​​Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of intelligence and evolution; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her current book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. She is also one of the Primary Investigators of the Governing through Design Research Group and a P.I. on the AUDACE FQRSC project Reclaiming the Planet, both which sponsor this project.

Sudipto Basu is a second year PhD student and J.A. DeSeve Graduate Fellow in Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University. His ongoing research is about the entanglement of the Cold War-era discourses of population control and management with infrastructure projects and developmental experiments in the Global South, particularly India. He has previously worked on the intersections of experimental cinema since the Cold War, cybernetics and the Anthropocene; post-war Bombay cinema’s political economy and the experimental turn in Films Division India. His written work has been published in APRJA, IIC Quarterly and Critical Collective, and a video essay he co-directed, Tracts of Dust (2018), has shown in Bangkok Biennial and Little Cinema International Festival, Kolkata.

Nadia Christidi is a PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and an arts practitioner. Her dissertation explores how the future of water is being imagined and prepared for in cities facing water supply challenges which are intensifying with climate change. Working at the intersection of art, research, and public pedagogy, Nadia has presented work and public programs at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata, SALT Ulus, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Jameel Arts Centre, the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival, and Ocean Space. Nadia was previously a TBA-21 Academy Ocean Fellow, a Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellow for Water Solutions at MIT, an Art Jameel Arts Research and Writing Resident, and a Delfina-FICA Research Fellow. She holds an MA in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and BA in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College.

Özgün Eylül İşcen is an affiliated research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her recent research focuses on counter-futuring alongside the ongoing urban, migrant, and environmental struggles that challenge today's profit-driven, extractive modes of futurity and cultivate transnational perspectives on smart urbanism and speculative design. Eylül earned her PhD in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University in 2020. Her dissertation examines the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media as an imperial apparatus by delving into media histories and arts within the context of the Middle East. She has published in numerous edited book volumes, art catalogs, and academic journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies and Organised Sound. She currently teaches at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and collaborates with Prof. Dr. Shintaro Miyazaki for the Counter-N, web-based publishing, exchange, and research collection supported by Humboldt.

Johanna Mehl is a designer, design scholar, and educator interested in the larger material and immaterial systems that shape design practices and that design in turn propagates. She holds a B.A. in Communication Design from the Niederrhein University of Applied Science, Krefeld and an M.A. in Art and Design Studies from the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen. Besides her artistic and curatorial practice, she has taught in the fields of media and design theory at different design schools across Europe and worked as the coordinator of the M.A. program Integrated Design at KISD (Köln International School of Design). She recently started a research associate position at Technische Universität Dresden, continuing her Ph.D. research on design paradigm shifts in the anthropocene.

Leona Nikolić is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University specialising in the intersections between spirituality, magic, and algorithmic technologies. More specifically, she is examining the connections between astrology and artificial intelligences as methods of speculation, prediction, and forecasting, as well as the ways in which we assign legitimacy and authority to knowledge-making practices. Leona has been invited to present at academic conferences in Montréal as well as in Denmark, Mexico, France, Turkey, and the UK. Her research has been published in MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory and is forthcoming in the European Journal of Communication Studies. At Concordia University, Leona is a member of the Centre for Sensory Studies; the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology; and the Global Emergent Media Lab.

Dr. Michelle Pfeifer is postdoctoral fellow in Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies at Technische Universität Dresden in the Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change. Their research is located at the intersections of (digital) media technology, migration and border studies, and gender and sexuality studies and explores the role of media technology in the production of legal and political knowledge amidst struggles over mobility and movement(s) in postcolonial Europe. Michelle earned their PhD at the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University with a dissertation titled Data and Borders: Tracking Media Technologies of Migration Control in Europe that offers a critical analysis of how state projects use language and algorithmic analysis to maintain the European border, control migration, and enforce asylum regimes. Michelle’s research has been published in Citizenship Studies and Culture Machine and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology Thinking with an Accent from the University of California Press. They co-edited the special issue “The Sexual Politics of Border Control” published in Ethnic and Racial Studies and co-organized the international symposium “Sexuality and Borders” at NYU. Michelle has taught courses on media and identity and methods in media studies. They are also the recipient of a doctoral research fellowship from the Berlin Program at Free University Berlin and a dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren foundation as well as grants from the NYU Migration Network and the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies.

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a research assistant at Technical University in Dresden, Germany with the Chair for Digital Cultures. She is interested in black studies, media & technology, poetics & politics, critical pedagogy & practice and speaks, writes and workshops for magazines, organizations and institutions. Her doctoral thesis about Édouard Glissant, histories of technology and cybernetics is finished at Leuphana University Lüneburg where she is also associated with the Centre for Digital Cultures and an alumna of the research training group «Cultures of Critique». In 2021 she was a lecturer at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, from October 2018 to May 2019 she was a Doctoral Fellow at the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University, Montréal. She co-edited issue 26 of the German Journal for Media Studies (ZfM): «X | Kein Lagebericht« (04/2022), which is an anti-racist critique of the institution. Nelly is a Senior Fellow with Humanity in Action, member of the German Forum Antiracism Media Studies (FAM) as well as the DFG Network »Gender, Media, Affect«