The Speakers
Dr Anastasia Tyurina
Dr Anastasia Tyurina is a Lecturer in Visual Communication - School of Design at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. As a design researcher and a new media artist, Anastasia is interested in creating visual experiences that promote social change, better health, and wellbeing.
The broad objective of Tyurina's research agenda is to contribute to the understanding of how collaborative practices of science, technologies, and contemporary arts and design are capable of addressing and solving some complex critical issues in society related to the Anthropocene.
She operates within the domains of scientific imaging, photography, creative coding, visual communication, and interaction design. She approaches the development of technology as a fundamental human activity. From this perspective, she seeks to uncover the relationship between the mind, body, and material that cultivates knowledge through making.
Arzu Kusaslan
Arzu graduated from Istanbul Technical University, Architectural Department. She has been searching the way people perceive the reflection of power relations in space, reactions and behaviours developed by people against this and their creativity under power control. She looks at how people use digital technologies as a means of expressing themselves in space.
Thresholds-MIT Journal see pages: 102-107
Conversation Projects
Conversation Projects is Sobia Ahmad & Monroe Isenberg. They are interdisciplinary artists working at the intersections of art and social engagement. Through performance, installation, and new media, they investigate relationships between human experiences and the natural world. Their collaborative body of work explores a shared interest in ecology, spirituality, and their Islamic and Jewish mystical traditions and ways of knowing. Through contemplative repetition, they reimagine rituals that approach communion with land, place, and the invisible.
Darroch Day & Dr Hannah Hopewell
Darroch is currently a fifth year landscape architecture student at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He enjoys exploring new ways of representing landscapes and has found strength within digital modelling and critically assessing an idea against the real world site and its inhabitants.
https://darroch.myportfolio.com/
Dr. Hannah Hopewell teaches at the School of Architecture, Te Herenga Waka. Hannah’s research take place at the intersections of landscape, the urban and politics. She is particularly interested in the relationship between the representation of landscape and spatial equity.
ElsaMarie DSilva
ElsaMarie D’Silva is the Founder & CEO of Red Dot Foundation (India) and President of Red Dot Foundation Global (USA). Its platform Safecity, crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in Dec 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India and abroad.
ElsaMarie is a 2020 IWF Fellow and a Gratitude Network Fellow, 2019 Reagan Fascell Fellow, a 2018 Yale World Fellow and an alumni of the Stanford Draper Hills Summer School, the US State Department’s Fortune Mentoring Program, Oxford Chevening Gurukul and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Leadership Program. She is also a fellow with Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices, Vital Voices and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader.
She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women and has won several awards including Government of India Niti Aayog’s #WomenTransformingIndia award and The Digital Woman Award in Social Impact by SheThePeople. In 2017, she was awarded the Global Leadership Award by Vital Voices in the presence of Secretary Hillary Clinton.
Greg Nijs
Greg Nijs is a sociologist working as a researcher at Urban Species & LoUIsE (Dept. of Architecture, Université Libre de Bruxelles, BE). Bringing together social scientific research and collaborations with artists and designers, his interests revolve around issues of human and more-than-human entanglements; participation, experience, affect and cognition in the design and use of urban environments; other/ed knowledge practices; and questions of the urban, nature, and technology.
Inga Adda
Inga Adda is an emerging artist from Rockville, Maryland, with an emphasis on materiality and experimentation. She received her BFA in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. Her latest art installation, Walk This Way, a self- guided, experiential walk in the woods which encourages observation, contemplation of the natural world, will open in Little Bennett Regional Park in Montgomery County, Maryland, U.S. this summer 2021.
Dr Jane Turner
Jane’s research and practice explores game design, and the game engines and systems that underlay production, as cultural objects. She was involved in the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) Indigenous game world project Digital Songlines. She has been exploring cultural geographies of the imagination via the use of high-end game engines in projects such as: tabernacle project and graffiti engine – nQuumbar project (participatory design using game worlds). In the projects of Strolls project and little grey cat engine, Jane explores the autocracy of software and potential participatory options to exploit the spatial metaphors of game worlds to re-connect digital storytelling to place. Recent projects such as The Rolling Stories Project and Pathways and Paws(es) continue the exploration of cultural geographies of the imagination and ontological design – the power of design to tell stories.
Dr Jenny Partanen
Jenni Partanen is a Professor of urban studies at the TalTech, Estonia. Her research interests are in urban self‐organizing processes and their simulation, problematic of ubiquitous 'programmable city', and the possibilities of planning in controlling the complex urbanity.
Jorgos Coenen
Jorgos Coenen is in the final stage of his PhD research at the Research[x]Design lab at KU Leuven (Belgium), where is supervised by Prof. Andrew Vande Moere. The aim of his research was to understand how the public interaction and visualization of data could spark local debate and encourage active citizenship. His research has led to novel types of interactive public display that communicate train timetable information, air pollution levels, hyperlocal perceptions of urban spaces, and sports statistics. Throughout this research, he also iteratively developed a custom public display system, coined Citizen Dialog Kit. This tool has since been deployed in multiple civic engagement projects as a means to include a more diverse part of the population in a wide range of participatory processes.
Meeting Ground
Meeting Ground is a collaborative collection of projects that considers the ground as a point of entry to shared space where interconnection between earth and self, individual and other is made visible. Artists, curators and activists Susan Main and MJ Neuberger invite participants to look down and attend to the spaces they walk upon.
