Contributors

Arren Bar-Even earned his PhD at the Department of Plant Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. His work focuses on biochemistry, cellular metabolism, systems biology and computational biology, among others. He leads the Research Group Systems and Synthetic Metabolism at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Potsdam, aiming to uncover optimality in metabolic designs and to offer novel solutions for humanity’s needs in chemical and energy production.

Pablo Alarcón is a set, costume, and stage designer for independent theater productions and films. Alongside his work for Fahrad Payar, Yumiko Yoshioka, the Kleist-Theater Frankfurt (Oder), Theater Salpuri in Berlin, and others, he regularly works for Theater Thikwa, Berlin, for which he has designed numerous costumes. Another key place for him is Salzburg, where he served as costume designer and costume assistant for the Salzburg Festival productions Les Boreades, Don Giovanni, and Macbeth, as well as for many productions in the independent scene (including Theater ECCE, Theater bodi end sole, Stadttheater Hallein, and others). Since 2012, he has been Art Director at the Stelzen Theater Dulce Compania, Berlin.

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator. Her projects, including her recent 3D-printed sculptural reconstructions of ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS, titled Material Speculation: ISIS (2015–16), have received widespread curatorial and press attention and have been exhibited worldwide. She is the recipient of Foreign Policy magazine’s Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 Award and her work has been shown at the Queens Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Venice Biennale of Architecture; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among many others.

Marie-Luise Angerer has been Chair of Media Theory/Media Studies at the Institute of Arts and Media, University of Potsdam since 2015. Between 2000 and 2015, she was a professor of media and cultural and gender studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She has also been a guest professor in the US, Canada, Australia, Berlin, Bochum, Budapest, Ljubljana, and Zürich and has extensively published about the body, the construction of gender identities in communication and media, and new discourses on post-human life and future visions. Currently, Angerer is working on new materialism, media technologies and affect, knowledge forms, and aesthetic production. Her most recent publication is Ecology of Affect: Intensive Milieus and Contingent Encounters (2017).

Elie Ayache was trained as an engineer at l’École Polytechnique, Paris. He subsequently pursued a career as an option market maker on the floor of Marché à Terme International de France (MATIF, 1987–90) and London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE, 1990–95). He then turned to the philosophy of probability, by pursuing postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne, and to the technology of derivative pricing, by co-founding ITO 33, a financial software company, in 1999. Today, ITO 33 is the leading specialist in the pricing of convertible bonds, the equity-to-credit problem, and more generally the calibration and recalibration of volatility surfaces. Ayache has published numerous articles on the philosophy of contingent claims. He is the author of The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (2010) and The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market (2015).

Priya Basil’s literary work looks into the problems ofcultural identity for immigrants and raises questions of memory, exile, and self-rediscovery. Her debut novel Ishq and Mushq (2007) was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Other titles are Strangers on the 16:02 (2011) and The Obscure Logic of the Heart (2010). In 2010 Priya Basil founded Authors for Peace, a platform to promote peace through literature.

Anil Bawa-Cavia is a computer scientist and theorist with a background in machine learning. He runs STD-IO, a speculative software studio. His practice engages with algorithms, protocols, encodings, and other software artifacts. Bawa-Cavia is a founding member of Call & Response, a sonic arts collective and gallery space in London, and a member of the New Centre for Research & Practice.

Josh Berson is an anthropologist, novelist, and sound artist. His first book, Computable Bodies: Instrumented Life and the Human Somatic Niche, won the 2016 PROSE Award in Language and Linguistics. His next book, Meat: From Human Origins to the Crisis of Capitalism, will appear in 2018. Since 2013, Berson has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. From 2014 through 2016, he led the Remote Sensing of Mood strand at the Wellcome-funded research initiative Hubbub. Berson consults regularly on the design of scalable platforms for the real-time remote sensing of subjective states of being. His current research starts with and takes a deep-time perspective on the question “What does a person, or a community, really need to survive? In order to flourish?”

