations have been shown at venues like the Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine; the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; or at the Prix Ars Electronica Festival. They published on the subject of their work in Leonardo, The Journal of Performance Research and The Lancet.

Szely studied at the Institute for Electro-acoustic and Electronic Music, Vienna and works in the fields of sound-architecture and -installation, intermedia art, composition, radio art, sound environments for theatre, concerts and performances, and acoustic interventions in public space. He is in charge of sound architecture and sound direction, TONSPUR for a public space, a series by TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien (since 2003). He won numerous grants and awards, such as an honorary mention, Prix Ars Electronica 2010. His work has been shown and heard in Europe, Canada, the USA, Asia and Russia and released CDs on mosz, sabotage records, one drop of blood records.

Wladimir Velminski studied mathematics, physics, Slavic and cultural studies in Berlin and Moscow. In 2008, he obtained his PhD in art history at Humboldt University Berlin. In addition to his activities as Head of the Department of History and Theory of Media Regimes in Eastern Europe at Bauhaus University Weimar, he is currently a Senior Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at Leuphana University, dealing with Media Cultures of Computer Simulation. He has published widely on the cultural history of Eastern Europe. Previously, Velminski was a Dilthey Fellow at Bauhaus University Weimar and a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM) in Weimar.

Ann Liv Young was born on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Her work has been presented at major venues in New York City and Europe such as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Brooklyn Museum, Judson Church, The Kitchen, Laban Centre London, Impulstanz, Springdance, The Arches, Tanz im August, Motel Mosaique, Donau Festival, City of Women, Kampnagel, Brut-Vienna, Inkonst, Gender Bender, Theatre de la Bastille, among others. Her work has also been presented in the USA, London, Vienna, Holland, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Italy, Sweden, and Slovenia.

EPISODE 5

Jaya Klara Brekke is a researcher and creative producer working between London, Athens and Durham where she is currently writing a PhD on the political geography of the blockchain at Durham University. She is the designer for D-CENT, a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment.

Nils Gabriel researches open publishing practices at RIAT. He is an artist, coder and designer and develops extended publications utilizing ‘old tech’ and ‘next tech’. Gabriel designs hybrid and experimental media formats that are informed by research in media archaeology and alternative publishing.

Jan Groos works as an independent filmmaker in collaboration with his sister Anna. He has a strong interest in theoretical discourse and experimental documentary formats based around speculative cryptoeconomics. He actively investigates experimental Blockchain applications and works with DARC on communicating Proof-of-Presence.

Maximilian Gurresch is a Vienna-based freelance filmmaker, photographer and software developer. Besides more conventional productions he has been focusing on methodologies of documentation for artistic and high-tech projects, amongst which are the EU-funded AXIOM – the first high-end open source cinema camera -  and BitcoinCloud – an attempt to spatially represent the blockchain and a cryptocurrency. He considers himself a digital bricoleur striving for the best aesthetic results, rather than an artist or designer. In the future, he seeks to explore and improve the interface between man and virtual reality videos.

Max Hampshire is a researcher and artist in Amsterdam. His research involves unraveling the emergent politics of cryptographic platforms and autonomous technologies. He is one of three project initiators of terra0, an ongoing project investigating autonomous infrastructures. He is an associate researcher at RIAT, and has previously worked for the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.

Sunny King, part Peercoin and part Primecoin, is a pseudonym.

Jürgen Kleft Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Except for when you are properly prepared. More than half a decade ago Jürgen Kleft who Rüdiger Nehberg is credibly said to have baptized the “Prometheus of survival” embarked on his mission which now has crystallized in crafting functional wear for unfunctional people. Making use of both artistic and scientific methods, he grew to become the world’s most renowned specialist on the Shellpunk. Set between DIY and high-tech, Kleft explores the myths of a creature yet to fully emerge in the midst of our society.

Rachel Rose O’Leary is an artist and writer researching cryptographic systems. As writer she focuses on the negative reciprocity between cyberthreats and security architectures, conceived as a “crystallisation through withdrawal” (Inhumanism: an erotica, 2017). As artist, she conceptualizes this through jewelry, lingerie and armory. O’Leary is a contributor to Coindesk and is on the board of the Blockchain Association of Ireland.

Johannes Leutgeb is a PhD student in economics in the Berlin doctoral program BDPEMS and a research fellow at WZB in Berlin. His focus is in behavioral and experimental economics. Leutgeb is currently working on long-run interactions in high frequency environments and models of (political) influence.

Laura Lotti researches economic spaces and completed her PhD in software studies and financial technology. Her publications include Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange (2017); Contemporary art, capitalization and the blockchain: On the autonomy and automation of art’s value (2016) and Enter the Black Box: Aesthetic Speculations in the General Economy of Being (2016).