Susan Main's multi-disciplinary work explores individual and social contracts between space, time, and attention, pairing the unmediated event with tools that attempt to measure, define, locate and orient. Using drawing, painting, video, projection, documentation, and collaboration, her work investigates the liminal, transitory qualities of attention and mediation.
MJ Neuberger’s work arises from her ritual attempts to return to a body abandoned in childhood trauma and abuse that she traces in part to colonial history in her mother’s native Philippines. Referencing indigenous ceremonies and elemental processes, Neuberger’s installations, sculptural work and images suggest acknowledging shared vulnerability and reconnecting with an indigenous, nature-based self as a path toward integrating traumatic memory and reoccupying colonized bodies.
Their collaborative work brings together artists and non-artists through simple prompts that encourage co-creation and re-imagination of shared space. From Project: Soils porch chats, quarterly seasonal gatherings, and participatory acts of intention and attention, Meeting Ground explores the limits and possibilities of aesthetics to open up/decolonize/re-center a meeting with the ground. Through 2021, Meeting Ground projects are featured at Cultivate.
Dr Seija Ridell
Seija Ridell is Professor of Media Studies at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Finland. Her field of expertise ranges from news narratology, genre theory, reception research and user studies to the study of web‐related local activism and algorithmic mediation of urban infrastructures.
Dr Stanislav Roudavski
An academic at the University of Melbourne, Dr Stanislav Roudavski researches designs for animals, plants, rivers, and rocks as well as humans. His experiments contribute to knowledge by using scientific evidence and advanced technologies in concert with cultural, political, and historical analyses.
Supercluster
Supercluster. Collaborative meeting grounds for locative media in the XXI century. Exploring new forms of creating and learning with locative media in the light of locally-globally issues, our planetary crises and forces of global change, encouraging local and global joined-up-thinking.
Fred Adam (Spain) is a new media explorer co-founder of the CGeomap locative media digital platform and founder of the Lab GPS Museum. He is a researcher and freelance art director specialized in spatial narratives in the outdoors. He has a special interest in investigating how mobile technology can help us to understand better and preserve the Earth by involving people into transformative outdoors experiences. He was art director of (among other projects( JUNGLE-IZED: A Conversation With Nature for Sound Walk Collective New York (bringing the Amazon rainforest to Times Square, NYC) and Deep Time Walk (with Stephen Harding / Schumacher College).
With Geert Vermeire he has launched Supercluster - a locative media creation, teaching and learning web portal for collective and collaborative digital & mapping projects and online workshops and courses.
Geert Vermeire (Belgium) is curator, artist, poet with a focus on spatial writing, locative sound & performance and social practices. He develops collaborative processes, departing from the ethical involvement of cultural action, together with other creatives and activists comprising ecologists, anthropologists, musicologists, engineers and multimedia artists.
Co-founder of Supercluster and core team member of CGeomap. Specific interest in his practice goes to walking as a creative instrument, unfolding around human connections, text and space, resulting in works of arts, site-specific interventions, locative media and in creative walks engaging both with the landscape and with those walking through the landscape.
https://supercluster.eu/waters/
https://supercluster.eu/courses/earthlings/
Dr Tracey Benson
Dr Tracey M Benson is an Australian based interdisciplinary artist, researcher and founder of Treecreate. Her work focuses on issues related to belonging, place, wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviour change. Walking is central to her creative practice of exploring locative and augmented media tools to engage audiences to see their local places with fresh eyes. Her work has been extensively presented internationally in media arts festivals and exhibitions. With a passion for understanding different knowledge systems and engaging audiences, she often collaborates with Indigenous communities, historians, technologists and scientists. She lectures internationally and holds adjunct positions at University of Canberra, the More than Human Lab at Victoria University, Wellington, NZ, the eXtended Reality Collective at Charles Stuart University and is an Advisor for the TransArt Institute. She is listed as an expert with the Australian Academy of Science for her work on citizen engagement and behaviour change around energy and household sustainability.
Thomas Laureyssens
Thomas Laureyssens is an interaction and game-designer, researcher, artist, and teacher at LUCA School of Arts. His work is inspired by urban and societal matters, and driven by grounded optimism. Thomas designs games and interactive interventions for public and semi-public spaces, with the intention that they are inspirational or even transformative for the people or communities that engage with them. His PhD dissertation (in progress) concerns with how urban social technologies are appropriated and activated by local communities, and which role human actors play in this process.
Tony Yu
Tony Yu is a tutor and a research assistant at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, the University of Melbourne. He researchers design processes and their amplification by digital technologies. The aim of this research is to support production of inclusive, more-than-human design outcomes.
Vasilis Ntouros
I am a young and novice HCI researcher doing my PhD in OpenLab Newcastle (UK)/ Athens (GR). Through my research, I intend to participate in and contribute to the ‘sharing discourse’ by exploring -- through a series of case studies -- the role that the design of technologies play in mediating sharing activities. I am also an amateur gardener, an amateur skateboarder and an amateur mixed-media poet.
Yu Shan
Yu Shan is a PhD candidate at the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology. She is also a research assistant at the Institute for Cultural Industries, Shenzhen University. Her research interests include creative economy, immersive media, and content production in Asia. Recent publications include peer-review journal article on Cultural Science Journal.