Benjamin Bratton’s work spans philosophy, art, design, and computer science. He is a professor of visual arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego and Program Director of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. Bratton is also a professor of digital design at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, and visiting faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles. In his most recent monograph, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016), Bratton outlines a new theory for the age of global computation and algorithmic governance.

Seth Bullock earned DPhil (PhD) in evolutionary simulation modeling from the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University. He spent two years at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin working on simulating the evolution of adaptive decision-making behavior in people and other animals. In 1999, Bullock took up a five-year University Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds and founded the Biosystems research group. In 2009, he became Director of Southampton’s Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS). He was promoted to professor of computer science in 2011, and in 2015 he joined the University of Bristol's Department of Computer Science as Toshiba Chair in Data Science and Simulation.

Yoneda Lemma (a.k.a. You Need a Lemon, sometimes Yoni Dilemma) is a quasi-causal brainchild for abstract exploration, a jumping off point for experimental research and a platform for productions, plotted by Canadian-born archaeologist, composer, producer, and feminist thinker Katrina Burch. Lemma’s complex harmonic layers dig into sound, shifting sonic elements from one fiction to another. When she’s not making music or writing, Burch is in the field excavating the Jequetepeque desert of Peru or conducting ethnoarchaeological research in Southeast Asia. She has exhibited her work at V4ULT, Berlin; Le Cube, Paris; and Tate Britain, London, among others. Burch has published with the Passive Collective, MIT Press, and Merve. She is a collaborator in the collectives Laboria Cuboniks, d-n-e, LATRINE, INFRA, and Asounder.

Nicolas Buzzi has been playing drums since he was ten, and at age thirteen he began playing synthesizers. Since 2007, he has worked as a musician and audio engineer for concerts, theater shows, and other live performances, specifically in the fields of electronic and electroacoustical live music, improvisation, and sound art.

Luis Campos is the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair of Astrobiology and Associate Chair of the History Department at the University of New Mexico. Trained in both biology and the history of science, Campos’s scholarship brings together archival discoveries with contemporary fieldwork at the intersection of biology and society. He has written widely on the history of genetics and synthetic biology and is the author of Radium and the Secret of Life (2015) and Making Mutations: Objects, Practices, Contexts (2010). Campos also serves as Secretary of the History of Science Society, the world’s largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, medicine, and their interactions with society in their historical context.

continent. is a para-academic, experimental publishing collective; a continuous effort to dynamically recompose publics, convene encounters and create open access online and offline collections of text, sound, image and media.

Anna Echterhölter is a visiting professor in the history of technology at the Technical University of Berlin. She previously taught at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University of Berlin and held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2008, 2015) and German Historical Institute in Washington, DC (2016). Her second book (forthcoming in 2017) conceptualizes the history of economic exchange from the perspective of measurement and metrology. Echterhölter is a co-founder of Ilinx magazine. Her research topics include, among others, standardization and colonialism, the history of quantification, rationing and planning, the media of subsistence, and the future of bureaucracy.

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (I). She has published many works on the theory of social systems, media theory, memory theory, and the sociology of financial markets. Her current research projects focus on a sociology of algorithms. Esposito's recent publications include The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (2011), “Artificial Communication? The Production of Contingency by Algorithms” (Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 2017), “Algorithmic Memory and the Right to Be Forgotten on the Web” (Big Data & Society, 2017), and “The Structures of Uncertainty: Performativity and Unpredictability in Economic Operations (Economy and Society, 2013).

Thomas Feuerstein is an artist who lives in Vienna. His practice has a wide range of reference points, from art and cultural history, philosophy, literature, science, and economic theory and the economy, to the newest media and network theories, current scientific debates, belief systems, and even science fiction. In his art, Feuerstein intertwines ancient Greek thought with today’s technologized world while simultaneously including controversial sociopolitical questions. Most recently, his work was exhibited at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Kunstverein Heilbronn; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; and 401contemporary, Berlin.

