Baum & Leahy
Baum & Leahy is an award-winning international, creative duo working across interdisciplinary collaboration, interactive installation, art direction, scenography and experience design. Since 2017 Baum & Leahy have been worldbuilding the speculative epoch of the Microbiocene – the ongoing era of microorganisms – as an overarching focus within their work. Through research-led worldmaking and material storytelling, their work allows the beholder a proximity to alternative realities, melting between the feasible and fantastical. Since meeting at the Royal College of Art, Baum & Leahy have exhibited at internationally renowned venues, including Victoria and Albert Museum, Wellcome Collection, Somerset House, Tate Modern (UK), The National Gallery of Denmark, Medical Museion (DK), MU Hybrid Art House (NL), Prairie (US), Vega Scene (NO), and Art Laboratory Berlin (DE). They were shortlisted for the Lumen Art Prize and The Rapoport Award for Women in Art and Tech in 2019, and received both the Bio Art & Design Award and the British Library Labs Artistic Award in 2018. From 2020-2021 they are fellows at BOM (Birmingham Open Media), and part of the CPH:DOX Lab.
Center for Genomic Gastronomy
Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an artist-led think tank that examines the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems. The Center collaborates with scientists, chefs, hackers and farmers and presents its research through public lectures, research publications, meals and exhibitions in Europe, Asia and North America. The Center's research has been featured and reviewed in The Lancet, Nature, and Chemical & Engineering News. Artists Zack Denfeld and Cathrine Kramer founded the Center for Genomic Gastronomy in 2010 and continue to lead many of its research projects. Emma Dorothy Conley is a producer at the Center for Genomic Gastronomy. With a focus on imagined futures, she creates practical and speculative work that aims to identify issues and expand realities.
Mary Maggic
Mary Maggic (Mary Tsang) 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! Lab, generate 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. Their projects explore the biopolitical nature of biotechnologies, their roots in society and transhumanism, and the question of who gets access.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 they 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).
Suzanne Kite
Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite is developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite has published her research journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award winning article, “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. She was a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Women at Sundance x Adobe Fellow.
Ashley Jane Lewis
Ashley Jane Lewis is a tech educator and interactive artist with a focus on bioart, Afrofuturism, and speculative design. In the summer of 2016, she was listed in the Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada. Her new media work has been exhibited in both Canada and the U.S., earning editors’ choice at Maker Faire and, most notably, featured on the White House website during the Obama presidency. Her works explore the relationship between past, present, and future for the empowered Black identity, asking audiences to suspend their conceptions of reality. She is now studying to get her master’s at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications) in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She's been featured as a Tech Activist in Metro News, Reader's Digest, and the Huffington Post, and she has highlighted diverse tech education as a keynote speaker on numerous occasions for audiences at Afrotectopia, TEDx, FITC, International Women's Day and Maker Faire. Ashley feels honoured to have had the opportunity to help more than 3,000 youth learn how to code to date.
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (Ayo)
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (Ayo) is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and time-traveler living and working in New York. His works range from painting and speculative design to physically interactive works, wearable technology, and explorations of "Reclamation." As a collaborator with choreographer Maida Withers, Carmen Wong, and Yoko K., amongst others, Okunseinde has created several interactive performance-based works and has performed in several countries, including Mexico, Finland, and Croatia. His art residency participation includes ITP’s S.I.R., IDEO’s Fortnight, The Laundromat Project, Eyebeam, New INC, and Recess Assembly. He has exhibited and presented at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Tribeca Storyscapes, EYEO Festival, Brooklyn Museum, M.I.T. Beyond the Cradle, and Afrotectopia, amongst others. Okunseinde has taught at New York University, Bennington College, Hostos CUNY, and 92Y. He holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design in New York, where he is currently a faculty member.
Richard Pell
Richard Pell is the founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History (CPNH), an organization dedicated to the collection and exposition of life-forms that have been intentionally and heritably altered through domestication, selective breeding, tissue culture, or genetic engineering. The CPNH operates a permanent museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and produces traveling exhibitions that have appeared in science and art museums throughout Europe and the United States, including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Wellcome Collection in London, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, the CCCB in Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the 2008 Taipei Biennial, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The CPNH’s exhibitions have also been featured in National Geographic, Nature Magazine, American Scientist, Popular Science, and New Scientist. The CPNH was awarded a Rockefeller New Media fellowship, a Creative Capital fellowship, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and has received generous support from Waag Society and the Kindle Project. Pell is a National Academy of Science Kavli Fellow and was awarded the 2016 Pittsburgh Artist of the Year. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Devin Ronneberg
Devin Ronneberg is a multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and living in Los Angeles, working primarily in sculpture, sound, image-making, networking, engineering, and computational media. His work is currently focused on the unseen implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, and the radiation of invisible forces. Incorporating aerospace engineering techniques passed down by his father as the basis for his sculptural practice, his work explores the possibilities of modern manufacturing and materialities with techniques and materials used in the design and prototyping of hand-built experimental aircraft. Ronneberg’s work has most recently exhibited at Experimenta 2020, MoCNA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and ISEA 2020. Ronneberg co-founded the Los Angeles underground imprint Private Selection Records and produces, DJs, and performs live under the Aerial moniker. He is a Sundance New Frontier Story Lab 2020 fellow, holds a BFA in music technology from California Institute of the Arts, and is an experimental aircraft designer / builder at Berkut Engineering.
