Aaron Huey is a National Geographic photographer and Founder + Creative Director of Amplifier.org. As a photographer Huey has created over 30 stories for the National Geographic magazines including several cover stories, and is also leading new projects inside the brand from VR and AR to metaverse spaces. Huey’s 2019 Bear Ears Virtual Museum VR experience promoted the protection of sacred lands and won the Webby for best VR Interactive Design, and is currently being made into Augmented Reality lessons and metaverse experiences to teach pre-Colonial History in K-12 schools across the country. 

As a Stanford Knight Fellow and then as one of the first d.School Media Experiments Fellows, Huey evolve his storytelling into many projects beyond traditional photography, including his art and advocacy non-profit Amplifier, where he created the global art phenomenon called “We The People” out of his backyard with a small team in Seattle. Huey now leads Amplifier Labs and all of the organization’s work in new media including NFTs, metaverse wearables, and metaverse world builds. Huey is a founding artist of Change DAO, and was recently named a Stanford Starling Lab Fellow where he is mapping Web3 ecosystems and new frameworks for data integrity.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist and technologist who uses AI to make a positive impact in the world and for the environment. She is Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan and Jewish. She is a Banks Endowed Preeminence Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts at the University of Florida.

Aria Dean is an artist and writer based in NYC whose work across sculpture, film, theater, and critical writing examines the structures of individual and collective subjectivity in relation to material cultural histories and technology. She has exhibited widely in the US. and internationally, most recently participating in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Dean’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, E-flux, Art in America, and others. She has served as an adjunct professor for MFA programs at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University. Until January 2021, Dean was Editor and Curator at Rhizome at the New Museum (New York). She is now Creative Development Executive at the film and television studio SunHaus (Los Angeles).

Arkadiy is a critical technologist working in the space of cultural production, curation, and preservation. He is interested in the relationship between creative labor and reward, the lifecycle of a work, and the impact made by the history of reproduction technology on creators and communities. He’s explored these ideas at Hype Machine, Mediachain, Spotify, Protocol Labs, and most recently as the Decentralized Technology Lead at the Internet Archive.

Calum Bowden collaborates on stories, worlds, and platforms that reconnect the cultural with the technological, economical and political. He co-founded Trust and Black Swan.

Trust is a network of utopian conspirators, a sandbox for creative, technical and critical projects, and site of experimentation for new ways of learning together; a hybrid online (Discord) and physical space (Berlin) for inquiry into emerging social and political phenomena through the lenses of aesthetic, narrative, game, technical, climate and design research. Since 2018, Trust has developed a public programme that includes lectures, installations, residency programmes, reading groups, working groups, live-streamed participatory events, and online resources. Trust incubates open source projects that build a creative culture of the commons, including: Moving Castles, Millieu, and Black Swan’s Cygnet.

Artist and game developer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley weaves the lived experiences of Black Trans people into the fabric of their fictional space.Through animation, sound, and performance, they pay reverence to the many creative narratives of “those living,those who have passed, and those who have been forgotten”. 

Much like a Black Trans archive, their practice cements the posterity of Black Trans people’s existence as: “throughout history,Black queer and Trans people have been erased from our archives. Because of this, it is necessary not only to archive our existence but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to use to share our experiences.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been shown in Albright Knox, David Kordanskyes, and Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. An online component of their Gallery, Quad, Arebyte Gallery, Science Gallery, MU, Barbican, Tate, and Les Urbain has been part of the BBZ

www.blacktransarchive.com
@ladydangfua 

GABRIEL MASSAN (b.1996 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a Berlin-based mixed-format digital artist. Combining storytelling and world-building techniques, he discusses power relations and inequality between his sculpture’s life performances in the virtual space. His work includes 3D animation, digital painting, single-player games, virtual and augmented reality, having wide distribution in NFT.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. In 2012, Question Bridge: Black Males debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was selected for the New Media Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute. Thomas is also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in 2017. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; and Marauni Mercier, Belgium.