Anna Frei, a.k.a. Fred Hystère, is an artist, sonic researcher, graphic designer, editor, DJ, and record store co-founder (OOR Records), who lives and works in Zürich. She* organizes experimental audio formats, concerts, and club nights, is part of several collaborative art projects, and works as a conceptrice* of publications and editions. As DJ Fred Hystère, she*’s searching for multilayered, emancipatory narratives within experimental DJ mixes and collaborates on performances and audio pieces. Since 2014, she* has co-operated and co-curated OOR Records/OOR Saloon, Zürich.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including The Interface Effect (2012). His collaboration with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, was published in 2013. With Jason E. Smith, Galloway co-translated the Tiqqun book Introduction to Civil War (2010). For ten years, he worked with RSG on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects. Galloway's most recent book is Laruelle: Against the Digital, a monograph on the work of François Laruelle (2014).

Johnny Golding is a philosopher and poet who is internationally renowned for her philosophy enactments, installations, and soundscape exhibitions. Golding’s research covers the entangled dimensionalities of radical matter, an intradisciplinary arena of art, philosophy, and the wild sciences set on the playing fields of electronic/digital poetics, the logics of sense, metamathematics, and modern physics. She is a research professor of philosophy and fine art at the Royal College of Art, London. Previous roles include Director of the Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR) at Birmingham School of Art (2012–16); professor of philosophy in the visual arts and communication technologies at The University of Greenwich, London; and Director of the Institute for the Converging Arts and Sciences (ICAS) in London (2003–12). Golding is currently finishing her latest monograph, entitled Radical Matter: Wild Science, Philosophy and the Courage of Art.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is Associate Dean of the School of Law and a board member of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Advancement of the Arts (RSA); the writer of the award-winning What If Latin America Ruled the World? (2010) and more recently Story of a Death Foretold (2014); a columnist at El Espectador (Colombia); and a frequent contributor to the BBC World Service’s Night Waves, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera, among others. He graduated from law school in Bogotá after leading the student movement that initiated the 1990s wave of constitutional reform throughout Latin America and obtained his LLM with distinction at University College London and his PhD in philosophy at King’s College, University of Aberdeen. His next book is titled Ten Things They Don’t Tell Us about Justice, War, Art & Finance in the Near Future (forthcoming 2018).

Orit Halpern is a Strategic Hire in Interactive Theory and Design and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. She is also Co-director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a research-creation laboratory situated at the intersection of the computational and environmental sciences, design, and anthropology. Her recent publication, Beautiful Data (2015), is a history of interactivity, data visualization, and ubiquitous computing. She is currently working on two books; the first is a history and theory of smartness, and the second is about extreme infrastructures, resilience, and speculation. She has also published and created works for a variety of venues including e-flux Architecture, Rhizome, Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Dieter Hiller is geologist and oil industry professional. He has worked in the field of health, safety, and environment (HSE), and in particular environmental issues, for more than thirty years, much of that time in the oil industry. Hiller specializes in environmental management, and since 2012 has been a partner with Environmental Resources Management (ERM). Prior to this assignment, he held various positions with Schlumberger Limited, the world's largest oilfield services company, in France, the US, and Canada.

Bernd Hopfengärtner is a designer and futurologist. He is interested in design as an interdisciplinary intermediary, placed between natural science, engineering, cultural and media theory, and everyday life. His work has been exhibited at the Wellcome Trust in London, MoMA in New York, and National Museum of China in Beijing, among others. He lives in Berlin. Together with Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger, he has been developing the speculative research project "Beauty of Oil.”

Alexander Ilitschewski is an author of novels and essays. He spent his childhood in Azerbaijan, studied and taught theoretical physics in Moscow, and emigrated to California in the mid 1990s. Today he lives in Jerusalem. In 2009, his prize-winning novel Pers (The Persian) was published (the German translation, Der Perser, was published in 2016). It draws a portrait of the economic, political, and social transitions in the oil region of Baku from the time of the Nobels and Rothschilds until today.

