Jussi Parikka

Aarhus University, Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture

Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC). He is also visiting professor at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). In 2021 he was elected as member of Academia Europaea. His published books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016), A Geology of Media (2015), and A Slow, Contemporary Violence (2016). Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and is the co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). His book Operational Images was published in May 2023. Parikka’s books have been translated into 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. He has also worked as curator, including as part of the curatorial team of transmediale 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023, as well as the co-curator of the forthcoming Motores del Clima (Laboral, Gijon, 2023). Http://jussiparikka.net.

Caroline A. Jones

MIT School of Architecture + Planning, Professor History, Theory, Criticism

Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT.  She studies modern and contemporary art, focusing on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with science. She has also worked as a curator, recently in three exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Art Center: Hans Haacke 1967 (2011); Video Trajectories(2007-08); and Sensorium (2006-07). Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at NY MoMA, SF MoMA, the Hirshhorn DC, and the Hara Museum Tokyo, among other venues. Publications include Machine in the Studio (1996/98), Picturing Science, Producing Art (co-editor, 1998), Sensorium (editor2006), Eyesight Alone (2005/08), Experience (co-editor, 2016), and The Global Work of Art(2016). Caroline is currently researching patterns of occlusion and political contestation in what she calls “the anthropogenic image” of environmental disaster, in collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison.

Theodora Vardouli

McGill University Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, Associate Professor

Theodora Vardouli researches design and architecture’s entwining with digital technologies and computation. She is an Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University where she directs the Computational Design Exploratory (CoDEx). Before joining McGill University, Vardouli completed a PhD in Design and Computation from the MIT Department of Architecture. She is an External Examiner for two graduate programs at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and a member of the editorial board for the journal Technology, Architecture + Design (TAD).

Viola Ago

Toronto Metropolitan University, Assistant Professor School of Interior Design

Viola Ago (b. Lushnjë, Albania) is interested in architecture’s role in a world inhabited with visible and invisible forms of duress. Her focus in the affective conditions of war and conflict ridden territories has guided her investigations towards a design research project that looks at the aesthetic and formal agency of destruction and disorder. Viola is the director of MIRACLES Architecture and an assistant professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously Viola was a fellow at Rice University, the Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan; and a resident at MacDowell and Autodesk’s Technology Center.

Viola’s written work has been published by Anyone Corp, John Wiley & Sons, Routledge, Park Books, AR+D, Sci-Arc, Acadia Conference Proceedings, TxA, JAE, Architect’s Newspaper, Archinect, among others. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Ghent NY, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Columbus OH, Columbus IN, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, and Cincinnati.

Michael Abrahamson

University of Utah, Assistant Professor School of Architecture

Michael Abrahamson is an architectural historian and critic whose research explores the materiality of buildings and the methods of architectural practice across the twentieth century. Through these lenses, his writing reveals the systems of creativity, subordination, and legitimation that undergird the creation of architecture in the professional office and on the construction site. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Michigan centered on four critical projects by the late modernist architectural firm Gunnar Birkerts and Associates, in an attempt to square the assertions of authorial individuality proffered by its figurehead with the day-to-day bureaucratic work of those he employed. He is currently at work on a book project based on this research titled The Introspective Professional: Gunnar Birkerts Between Genius and Bureaucracy. The book will intertwine methods from business and labor history with cultural studies to narrate the history of post-WWII practice in the United States, using Gunnar Birkerts and Associates as its primary case study.

Silvia Ruzanka

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Assistant Professor, Electronic Arts/Games and Simulation Arts Sciences (HASS)

Silvia Ruzanka is an artist-philosopher whose work examine technology and media, obsolescence, memory, connection, and frailty in human and post-human entanglements. Through virtual reality, games, animation, installation and writing, her projects have explored surveillance technology, the history of the telegraph, glitch and digital decay, videogames for plants, experimental motion capture techniques and science fiction films. Her current body of work focuses on speculative forms of botanical computing, imagining alternative systems of computation based in plant-thinking.

Her work has been presented at galleries, museums, festivals, and conferences internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; InterAccess (Toronto, Canada); the City College of New York; Georgia Southern University (Savannah); SIGGRAPH (San Antonio, Texax); ISEA; the New Forms Festival (Vancouver, Canada); the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (Shenzhen, China); the Game Happens festival (Genoa, Italy), and the FILE Electronic Language Festival (Sao Paulo, Brazil).

She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts and the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds an M.F.A. in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Physics from Smith College. Prior to joining Rensselaer, she was Assistant Professor in Art and Informatics at Indiana University, South Bend, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Hartford Art School and at Indiana University Bloomington. She is currently writing a dissertation on philosophies of care and computation as a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine.

Hans Tursack

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, PhD Student Electronic Arts (HASS)

Hans Tursack is a designer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a BFA in studio art from the Cooper Union School of Art, and an M.Arch from the Princeton University School of Architecture where he was the recipient of the Underwood Thesis Prize. He has worked in the offices of LEVENBETTS Architects, SAA/Stan Allen Architecture, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. His writing and scholarly work have appeared in Perspecta Journal, Pidgin Magazine, Plat, Crop Journal, Thresholds Journal, Log Journal and Acadia. Hans is currently a PhD student in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Joseph Bedford

Virginia Tech, Associate Professor School of Architecture

Joseph Bedford is an Associate Professor of History and Theory at Virginia Tech. He is the director of the Architecture Exchange, a platform that fosters discourse and exchange in architecture through podcasts, conferences, books, workshops, oral history projects and teaching resources. He is the author of Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture (Bloomsbury 2020) as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as JAE, ARQ, AA Files, OASE, Log and NYRA. He is the series editor of a new book series at Bloomsbury Press called Architecture Exchange: Engagements with Contemporary Theory as well as the e-flux Architecture series Theory’s Curriculum. He was educated at Princeton University, The Cooper Union and Cambridge University where he received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate and he was the recipient of a one-year Rome Scholarship at The British School in Rome. His scholarship explores the intellectual history of architectural thought in the later third of the twentieth century as it lays at the intersection between philosophy, theory and architectural education.

Matthew Allen

Washington University in St. Louis, Visiting Assistant Professor Sam Fox School of Art and Design

Matthew Allen writes and teaches courses on the history and theory of architecture, technology, and visual culture. He is the author of the book “Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture” (ETH / gta Verlag, 2023). His writing has appeared in Log, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Domus, the New York Review of Architecture, Architectural Record, and elsewhere. Allen holds a PhD and a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and other institutions. Allen has worked for MOS, Preston Scott Cohen, and other firms at the leading edge of contemporary practice.