Holly Herndon is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Her work involves building new technologies to experiment with her voice and image, facilitated by critical research in artificial intelligence and decentralized infrastructure. In recent work, she has produced an instrument for anyone to sing with her voice, distributed governance of her digital voice to the Holly+DAO and released the Classified portrait series generated from what publicly available AI datasets know about her likeness.

Herndon has toured her influential musical albums PROTO (4AD) and Platform (4AD) globally, most recently with a choir composed of human and AI voices. She completed her doctorate in composition at Stanford University working with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). She also makes her research process public through the Interdependence podcast.

Jesse Damiani is a curator, writer, and advisor in new media art and emerging technologies. He is the founder of Postreality Labs, a curatorial studio and strategic advisory based in Los Angeles, CA. He is Curator & Director of Simulation Literacies at Nxt Museum, a Research Affiliate at Institute for the Future, and an Affiliate of the metaLAB at Harvard University. Recent curated exhibitions include PROOF OF ART at Francisco Carolinum Linz, the first museum retrospective on the history of NFTs; Synthetic Wilderness at Honor Fraser Gallery; and Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror at Vellum LA. Other ongoing curation includes XR For Change, the XR summit at the Games For Change Festival. He writes about art, media, and emerging technology on Forbes, with additional writing in WIRED, Billboard, Entrepreneur, Quartz, and The Verge. Damiani is Founder of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology and formerly served as Director of Emerging Technology & Insight at Southern New Hampshire University, where he led the Future of Work initiative.

Albert-László Barabási is a network scientist, fascinated with a wide range of topics, from unveiling the structure of the brain to treating diseases using network medicine, from the emergence of success in art to how does science really works. His work has helped unveil the hidden order behind various complex systems using the quantitative tools of network science, a research field that he pioneered, and lead to the discovery of scale-free networks, helping explain the emergence of many natural, technological and social networks.

Albert-László Barabási spends most of his time in Boston, where is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, and holds an appointment in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. But he splits his time with Budapest, where he runs an European Research Council project at Central European University. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his Masters in Theoretical Physics at the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary and Ph.D. three years later at Boston University. 

Lina Mazenett & David Quiroga work as a two-person collective; they received a BA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. They completed a postgraduate course in Amazonian studies at the Amazonian Seat of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 2018.

Recent solo shows include Consanguinity, La Cápsula, Zurich, (2021); Solo Show Art Dubai, Art Dubai, Dubai (2019); Desaparece una Cultura, Instituto de Visión gallery, Bogotá, (2018); Arbor Vitae, Botanical Garden, Bogotá; Astrum in Corpore, Fundación Flora ars+natur, Bogotá (2015), Imágenes Sedimentarias, MAMBO Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Bogotá (2014); Medusa, a Head Clothed in Night, Greatmore Studios, Cape Town (2013). Their work has been also featured in international group shows, such as at Somerset House, London (2022),  Unfinished Camp, at The Shed, New York City (2021), Pivô, São Paulo (2020), Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2019). 

In addition to their artistic practice, they participated in the online roundtable organized by Julie’s Bicycle, the British Council, and Fondo Acción, as part of The Climate Connection program. They were fellows of the COINCIDENCIA program offered by Pro Helvetia Switzerland. In 2018 they won the Emerging Artists Scholarship offered by the Colombian Ministry of Culture and were nominated for the CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Scholarship and Commission Program 2016-2017. 

María Paula Fernandez comes from Argentina, is the co-founder at jpg.space, and the Department of Decentralization. She has been working in web3 since 2017, when she joined the Web3 Foundation as employee number three. She’s worked or consulted for several of the most prominent blockchain projects, and in 2018 she founded a grassroots organisation in Berlin, Department of Decentralization, hosting web3 hackathons, and researching and publishing on art and technology. Her organisation’s latest collaboration was a year long project with Hito Steyerl, StrikeDAO, for which they built a quadratic voting app and presented a governance proposal for a German institution

Michael Connor is Artistic Director of Rhizome, where he oversaw the Net Art Anthology initiative, an effort to retell the history of net art through 100 works, presented as an online exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book. His first online curatorial project took place in 2003 at FACT, Liverpool, where he organized an edition of the traveling exhibition “Kingdom of Piracy” with Shu Lea Cheang, Yukiko Shikata, and Armin Medosch. Connor is currently editing a book by Gene Youngblood about the work of Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz. 

Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American artist creating work about a world made to fit the form of data. Her multimedia practice highlights absence to make sense of the power dynamics that result in disenfranchised communities’ different relationships to systems that are digital, cultural, historical, and ecological.

Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. Lusaka) is a para-disciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, questioning the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach.

They hold a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Nour Batyne (she/her) is a creative producer, facilitator, and artist — her work lies at the intersection of immersive storytelling, futures thinking, and social innovation. She is the co-founder of One of Many, a consulting & design studio that works with leaders & cultural organizations to build resilient communities around accountability & our undeniable interconnectedness. She is also an organizer for the Wide Awakes, an open-source network who radically reimagines the future through creative collaboration. Nour is a Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellow at the School of International Futures, and serves as an Associate Instructor for the Nonprofit Management M.S. program at Columbia University. With a global portfolio of work, she is currently based in New York City.

Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, she organized the Whitney’s presentation of Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021) and co-curated the mid-career survey Julie Mehretu (2021). Additional projects at the Whitney include the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017), and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017 (2017). Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kehinde Wiley, Tom Sachs, and others. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and travelled to three U.S. venues in 2017-18. She serves on the Board of Art Matters, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess.

Salome Asega is a new media artist, design researcher, and Director of NEW INC, New Museum’s art, design, and technology incubator. She sits on the boards of Eyebeam, National Performance Network, and POWRPLNT. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology where she teaches studio courses on speculative design and participatory design methodologies.

Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specializing in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists; a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft; an alumni of Recurse Centre, a retreat for software developers; and an organizer of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. She is on the advisory board of Circles UBI, an alternative currency that tries to create more equal distributions of wealth. Recently, she has exhibited work at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Canada, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, theOökultur in Linz in Austria, Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne, suns.works in Zurich, and Floating University in Berlin.

Simon Denny (b. 1982 Auckland, New Zealand) makes exhibitions that unpack the social and political implications of the technology industry and the rise of social media, startup culture, blockchains and cryptocurrencies, using a variety of media including installation, sculpture, print and video.

Denny curated exhibitions about Blockchain and art and has exhibited in major museums across the world, his work is held in institutional collections internationally. Denny co-founded the mentoring program BPA and is professor for Time Based Media at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg.

Wendy Hanamura is the Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest digital libraries. As a storyteller, Hanamura uses her communication skills to share the remarkable stories locked in the Internet Archive’s 100 petabytes of books, images, films, software, and music.  As a communicator and producer, she helps to steward the global movement to create a Decentralized Web, including producing the Decentralized Web Summits 2018 & 2016, DWeb Camp 2019.

Her career has spanned independent television, documentaries, social campaigns and new media tools.

Previously, as Chief Digital Officer of KCETLink, Hanamura led diverse content teams creating media for social change. Hanamura began her career in journalism at TIME magazine. She’s reported and produced television content around the world for CBS, World Monitor Television, NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation), and PBS.

Her favorite project remains Honor Bound: A Personal Journey, the documentary she produced about her father and his storied WWII unit, the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  At Harvard, Hanamura majored in Visual & Environmental Studies and went on to study with architect, Fumihiko Maki, at the University of Tokyo.

Design Director, Artist & Researcher investigating human relationship and creative inquiry in to biology & technology and is the founder and Principal Investigator of Serpentine Synthetic Ecologies Lab. Her long standing artistic and critical practice explores the plurality of senses and sensing, perception and the invisible scales at which humans frame and reframe ecology through culture, society and technology. Yasaman is a creative leader with more than a decade of experience in building platforms and novel inputs & immersive interfaces specializing in Operating Systems of AR, VR, MR. She is also an educator at institutions such as Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Rhode Island School of Design and is frequent guest professor at Parsons New School, Stanford, NYU, Art Center College of Design, ZhDK to name a few. She is passionate about sharing her expertise and continues to uplift women identifying communities of color and folks less represented.