Bernhard Siegert is Professor Emeritus of History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where he co-directed the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM). A leading figure in German media theory and cultural techniques research, Siegert’s work explores the material and infrastructural conditions of knowledge production, communication, and mediation. Siegert’s scholarship has been foundational for understanding how humans organize their relationship to environments and ecosystems through material practices and infrastructures. His publications include Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford 1999), and Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (Fordham 2015). Together with Benedikt Markle, Siegert is the editor of Reckoning with Everything: The Becoming-Environmental of Computing (Meson Press 2025), available open access.

Armen Avanessian is Professor of Media Theory at Zeppelin University (Friedrichshafen). He has previously been Visiting Fellow in the German Department at Columbia University and Yale University, as well as fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. He has run the weekly theory program Armen Avanessian & Enemies at Volksbühne in Berlin. His work has been translated into various languages. Most recently, he is the author of Planeten Denken: Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit (Merve 2024), Planetarische Ethik: Tiefenzeit  (Merve 2025), and Überwintern: Über Leben in dürftiger Zeit (Matthes und Seitz 2025).

Alexander Damianos is a lecturer and researcher in environmental law at Kent Law School, University of Kent. He is an associate fellow of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, and “selected young scientist” of the Creative Europe S+T+ARTS Studiotopia fellowship, at Ars Electronica. He is the author of Science, Politics and the Anthropocene Working Group: What was the Anthropocene?, which presents the first ethnographic study of the effort to formalise the Anthropocene as a geological fact. His work has been published in journals such as Αυτόματον, Law & Critique, Global Sustainability, and Social Studies of Science.

Daphne Dragona is a curator, theorist, and writer based in Berlin and Athens. She teaches Theory of Curatorial Practices, Exhibition Design, and History of Digital Art at the Department of Audiovisual Arts, Ionian University. Her current work addresses the ambiguous role of technology in times of climate crisis and the challenges and possibilities of degrowth for art and culture. She was curator for transmediale festival (Berlin, 2015–2019) and EMAF – European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück, 2021–2023). Dragona’s research explores how artistic and curatorial practices engage with the contradictions of connectivity, the promises of the commons, and ecological transformation in the digital age. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies at the University of Athens, and her writings have been published by Springer, Sternberg Press, Diaphanes, and Leonardo Electronic Almanac, among others.

Adriaan Eeckels is a historian, humanist, and semiotician, and former project leader of the SciArt Project at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. His career within European institutions spans roles at the Schengen Secretariat, European Court of Justice, and European Commission across Luxembourg, Brussels, and Ispra, Italy. Since 2016 he has directed SciArt, fostering collaborations between researchers, artists, and policymakers to rethink knowledge production and cultural imaginaries around nature, human–nonhuman relations, and systemic change. His work focuses on reimagining the relationship between human and non-human worlds, exploring how art-science collaborations can inform evidence-based policy and foster cultural transformation. He has curated major exhibitions including NaturArchy (2024), which invited artists and scientists to reimagine Western relations with the non-human and explore juridical personhood for nature. 

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor of Digital Culture at Technische Universität Dresden. A historian of science and media, her research examines the intersections of technology, cognition, and governance, particularly how computational infrastructures shape contemporary understandings of ecology, economy, and planetary management. She is the author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (2014) and co-author of Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope (2021). Halpern’s work critically interrogates how concepts like resilience, smartness, and optimization have transformed environmental thought and practice, tracing the genealogies of computational approaches to ecological crisis and their implications for futurity and planetary inhabitation.

Katerina Gregos is a curator, art historian, and writer. Since 2021, she has served as artistic director of the National Museum of Contemporary ART (EMST) in Athens, where she curated the exhibition Why Look at Animals? She has curated nine international biennials, as well as national pavilions at the Venice Biennale for Denmark, Belgium, and Croatia. She previously served as founding director and curator of the Deste Foundation’s Centre for Contemporary Art in Athens, artistic director of Argos – Centre for Art & Media in Brussels, and artistic director of Art Brussels. She regularly publishes on art and culture and holds visiting lecturer positions at institutions including HISK in Ghent and the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.

