Stefan Andriopoulos is Professor of German and co-founder of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University. He is author of Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books, 2013), which was named book of the year in Times Literary Supplement. His previous book Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2008) won the SLSA Michelle Kendrick award for best academic book on literature, science, and the arts.

He is currently working on a new project that adopts a historical perspective on how the introduction of new technologies has increased the circulation of rumors and misinformation, from Gutenberg to QAnon. A short and accessible article, “The Multiplication of Monsters,” came out recently in Public Books. A longer essay, “Rumor and Media: On Circulations and Credence (via Kant and Marx),” has been published in Grey Room.

Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer examining issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She has created digital networks automated by environmental phenomena, schemes for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency. She has recently exhibited at the Smithsonian (Arts and Industries), the Vienna Biennale for Change, the Guangzhou Triennial and in venues like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of Art, NYC. She is a 2023 Creative Capital Awardee and has also been a fellow at Eyebeam, Data & Society and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Her work has been widely discussed in the press including in the New York Times, Art in America, The Atlantic, NPR, Al Jazeera and The Guardian and in art and technology blogs like the Creators Project and Creative Applications. She has given talks and workshops at museums and festivals like EYEO, TedxSydney and the Sonar Festival.

Tega’s first book is Code as Creative Medium, co-authored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She earned her PhD in New Media Arts and Technology at the Australian National University, School of Art and Design and she serves on the board of the School for Poetic Computation.

Logan Lane is the founder of Brooklyn’s Luddite Club, a group of teenagers who gave up their smartphones.

Kevin Munger the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. He studies the communication of political information on the internet, and how to make digital social science make sense. he has published research on the subject using a variety of methodologies, including textual analysis, field experiments, longitudinal surveys and qualitative theory. Kevin’s research has appeared in leading journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Communication, and Political Science Research & Methods. His present interests include cohort conflict in American politics and developing new methods for social science in a rapidly changing world.

Nimay Ndolo is an influencer, actress, and filmmaker.

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, Air Age Blueprint and Out Side, and are co-editor of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric. K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding. K’s work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Bookforum, Artforum, BOMB, Lithub, The Warburg Institute, Institute of Network Cultures, and by writers including Erik Davis and Bruce Clarke. K has spoken at TED, New Museum, Tate, Serpentine Gallery, HKW, Moderna Museet, Christie’s, MacArthur Foundation, MfN Berlin, Ars Electronica, Sónar, and many other venues, and has taught at SCI-Arc, Strelka, and IAAC.

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal is Ruth and Paul Idzik Collegiate Chair in Digital Scholarship and Assistant Professor of English and Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He researches and teaches about the aesthetic and politico-economic entanglements of our technological cultures. His award-winning writing appears, or is forthcoming, in Critical Inquiry, Configurations, American Literature, and Design Issues, among other venues. He holds a Ph.D. in English and STS from UC Davis and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Indore. He has also previously been a visiting fellow at the research Cluster “Media of Cooperation” in University of Siegen, Germany and a graduate student at the Universe of Chicago. His research—which is situated at the crossroads of media theory, science and technology studies, and literary criticism—has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Linda Hall Library, and the Hagley Museum, among other institutions. Professor Dhaliwal is currently working on a book project titled Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation, which asks ‘what exactly is computing?’ Illuminating the hard-coded political logics we take for granted in our contemporary digital cultures, his project shows how our cultural narratives, politico-economic formulations, and epistemic beliefs get crystallized into computational hardware and software architectures. His other projects have found him researching the entanglements between data and narratives, popular discourses of the future in simulation video games, material and cultural histories of artificial intelligence, and new taxonomies of internet aesthetics. He is also engaged in several critical making projects, including a number of public-facing game design endeavors.

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in artists’ books, the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Recent titles include: Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity, (The Elephants, 2018), Downdrift: An Eco-fiction (Three Rooms Press, 2018), and Visualization: Modelling Interpretation (forthcoming). Off-World Fairy Tales, a collaboration with Susan Bee, was published in Fall 2020 (Litmus Press). In 2014, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts by the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017. Her recent work includes: Visualisation: L’Interpretation Modellante Visualizing Interpretation (MIT, 2020), Iliazd: Metabiography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), and Digital Humanities Coursebook (Routledge, 2020). Her work has been translated into Korean, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Danish and Portuguese.

Brian Merchant is a writer. I was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a senior editor at Motherboard. He is the author of The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown) and Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech (2023, Little, Brown), and a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform.

Christopher John Müller is an Honorary Research Associate of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University and an Associate Teacher at the University of Bristol. His recent publications include “Desert Ethics: Technology and the Question of Evil in Günther Anders and Jacques Derrida,” Parallax (2015), 21 (1): 42-57 and “Style and Arrogance: The Ethics of Heidegger’s Style,” Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ivan Callus, Gloria Lauri-Lucente, James Corby (Continuum, 2013), pp. 141-162. His work draws on Literature, Philosophy and Critical Theory to address the manner in which technological and linguistic structures shape human perception, agency and interaction.

Stephanie Shepherd is an entrepreneur, environmental advocate, and tastemaker who educates her millions of fans on how to blend luxury lifestyle and conscious consumerism. Her style, beauty secrets, and work as a humanitarian have cultivated a global community. Formerly the Chief Operating Officer of Kardashian West Brands, Steph has since established her own platform and partnered with American Express, Google, and J Brand — among other prominent lifestyle brands. Most recently, Steph has lent her expertise to Kourtney Kardashian’s website, Poosh, and Elle Magazine as a monthly contributor. She has hosted and an executive produced her very own Facebook Watch series, “Steph Shep Says.” As well as recently joining sustainable personal care brand +Plus as the Chief Impact Officer. In 2019, Steph co-founded the digital climate education platform, @FutureEarth. Shepherd is also an ambassador for Days For Girls International, The Environmental Working Group and John Kerry’s World War Zero climate change initiative. She most recently joined the board of Vice President Al Gore’s The Climate Reality Project. Through her advocacy, Stephanie has generated millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours for organizations who, like her, relentlessly pursue human flourishing and environmental preservation.