Victoria Ivanova researches, writes, curates, speaks, and consults on innovative approaches to policy, finance, and rights in the sphere of contemporary art and beyond. Having previously worked in the human rights field, Ivanova in 2010 co-founded a multidisciplinary cultural platform in Donetsk, Ukraine, which explored the intersections between activism, education, and artistic production. Today, her practice is largely informed by systems analysis and her interest in infrastructures as mechanisms for shaping and (re)producing socioeconomic and political realities. Ivanova holds an MSc in human rights from the London School of Economics and an MA in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. She is currently completing her PhD in cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Alexander Klose is a cultural theorist and concept developer based in Berlin. His work focuses on the interplay between technologies of communication and transport and processes of social (re)formation. Between 2001 and 2009, he pursued an artistic and scientific research project on the principle of standardized containers and the rise of logistical thinking. Together with Bernd Hopfengärtner and Benjamin Steininger, Klose has been developing the speculative research project “Beauty of Oil.”

knowbotiq (Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler) experiments with forms and medialities of knowledge, political representation, and epistemic disobedience. Recent projects investigate and enact political landscapes with a focus on algorithmic governmentalities, libidinous and affective economies, and postcolonial violence. knowbotiq has participated in the Venice Biennale, Moscow Biennale, Seoul Biennale, Shenzen and HongKong Bi-City Biennale, and Biennale Rotterdam and exhibited at the New Museum, New York; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; Kunsthalle St. Gallen; Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Škuc Gallery Ljubljana; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Hamburger Kunstverein; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. knowbotiq holds a professorship in the MFA program at Zurich University of the Arts.

Stephanie LeMenager is a pioneer in the critical theory of petromodernity and a professor in the University of Oregon’s English Department. She co-founded the environmental humanities journal Resilience and has been a member of After Oil, a Canada-based research and public outreach collective, since the early 2010s. Her book Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014) sums up what it means to live in the age of hydrocarbons from a cultural theoretical position.

Boaz Levin is an artist, writer, occasional curator, and Co-founder of the Research Center for Proxy Politics in Berlin. He has presented his work internationally, most recently at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; FIDMarseille; and School of Kyiv (Kyiv Biennial). Last Person Shooter (2014), co-directed with Adam Kaplan, was awarded the Ostrovsky Family Fund Award at the 2015 Jerusalem Film Festival. Regarding Spectatorship, an ongoing curatorial research project with Marianna Liosi, was shown at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, in 2015–16. Since October 2016, Levin has been a member of the Cultures of Critique research training group at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Most recently, Levin co-curated the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-Heidelberg, in 2017.

Giuseppe Longo is Research Director at the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (Emeritus) at the Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (ENS). He was previously Research Director in mathematics, then in computer science, at ENS (1990–2012), and a professor of mathematical logic and computer science at the University of Pisa (1973–90). Longo spent three years in the US, including at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, as a researcher and visiting professor, and also spent several months at the University of Oxford and Utrecht University. He has authored and co-authored more than 100 papers and three books. He recently extended his research interests to include the epistemology of mathematics and theoretical biology.

Nahum is an artist and musician. His work focuses on creating alternative and unconventional perspectives of human experience using outer-space technology, illusionism, and other strategies. He directs space missions for artistic purposes, such as Matters of Gravity (2015), a microgravity project at Star City, Russia. He chairs the International Astronautical Federation’s Committee on the Cultural Utilisations of Space and is the founding director of KOSMICA, a global institute that focuses on the cultural, critical, and artistic aspects of outer-space activities and their impact on Earth. Nahum is a fellow of the National System of Art Creators, National Fund for Culture and Arts in Mexico and a visiting lecturer at the International Space University in France. In 2014, he won the Young Space Leader Award for his cultural contributions to outer-space activities.

Angi Nend sets up scenarios and what he calls “performative facilities” using a wide variety of formats and media including installations, lecture-performances, live action role-playing games, happenings, interventions, and concerts. Alongside his self-organized and more ephemeral environments, his works have been shown at institutions such as Substitut, Berlin; De Appel, Amsterdam; and Connecting Space, Hong Kong. Nend was recently invited to present a scenario for the durational concert Social Dissonance by Mattin, at Documenta 14 in Kassel.