Iwona Janicka is Research Team Leader at the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P) and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism. Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Her work has been published in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Philosophy Today, Textual Practice and SubStance.

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre and co-directs the Environmental Media and Aesthetics research program. He is also Visiting Professor at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka’s work examines the material foundations of digital culture, for example, the ecological and geological entanglements of media technologies. He is the author of Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), A Geology of Media (2015), and Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024), co-authored with Abelardo Gil-Fournie). Parikka’s scholarship pioneered the concept of “media geology,” tracing how rare earth minerals, electronic waste, and planetary extraction processes are integral to understanding contemporary media ecologies. His more recent work addresses environmental media, visual culture, and the material relations between media, data, and natural worlds. 

Luke Rendell is Reader in Biology at the University of St Andrews, where he is affiliated with the Scottish Oceans Institute, Sea Mammal Research Unit, the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, and the Institute of Behavioural and Neural Sciences. He is also a founder and co-investigator of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. A leading researcher in marine mammal communication and culture, Rendell's work explores the evolution of learning, behavior, and communication, with particular focus on cetacean cultural transmission and vocal dialects. Together with Hal Whitehead, he is co-author of The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (2015), which demonstrates the existence of cultural evolution in non-human species, particularly sperm whales, including the discovery of vocal clans and culturally distinct behaviors that are socially learned and transmitted. Rendell’s recent work addresses the integration of cultural dimensions in sperm whale conservation, examining how social learning and cultural transmission interact with anthropogenic threats and climate change in shaping cetacean populations and informing conservation strategies.

Max Ritts is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research explores intersections of social power, sensory practice, and ecological transformation, with a focus on Indigenous community contexts. His book A Resonant Ecology (2024) examines sound’s integration into the environmental politics on Canada's North Coast. Ritts is also co-editor of two recent book anthologies – The RAVEN Essays (2025) – a survey of Indigenous studies works by student activists, and Geofictions (In Press) – a compendium of ‘geo-sci-fi’ written by leading critical geographers. Current research includes an investigation into the role of sensors in managing the industrial metabolisms of high-risk underground mining environments, and a science communication effort with the Gitga’at First Nation around the conservation of their Marine Territory.

Katharina Isabel Schmidt is Leader of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group “Artificial Justice.” In this capacity, she heads a team of experts on law, logic, computer science, technology, and the humanities. In her research, Katharina explores the fundamental tension between animation and automation in law. Her first monograph, German Jurists and the Search for Life in Law, traces legal modernism’s long history from 1900 all the way to the Third Reich. In doing so, Katharina pays particular attention to early twentieth-century yearnings for more “human” judges, judges, that is to say, who worked with their hearts, not their minds. Her second book recovers the early history of legal information science against the backdrop of “human failure” under the Nazis, the rise of legal cybernetics in the Soviet Union, and socio-political unrest around 1968. Katharina has training in both law and history, holding degrees from University College London, the University of Cologne, the University of Oxford, the Yale Law School, and Princeton University. She is also a junior fellow at the Hamburg Academy of Sciences.

Pratyusha Sharma is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University and Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft Research. She completed her PhD at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Working at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and interspecies communication, Sharma's research explores how language and language-like structures support reasoning and decision-making in both artificial and natural intelligence systems. She is lead researcher for Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), where her groundbreaking work has revealed the complex combinatorial structure of sperm whale communication, what her team calls the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet”, published in Nature Communications (2024). Her interdisciplinary research bridges AI, marine biology, and environmental communication, addressing how computational approaches can help us understand non-human communication systems and their implications for conservation and cross-species understanding.