Andrew Newman researches artistic technologies at RIAT. His focus is on knowledge production in outsider epistemic cultures. Newman is a founding editor of the Journal for Research Cultures, his publications include Fake Organum: The Uneasy Institutionalisation of Art as Research (2017); Cryptocurrencies as Distributed Community Experiments (2014) and Experimental Cultures and Epistemic Spaces in Artistic Research (2013).

Martin Reinhart is a filmmaker, film historian and inventor. In the last years, he developed a system to auto-correlate big sets of data together with physicist Leonard Coster. The goal of this work is to generate an objective topography of world knowledge. This research is undertaken within the FWF PEEK project Data Loam at the Art & Science department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Paul Rieger is a promoter of blockchain technology, crypto-literacy and an advocate of the NEM blockchain which led to the foundation of NEM Vienna in June 2017. When not educating, Rieger is combining his software engineering background with his entrepreneurial experience to design and develop blockchain-based solutions and prototypes for the private and public sector.

Brett Scott is a journalist, former derivatives broker and author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (2013). He writes for publications like The Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine and CNN.com, and provides commentary on financial reform and cryptocurrencies on media channels such as BBC and Arte. For RIAT he is active as ambassador for international outreach.

Matthias Tarasiewicz is the director of the Research Institute for Arts and Technology in Vienna and board member of the Open Source Hardware Association (USA). He has led research projects including Artistic Technology Research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Making Artistic Technology and AXIOM - Open Hardware Cinema (EU Horizon 2020). His publications include Forking as cultural practice: Institutional governance after the DAO (2017), Cryptocurrencies as Distributed Community Experiments (2014), A Brief History of Bitcoin (2013) and Coded Cultures: New Creative Practices out of Diversity (2011). He actively researches the blockchain and cryptoeconomics since 2010 and has a background in computer science, design and systems theory.

terra0 is driven by new concepts of ownership and maintenance and works towards automated sustainable and resilient forestry. It develops decentralized programs for environmental management and tokenizing of natural resources.

Christopher Villafuerte is a NYC based photographer enchanted with the human condition and its language of emotions. He is a student of how juxtaposing elements of our visual language can create complex emotions and allegories.

Sophie-Carolin Wagner investigates the epistemological consequences for communicational processes in functionally differentiated systems. She co-edits the Journal for Research Cultures and is project manager of the Austrian National Library Lab. Publications include Poietry: Challenging the improbabilities of communication (2017) and Establishing the continuously Unfinished: The Institution as an Artistic Medium (2017).

Markus Zimmerman is a blockchain architect and specialist for experimental on- and off-chain usage. Markus has a background in computer science and architecture with a focus on media theory and spatial configurations of technological systems. He specializes in digital design in distributed ledger technologies and observing the crypto-economy from both socio-economical and communications perspectives.

 

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Anna Mendelssohn studied acting in the UK. She is a member of the Vienna based theatre company toxic dreams (since 2004) and has performed in over 20 of their productions. She has also worked with numerous other directors and choreographers. Her own works include Cry Me A River (2010), which received the actor’s prize at the Impulse Festival 2011 and the Jury prize and the Coproduction prize at Arena Festival 2010; The Rise and Fall  (2011); WHAT ? (2013); Here and Now (2013); Ein Herbst, eine Jugend (2014); Frozen Eggs - Feminism and the Bauchgefühl (2015); Nietzsche and I (2015) and Amazon – River Deep (2016).

 

continent. is a copyleft, para-academic, experimental publishing collective; a continuous effort to dynamically recompose publics, orchestrate encounters and create open access online and offline collections of text, image, sound, and image (moving and otherwise). We share often on the internet, but we also love printed objects and the gathering together of thinking human bodies.

 

Sylvia Eckermann  is an artist based in Vienna (AT). Her work focuses on a discursive engagement with form and media that culminates in critical artistic reflections on our entanglement as individuals in current socio-economic situations. She works with various media including digital and physical environments, installations, videos, objects, and sculptures. Besides many other grants and awards, she is the first recipient of the City of Vienna Award for Media Art (2014).

Gerald Nestler is an artist and author who combines theory with video, installation, performance, text, sound, and speech to explore the “derivative condition” of contemporary social relations and its financial models, processes, narratives and fictions. He has also published widely, most recently e.g. the reader Making of Finance (with Armen Avanessian, Merve, 2015) and the special issue on Art and Finance in Finance and Society (with Suhail Malik, 2016). He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmith, University of London.

Maximilian Thoman lives and studies in Innsbruck and Vienna. He heads the media arts association mkt – Büro für intermedialen Kommunikationstransfer and is a member of the managing committee of p.m.k – platform mobile cultural initiatives. Besides his curatorial practice in exhibition projects and lecture series he is, since 2015, part of the editorial board of the online journal continent.