Gerald Nestler is an artist and writer who combines theory and post-disciplinary conversation with video, installation, performance, text, code, graphics, sound, and speech. He explores what he calls the “derivative condition” of contemporary relations and its paradigmatic financial models, operations, processes, narratives, and fictions. He is a member of the Technopolitics Research Group, Vienna, and the Volatility Research Group, New York. Nestler holds a practice-based PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London and has shown his work internationally and has received, among other grants and awards, the Austrian State Grant for Visual Arts (2003), Austrian AIR grants for Beijing (2008), and New York/ISCP (2016).

Julian Oliver is a critical engineer and artist based in Berlin. His work and lectures have been presented at many international museums, galleries, electronic art events, and conferences, including Tate Modern, London; Transmediale, Berlin; Chaos Computer Congress, Berlin; Ars Electronica, Linz; and Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo. Oliver has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 2011 for the project Newstweek (with Daniil Vasiliev). He is an advocate of free and open source software and a supporter of and contributor to initiatives that reinforce rights of privacy and anonymity in networked and other technologically mediated domains.

Tea Palmelund is a visual designer living in Berlin. Her work examines the blurred lines between artificial and natural realities, with a focus on digital design. She holds a master’s in design from the School of Design at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Through her mixed media installations in both physical and digital sites, she puts narratives of postcolonial Europe and opaque power structures on display. Palmelund is the co-founder of Utopian Union, a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration that initiates the cultivation of desire and the mapping of future realms.

Sascha Pohflepp is an artist and researcher whose work has been known to probe the role of technology in our efforts to understand and influence our environment. His interest extends across historical aspects and visions of the future, and his practice often involves collaboration with other artists and researchers. Notable exhibitions include Talk To Me, MoMA, New York, 2011; Micro Impact, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2012; and The House in the Sky, Pioneer Works, New York, 2016. Pohflepp lives and works between Berlin and La Jolla, California, and is pursuing a PhD in Art Theory and Practice at the University of California, San Diego as a fellow of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA).

Patricia Reed is an artist, writer, and designer based in Berlin. Selected exhibitions include the Museum of Capitalism, Oakland; Homeworks 7, Beirut; Witte de With, Rotterdam; HKW, Berlin; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. Her recent writings have been published in journals and books including e-flux Architecture, _AH, Cold War Cold World (Urbanomic), Reinventing Horizons (Tranzitdisplay), Moneylab (Institute of Networked Cultures), and The Neurotic Turn (Repeater Books). Reed is part of the collectives Laboria Cuboniks (technomaterial feminism) and Office for Applied Complexity.

Sophia Roosth is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences, examining how biology is changing at a moment when researchers are building new biological systems in order to investigate how biology works. She earned her PhD in 2010 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In her first book, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (2017), Roosth asks what happens to “life” as a conceptual category when experimentation and fabrication converge. Among others, she was the 2016 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the Joy Foundation Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Claudia de Serpa Soares studied dance at the National Conservatory in Lisbon and the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers in France. She has worked with Iztok Kovač, Paulo Ribeiro, and Lilo Baur, among others. In 1999, de Serpa Soares joined the dance ensemble of the Schaubühne theater in Berlin under the former artistic direction of Sasha Waltz. Since then, she has danced in many works by Waltz. De Serpa Soares has been working with the Rufus Corporation in New York and choreographed several video art projects with Eve Sussman. She has created and performed Crossroads (2007) with Ronald Kukulies, Edgar (2007) with Grayson Millwood, the solo performance The Circuit (2011), and More up a Tree (2015) with drummer Jim White and artist Eve Sussman.

Sarah Sharma is an associate professor and Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her monograph In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics was named the 2014 National Communication Critical Cultural Division Book of the Year. In the Meantime intervenes in the popular sentiment that the world is speeding and argues the explanatory power of speed up is less an accurate depiction of the contemporary moment than it is an ideological discourse itself. Sharma is currently working on a new project that explores the gendered politics of exit and refusal, or what she terms “the (s)Exit,” within contemporary technoculture.