Tiziana Terranova is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, where she co-founded the Centre for the Study of Transnational Technocultures (CRiTT). In 2020, she co-founded the Critical Computation Bureau (CCB) with Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Luciana Parisi and Oana Parvan. A leading theorist of digital networks and network cultures, her work examines the political and cultural implications of information technologies, platform capitalism, and computational infrastructures. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004) and After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (2022), with a forthcoming book Network Social: On the Return of the Social in the Post-Digital Age (Minnesota University Press). Terranova’s research explores the intersection of digital technologies, media and cultural studies, and political economy, with recent work addressing technoliberalism and the network social, recursive colonialism, and the potential for post-capitalist networked commons.

Yvonne Volkart is Head of Research and senior lecturer in art theory and cultural media studies at the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, where she directs the Swiss National Science Foundation research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning like a Plant (2022–2025). She also holds a teaching position at the Master of Arts in Art Education, Zurich University of the Arts, and writes regularly for the art magazine Springerin. Her research explores how aesthetic theory-practice, ecology, technology, science, and decolonial feminism come together to bring us into relation with the more-than-human world. She co-curated the exhibitions Eco-Visionaries: Art, Architecture and New Media After the Anthropocene (2018) and Ecomedia: Ecological Practices in Today's Art (2007). Her recent monograph Technologies of Care: From Sensing Technologies to an Aesthetics of Attention in a More-than-Human World (2023) examines the techno-eco-feminist turn in contemporary art and develops an aesthetics of relationality and care.

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. Her work operates at the intersection of media theory, ethics, and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the Anthropocene, nonhuman life, and technological mediation. Zylinska is the author of several influential books including Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014), Nonhuman Photography (2017), and AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (2020). As both a theorist and practising artist, she explores how media technologies shape our perception of and responsibility toward ecological crisis, developing concepts such as “photomediations” and examining the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of human-nonhuman relations in an era of planetary transformation.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is a Madrid-based artist and researcher originally trained in physics who holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art. His practice addresses the entwining of media and matter, exploring how light operates simultaneously as a mechanism of vision and as an agent of planetary transformation. Working across installation, video, sound, and computational processes including machine learning, his projects examine the connections between visual culture, agriculture, and environmental knowledge systems. Gil-Fournier is co-author of Living Surfaces (MIT Press, 2024) and has exhibited internationally at venues including Transmediale Berlin, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and LE BAL Paris. He is currently a Leonardo Scholar with the BBVA Foundation.

Kyriaki Goni is an Athens-based artist whose multimedia installations explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of technology. Through websites, textiles, ceramics, video, and sound, her research-based practice examines extractivism, surveillance, and human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Goni has exhibited internationally at venues including the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Onassis Cultural Centre Athens, Ars Electronica, and Transmediale. She currently serves as the first artist-in-residence at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) in Vienna. Goni holds degrees in Visual Arts and Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts, and in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Athens and Leiden University.

Nona Inescu is an artist based between Athens and Bucharest whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses photography, installation, sculpture, and video. Through a posthumanist lens, her work explores the complex entanglements between human bodies and their environments, examining concepts of geological time and ecological fragility. Combining industrial materials with natural elements, Inescu creates ethereal installations that address the ambiguous relationships between nature and technology in the Anthropocene. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Tallinn Art Hall, Kunsthall Trondheim, and Art Encounters Biennale, and graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest.

Agata Ingarden is a Polish artist based between Paris and Athens who works with installation, sculpture, and video. Combining industrial materials such as metals and silicones with natural resources including oyster shells, beeswax, and preserved butterflies, her practice explores the ambiguous relationships between nature and technology in the Anthropocene. Her expansive installations, often augmented with sound and video, draw on post-humanities, science fiction, and mythical narratives to envision worlds where human presence is felt but people remain absent. Ingarden graduated from École des Beaux-Arts Paris and Cooper Union School of Art New York, and has exhibited at institutions including Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Palais de Tokyo, and Mo.Co Montpellier.

