Speakers

Alt-text: Hito Steyerl pictured with a calm expression and closed eyes, has dark hair piled on her head and a floral zip up jacket. — Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl (born 1966 in Munich, Germany) is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the University of the Arts, Berlin, where she co-founded the Research Centre for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin. Steyerl has produced a variety of work as a filmmaker and author in the field of essayist documentary, filmography and post-colonial critique, both as a producer and theorist. Steyerl attended the Japan Institute of the Moving Image and University of Television and Film Munich. She participated in Manifesta 5 in 2004 and has exhibited widely in solo and group shows since this time; notably, at the Chisenhale Gallery, London 2010; E-flux, New York, 2012; Artists Space, New York 2015; KOW, Berlin, 2015; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2015; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2016 and Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, 2016. Steyerl is widely published in periodicals, newspapers, journals and anthologies, as well as her own publications, including the critically acclaimed Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War in 2017.

Alt-text: American Artist wears a green button-up shirt, has light brown skin and a collection of dark brown braids that hang down — American Artist

American Artist (b. 1989 Altadena, CA, lives and works in New York) is an artist whose work considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing. Artist is a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of EYEBEAM and completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. They have exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Koenig & Clinton, New York. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and Art21. Artist is a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design and teaches critical theory at the School for Poetic Computation.

Alt-text: Salome Asega has short dark curls and brown skin. Surrounded by pink flowers, she wears a blue and pink floral blouse — Salome Asega

Salome Asega is an artist and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and Recess. She has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more. She has also given presentations and lectures at Performa, EYEO, Brooklyn Museum, MIT Media Lab, NYU, and more. Salome is currently a Ford Foundation Technology Fellow landscaping new media artist and organization networks. She is also the Director of Partnerships at POWRPLNT, a youth digital art collaboratory in Brooklyn. Salome received her MFA from Parsons at The New School in Design and Technology where she also teaches classes on speculative design and participatory design methodologies.

Rindon Johnson

Rindon Johnson (b.1990, San Francisco) lives in Berlin. In 2021, Johnson will open two pendant solo exhibitions; in winter at SculptureCenter, New York and in autumn at Chisenhale, London. In summer 2021, Johnson, Maryam Hoseini and Jordan Strafer will present a collaborative exhibition at New Museum, New York. Author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017), Shade the King (Capricious, 2017) and forthcoming, The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (Chisenhale, Inpatient, SculptureCenter, 2021), Johnson studies VR as an Associate Fellow at the Universität der Künste Berlin.

Alt-text+%3A+In+a+crowded+crosswalk%2C+Eunsong+Kim+examines+a+small+camera.jpg — Eunsong Kim

Eunsong Kim is an arts writer, poet and translator. She teaches critical race & ethnic studies at Northeastern University. Her writings have appeared in: Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies, Poetics of Social Engagement and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Magazine, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review amongst others. She is the author of Gospel of Regicide, a book of poems published by Noemi Press in 2017, and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her academic book project in progress, The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation (under con-tract with Duke University Press) considers how legal notions of property become foundational to avant-garde and modern understandings of innovation in the arts. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship.

Alt-text: Lawrence Lek sits with a solemn look, he has shoulder length dark hair and wears a green utility jacket and black shirt. — Lawrence Lek

Lawrence Lek is a London-based artist, filmmaker, and musician working in the fields of virtual reality and simulation. Drawing from a background in architecture and electronic music, he creates fictional versions of real places that speculate on alternate geopolitical movements and future technological conflicts. This cinematic universe features characters caught between human and machine worlds: digital nomads, AI satellites, and online superstars, all searching for autonomy under alien conditions of existence.
His works include the virtual world 'Unreal Estate (The Royal Academy is Yours)’ (2015), the dystopian Brexit simulator ‘Europa, Mon Amour’ (2016), the conspiracy theory video essay 'Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD)' (2016), the AI-coming of-age story 'Geomancer’ (2017), the site-specific video game '2065' (2018), and the VR simulation 'Nøtel' (2019). His CGI feature film 'AIDOL' (2019) was presented at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and transmediale 2020, Berlin.
Recent solo exhibitions include 'Ghostwriter', CCA Prague (2019); 'Farsight Freeport', HeK, Basel (2019); Nøtel, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Essen (2019); 'AIDOL', Sadie Coles HQ, London (2019); and '2065', K11, Hong Kong (2018). Lek composes soundtracks and conducts audio-visual mixes of his films, often incorporating live playthroughs of his open-world video games. Soundtrack releases include 'AIDOL OST' (Hyperdub, 2020) and 'Temple OST' (The Vinyl Factory, 2020). Performances include 'Doom' at Somerset House, London and 'ProGeo', ICA, London (2019).

Lauren Lee McCarthy

Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is a 2020 Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow, 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellow, 2019 Creative Capital Grantee, and has been a resident at Eyebeam, ZERO1, CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica. She is the recipient of grants from the Knight Foundation, the Online News Association, Mozilla Foundation, Google AMI, Sundance Institute New Frontiers Labs, Turner Broadcasting, and Rhizome. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterth ur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT. She is also the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language for learning creative expression through code online. She is Co-Director of the Processing Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields—and to make these fields accessible to diverse communities. Lauren is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.

Alt-text: Gloria Sutton smiles in front of soft light. She has dark hair, fair skin and wears thick framed black glasses. — Gloria Sutton

At Northeastern, Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and is affiliated faculty with Information Design and Visualization. She serves as faculty advisor for Art History and Visual Studies, as well as on the Executive Committee for Northeastern University‚ Women‚ Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.
Sutton teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary art history and theory in a global context and her seminars address the rise of network culture and consider the ways visual art intersects with publishing, curation and design often directly engaging with current exhibitions and public projects.