Helena Shomar is a synthetic biologist and focuses on how biotechnologies could influence and shape daily life. Currently based in the Netherlands, she is a PhD Candidate at the G. Bokinsky Lab at TU Delft where she aims to design bacteria that produce last-resort antibiotics at an industrial scale from cheap and environmentally friendly materials. During her career, she has sought interdisciplinary collaboration with artists, designers, educators, or industrial partners to broaden the practice of science. With her team she created the scientific video-game hero.coli, exhibited the art-science work Living Ashes within the framework of the research project MAKING_LIFE in Helsinki, and organized workshops for different audiences.

Jens Soentgen is a philosopher, chemist, and Academic Director of the Environmental Science Center at the University of Augsburg. Since 2016, he has been an adjunct professor of philosophy at Memorial University in St. John’s, Canada and, since 2012, Co-editor of the journal GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society. Soentgen’s writing on the history and theory of chemistry, as well as on the specifics of individual materials, has been published widely both for the scientific community and for young readers.

Felix Stalder is a media theorist and professor of digital culture and network theory at Zürich University of the Arts, where he is currently Co-director of the Media Arts Program, as well as an independent researcher and organizer with groups such as the Institute for New Cultural Technologies (t0) in Vienna. He has published extensively on digital network cultures and their political implications and has been active in this field since the mid-1990s. Stalder’s books include, among others, Digital Solidarity (2013) and most recently Kultur der Digitalität (Culture of digitality) (2016), in which he examines the historical origins and contemporary conditions of the ever expanding digital sphere.

Benjamin Steininger is a cultural theorist and historian of science and technology who lives in Vienna. He works as a guest researcher for the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In his PhD dissertation, he analyzed the history and theory of catalysis in the twentieth century. From 2012 to 2016, Steininger headed a collaborative research project on the history of the Austrian oil industry. Together with Bernd Hopfengärtner and Alexander Klose, he has been developing the speculative research project “Beauty of Oil.”

Oxana Timofeeva is a philosopher working as an Assistant Professor on contemporary philosophy at the European University in St. Petersburg and as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow. Timofeeva is a member of the artistic collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?), and a deputy editor of the journal Stasis. She spent her childhood in Surgut, one of the centers of the oil industry in northwestern Siberia. Starting her academic career with a doctoral thesis on the theories of Georges Bataille, she later turned to animal studies and anthropocene thinking and recently published a materialist theory of oil.

Vera Tollmann co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics in Berlin. From 2014 to 2017, the center hosted workshops, lectures, and events at the Universität der Künste Berlin. In 2013, Tollmann co-curated the 9th Video Vortex conference at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Since 2015, Tollmann has been a PhD candidate in the Aesthetics of the Virtual graduate program at HFBK –University of Fine Arts of Hamburg.

Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, who work under the name Ubermorgen.com, live and work in Vienna, Cologne, and St. Moritz. Ubermorgen became notorious for their media hacks in the 2000s. The artist duo owns more than seventy-five active web pages, safely embedded within the Swiss Alps on military secured grounds. The French newspaper Libération described the strategy behind the vote-selling platform Vote-Auction (2000–06) as “un plan machiavélique.” Ubermorgen.com’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Biennale of Sydney, and Gwangju Biennale, among others and has won the Swiss Art Award, transmediale Award, and IBM Award for New Media. Ubermorgen.com influenced by Rammstein, Samantha Fox, XXXTentacion, Pfizer’s Olanzapine, Albert Hofmann’s LSD, and KFC’s Coconut Shrimps Deluxe, as well as Viennese actionism.

Inigo Wilkins took his master’s in sonic culture at the University of East London and completed his doctorate in cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016. The title of his thesis was “Irreversible Noise: The Rationalization of Randomness and the Fetishization of Indeterminacy,” which he is currently preparing for publication with Urbanomic. He is Co-director of the online arts journal and research platform Glass Bead. Recent publications include “Interfacey McInterface Face” (2017) and “The Sharpest Point of Sensation Is Pointless,” in a booklet accompanying musician Eric Frye’s LP On Small Differences in Sensation (2016).