A Berlin-based artist, designer, and musician, Bill Kouligas was born and raised in Athens, and first immersed himself in the city’s subcultural music and art scenes during the 1990s. He is best known for establishing the multi-disciplinary label PAN in 2008, which has become one of the most influential electronic music labels and artistic platforms of the past two decades. His curatorial approach often bridges contemporary art, experimental music, and club culture, fostering dialogue between these contrasting spheres. PAN has published groundbreaking works by artists like Arca, Eartheater, Anne Imhof, Crystallmess, Amnesia Scanner, Yves Tumor, Mark Leckey, and Objekt, fostering an ongoing dialogue between artists pushing the boundaries of their fields – whether in experimental electronic music, sound design, or cross-disciplinary practices merging visual media, art, sound, and technology.

Raffaela Naldi Rossano is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores a wide range of media, including installation, video, sculpture, text, drawings and performance. Her artworks are research-driven and process-based, intended as relational vehicles that seek to trigger new possible relationships, both psychological and socio-political, between spaces, bodies and objects. The Mediterranean area, starting from her hometown Napoli, stands at the epicenter of her practice. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Sharjah Biennial, Kunst Institut Basel, and TBA21 Academy in Venice.

Zoë Paul is an Athens-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, painting, weaving, ceramics, and installation. Working with materials such as clay, beads, bronze, and textiles, Paul revisits tradition through labor-intensive processes that challenge conventional notions of femininity and craft. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including MoMA New York, the Benaki Museum Athens, and Spike Island Bristol. Paul holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art.

Jenna Sutela works with biological and computational systems, including bacteria, slime molds, and artificial neural networks. Her interdisciplinary practice explores interspecies communication and symbiotic relationships between organic and synthetic life forms, challenging anthropocentric worldviews through audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances. Sutela has exhibited internationally at venues including Haus der Kunst Munich, Guggenheim Bilbao, Serpentine Galleries London, and the Shanghai Biennale, and served as Visiting Artist at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology. She will represent Finland at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026.

Elahe Rajabiani is a designer at the EU Policy lab where she helps scientists and policy makers tackle complex systemic issues with design tools and methods. Her work spans from problem framing and landscape mapping to designing processes and inventing new tools for creative collaboration and collective sense making. Prior to joining the EU commission Elahe was the creative lead at Almacube, the Open Innovation centre of the University of Bologna where she designed and led international programs to bring together the academia and the industry in multidisciplinary and cross generational teams to collaborate and develop new solutions for the most pressing societal challenges. She was also design educator and design thinking coach for SUGAR Global Network and Design Factory Global Network and led a challenge based innovation program in collaboration with CERN IdeaSquare for two years. Before moving to Bologna, Elahe worked in Milan as a service designer and digital strategists for global brands in various sectors from pharma to food, automotive and entertainment. Her interest is in Design in all its forms and functions. She is passionate about foresight and future thinking and how design as a visual, tangible, optimistic and proactive practice can give form to the future.

Eleni Riga is a curator and cultural producer based in Athens, working across the Mediterranean and beyond. Her practice weaves ecofeminisms and water politics into lived and critical geographies, often immersing herself – whether by diving or hiking – alongside the artists she collaborates with. With a background spanning documenta 14, Eleusis – European Capital of Culture, MoMA, exhibitions at Friart, Fribourg or BO, Oslo as well as independent initiatives, Eleni brings a holistic understanding of art to each project. She is Guest Curator at ATOPOS cvc with the Office of Hydrocommons program, where she continues to shape conversations around feminisms, ecologies and collective futures. She is also artist and institutions liaison at Callirrhoë, Athens. Currently, she is laureate of the residency program Institut français × Cité internationale des arts.

is Operating Officer of the Attica Hub for the Economy of Data and Devices (ahedd) at NCSR ‘Demokritos’ and Manager of the Smart Attica European Digital Innovation Hub. His current work focuses on data-driven decision-making, AI integration, and the governance of digital ecosystems.

Katerina Tzortzatou is Head of the Fundraising Unit at the National Centre for Scientific Research ‘Demokritos.’ She has led accelerator programmes and fostered collaborations between research institutions and industry across Europe. She is a technology transfer expert at the Solar Impulse Foundation and an independent innovation consultant with over fifteen years of experience supporting organisations in translating scientific and technological ideas into sustainable practice.