Daniel Birnbaum is the Director and Curator of Acute Art in London, UK. Daniel was previously the Director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 2010 to 2018. From 2000 to 2010 he was the Rector of Städelschule in Frankfurt and Director of its kunsthalle Portikus. He is contributing editor of Artforum in New York and has curated a number of large exhibitions, including Airs de Paris at Centre Pompidou in Paris (in co-operation with Christine Macel) in 2007. Daniel was the director of the 2009 Venice Biennale. He is the author of numerous books on art and philosophy and is the co-editor (with Isabelle Graw) of the Insitut für Kunstkritik series published by Sternberg Press. He is on the board of directors of Nobel Media, the organisation that manages all the events surrounding the Nobel prizes. 

Artist Olafur Eliasson's works span sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and climate change. Since 1997, his solo shows have appeared in major museums around the world. Olafur’s projects in public spaces include The New York City Waterfalls in 2008, and Ice Watch, shown in Copenhagen in 2014, Paris in 2015 and London in 2018. Olafur’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world. He has been active in the digital realm for many years and was early to explore the potential of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.  

Since 1991 Douglas Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. In 2000 Douglas amplified his visual art production and had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Kunstinstituut Melly, formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and Villa Stücke in Munich in the fall of 2017. In 2015 and 2016 Douglas was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevlier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres and receiver of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. 

Anicka Yi is an artist whose practice relates to synthetic biology, bio engineering, extinction, and bio fiction. Her work examines concepts of "the biopolitics of the senses" or how assumptions and anxieties related to gender, race, and class shape physical perception. Anicka lives and works in New York City. Institutional solo exhibitions of her work include the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. Anicka has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, 2017. 

Ed Atkins is an artist who makes videos, writes and draws, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed. Solo presentations include Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; MMK Frankfurt; DHC/ART, Montréal (all 2017); Castello di Rivoli, Turin; The Kitchen, New York (both 2016); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015) and The Serpentine Gallery, London (2014). An anthology of his texts, A Primer for Cadavers, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016, and an extensive artist’s monograph from Skira was published in 2017. Ed lives and works in Berlin. 

Pamela Rosenkranz’s work addresses the shifting philosophical and scientific meanings of the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ during the time of the Anthropocene (the geological epoch marked by the impact of human activities on the ecosystem). Pamela deploys a palette of patented icons—polyethylene water bottles, soft drinks, Ralph Lauren latex paint, JPEGs of International Klein Blue, Ilford photo paper, and ASICS sneakers—augmented by flesh-toned silicone and acrylic paint. By challenging the distinction between the natural and the artificial, she addresses the evolutionary and material dynamics underlying perception, art, and culture. 

Susanne Pfeffer took on the role as new director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main from 1 January 2018. The curator of Anne Imhof’s Golden Lion–winning project at the German Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, and contributor to Artforum, Pfeffer became head of Kassel’s Fridericianum in 2013. At the Fridericianum she explored posthuman futures with shows such as Speculations on Anonymous Materials (2013) and its sequels, Nature After Nature (2014) and Inhuman (2015). Susanne was artistic director at the Künstlerhaus Bremen from 2004-2006 and chief curator of the KW Insitute of Contemporary Art in Berlin from 2007-2012.  

Lars Jakob Bang Larsen is adjunct curator of international art at Moderna Museet. He is a guest professor in art theory, at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, visiting lecturer at the program in art, culture and technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and professeur invité and tutor at Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design, Geneva. Lars is a post doc fellow at the Institute of Art and Cultural History, University of Copenhagen, from where he also holds his PhD on psychedelic concepts in neo-avantgarde art. Lars organised several exhibitions, and was co-curator with Jochen Volz of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo 2016: Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty). He wrote several publications and is a contributor to various art magazines (including Artforum). 

Michelle Kuo is The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She was the Editor in Chief of Artforum from 2010-2017, helming the 50th anniversary issue of the magazine as well as numerous other special issues on topics ranging from new media to painting to identity politics. Michelle is the author of essays on the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Le Corbusier and Jeff Koons, among others; has lectured widely at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; contributes to publications such as October and The Art Bulletin; and delivered the 2012 International Association of Art Critics’ Distinguished Lecture. She is also contributing author to a book about the subject of her PhD dissertation, the postwar group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). 

Paul F.M.J. Verschure is Catalan Institute of Advanced Studies (ICREA) Research Professor, Director of the neuro-engineering program at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalunya and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology where he runs the Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems (SPECS) Laboratory. He is an Associate Professor in Computation and Artificial Intelligence at the University Pompeu Fabra. He is founder/CEO of Eodyne Systems S.L., which is commercializing novel science grounded neurorehabilitation and cultural heritage technologies. Paul is founder/Chairman of the Future Memory Foundation which aims at supporting the development of new tools and paradigms for the conservation, presentation, and education of the history of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. Complementary to his science, Paul has developed and deployed over 35 art installations and performances. 

Dado Valentic is a Chief Creative Technologist at Acute Art, world’s leading platform for Virtual Reality (VR) Art production and distribution. Faced with the task of overcoming the technical limitations of current VR, Dado has developed an entirely new approach to working in VR based on his experience as a researcher in the area of perception and optical illusion. He is working closely with some of the world’s leading contemporary artist and transforming their vision into interactive VR Artworks. Dado is an award-winning colourist and colour scientist with a long-standing contribution in the field of innovation of digital imaging. He has been working on some of the best-known Feature Film and TV productions including Sherlock Holmes, Exodus, Game of Thrones, Marco Polo, Total Recall and more. He was one of the inventors of Colour Managed Workflow that has today become a standard for the most high-end feature and episodic TV productions and continues to be one of the most innovative creative technologists. 

Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art, Time-based Media at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She was previously based in Berlin and New York, where she worked as an independent curator, art critic, and editor of e-flux. Karen was a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. With a focus on feminist practices, art and technology, her writing is regularly featured in magazines such as frieze and ArtReview, and anthologies published by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MIT Press and New Museum. Karen co-curated the survey exhibition Art Post-Internet at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014) and edited the publication Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/DATA. As regular public speaker, Karen has spoken at Renaissance Society at University of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Museum of Modern Art New York, MoMA PS1, and elsewhere.