Bill Shannon
Bill Shannon is a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist, inventor, and maker who explores body-centric work through video installation, sculpture, drawing, linguistics, sociology, choreography, and dance. Bill has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship in Performance Art, and a United States Artist Fellowship in Dance. Bill has received three NEA Multidisciplinary Arts Awards and worked as a choreographer on the creative team behind Cirque Du Soleil’s “Varekai.” Bill’s interdisciplinary works include a multi-year street performance and line art series titled “Regarding The Fall” and “Notes on Performance” respectively, a video installation series titled “Fragmentation Series,” and five group works for dance theater focused on translating "street dance" to the stage. Shannon’s most recent work involved putting together a team to design code and fabricate a Wearable Video Mask.
Daniel Slåttnes
Daniel Slåttnes lives and works in Oslo (NO) and Västra Ämtervik (SE). He holds a Master of Fine Art degree from the Oslo Academy of the Arts (2014). His recent exhibitions include “Vegetal Connections” at Atelier Nord in Oslo, “Anthro-botanical Investigations From the Studio” at Gallery Hans in Ørland, “Consciousness in the Time of Kairos” at Kurant in Tromsø, “Conversation Between Bodies” at Oppland Art Center and Aldea Center for Contemporary Art, Design and Technology in Bergen. He will have upcoming exhibitions at RAM Gallery in Oslo and Arteriet in Kristiansand. Slåttnes works within a speculative play about knowledge that, normally, is beyond comprehension. Consciousness in plants, investigations into objecthood, and the shape of time are examples of topics he has been researching in recent years. He explores, in several of his works, possibilities to establish a kind of communication with the materials he works with. The meeting between plant and machine is a distinct focus, as they are both on the outskirts of what we perceive as conscious life. Since 2015, he has explored plant consciousness in collaboration with a houseplant.
Alisha Wormsley
Alisha Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley explores collective memory and the synchronicity of time through the stories of women of color, and more specifically, Black women in America. Wormsley’s work spans public art, social practice, performance, installation, film, photography, and publication. For over a decade, Wormsley has been building the Children of NAN Archive to inform her practice. Nan, Wormsley explains, is the most-used syllable for “mother” across African dialects. The archive/body of work consists of photography, video footage, films, objects, philosophies, myths, rituals, and performances that she uses to understand and chronicle the ways Black womxn have taught one another to care for humans and the earth. Wormsley’s primary focus is to uplift and celebrate the people and places she engages with as she develops her Children of NAN Archive, and to provide spaces of critical reflection on the past, present, and future of the community. This configuration or access of the archive is organized through three objects. The objects act as memory, mapping, and technology. The objects are a vinyl record, a tapestry, and a glass vessel (an altar or bowl). For Wormsley, the Black woman’s body is the most advanced technology existing in a world made to limit this technology as much as possible. Inspired by Henrietta Lacks, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, and the ancient mystery schools of Mami Wata, Wormsley selects examples from the archive that relates to how Black womxn are the code, the vessel, and the map.
Ionat Zurr
Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts are pioneers in the field of biological arts. Catts is the co-founder and director of SymbioticA: the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and was a professor of contestable design at the Royal College for the Arts UK. Dr. Ionat Zurr is the chair of the fine arts discipline at the School of Design UWA and SymbioticA’s academic coordinator. They have been visiting scholars at The Centre of Arts and Art History at Stanford University (2007) and research fellows at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School (2000-2001). Catts & Zurr’s interest is Life, more specifically, the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and its applications. Often working in collaboration with other artists and scientists, they have developed a body of work that speaks volumes about the need for new cultural articulations of evolving concepts of life. Their work has been exhibited and collected by Pompidou Centre in Paris, MoMA NY, Mori Art Museum, NGV, GoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China, and more. Their research has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, New Scientist, Time, Newsweek, Nature, and Science.
Oron Catts
Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts are pioneers in the field of biological arts. Catts is the co-founder and director of SymbioticA: the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and was a professor of contestable design at the Royal College for the Arts UK. Dr. Ionat Zurr is the chair of the fine arts discipline at the School of Design UWA and SymbioticA’s academic coordinator. They have been visiting scholars at The Centre of Arts and Art History at Stanford University (2007) and research fellows at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School (2000-2001). Catts & Zurr’s interest is Life, more specifically, the shifting relations and perceptions of life in the light of new knowledge and its applications. Often working in collaboration with other artists and scientists, they have developed a body of work that speaks volumes about the need for new cultural articulations of evolving concepts of life. Their work has been exhibited and collected by Pompidou Centre in Paris, MoMA NY, Mori Art Museum, NGV, GoMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China, and more. Their research has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, New Scientist, Time, Newsweek, Nature, and Science.
Tarsh Bates
I am a scavenger: a feminist, an artist, and a scientist. What, how, and why matter to me. I am a descendant of the exhalation of cyanobacteria and millennia of evolution. My body seethes and pulses with hundreds of other species, fashioned by tiny lives and deaths, host to a thriving ecology. We are in relentless re-orientation, tentatively traversing the affordances of each other’s bodies. Like an ant, I palp and stroke/sniff at the edges to discover what is good to take back to the nest. Like a cat, I bask in the fascinating and disdain the disinterested. Like a dog, I roll in the rotten and run off with thrown sticks. I forage knowledge, materials, ideas, and tools and hunt transient alliances. I transmogrify ingredients into evocative victuals, sampling and nibbling, testing and sipping, kneading and folding, assembling and serving. I offer the human body as trans-species degustation, a site of sustenance for nonhuman life, food,shelter, and kinships.