Art Thinking Workshop in Taipei

Karen Palmer (Artist)
As the Storyteller from the Future, Karen Palmer is an award winning XR creator and futurist who explores the implications of A.I and technology on societal structures and the impact of in-equality. She does this through enabling participants to experience the future today through her immersive experiences. Karen recently won the coveted XR Experience Competition at SXSW 2023 with her film Consensus Gentium. It is a powerful exploration into the implications of today’s AI technology. This immersive experience is designed to drive discussion about data privacy, unconscious biases and the power of technology.

“Businesses have adopted a plethora of approaches from Disruptive, Innovative, Adaptive, Human-centric to Design Thinking! However, the future of business is Visionary thinking in order to cultivate the ability to travel to the future and imagine their optimum business then travel back to create the building blocks to make it a reality! I am the Storyteller from the Future! Join me to discover how!”

Robin McNicholas
Co-founder and Director of Marshmallow Laser Feast, Robin has directed a myriad of experiential game changers, large-scale installations and live performances. In 2021 he directed Dream, a collaboration with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Philharmonia Orchestra, Epic Games and Manchester International Festival.

Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) is an experiential artist collective, their work reinterprets the idea of human perception and experience. Employing a wealth of creative disciplines and underpinned by research, inviting participants to navigate with a sensory perception beyond the everyday. In collaboration with artists, scientists, musicians, poets, programmers, engineers and many more makers, MLF has been leaving a slug trail of sensory experiences as they journey through the cosmos. Fusing architectural tools, contemporary imaging techniques and performance with tactile forms, they sculpt spaces that lay dormant until animated by playful investigation.

Olga Tykhonova (Head of Research & Development of MUSEUM BOOSTER)
Olga combines research and hands-on practice aimed at ecosystemic advancement of cultural heritage institutions, particularly museums. Approaching the buzz-topic of sector’s digital transformation she explores how can and should we, as a sector, shift our focus from technologies of ‘information and data’ to those of world-building, imagination and caring. As a curator and architect of multi-constituent partnerships and funding programs, she is particularly looking at the intersection of art, social design and creative technology, investigating ways to nurture shared social ecology for collaboration across diverse epistemic cultures.

Her practice is committed to the path and process of interrogation organisational and collaborative structures that empower learning en route other possible ways of being and working together, ways of knowledge and art production that fuse the cognitive and the imaginary and allow to work through different notions of the political as necessarily unfinished. Convinced that instituting differently cannot be done alone, but only as a collective practice, Olga is carving out space and possibility for new grammar of sharing and being in common, enabling unexpected encounters and curating relationships.

Jussi Ängeslevä (Creative Director at ART+COM Studios)
Professor Jussi Ängeslevä is a designer, an artist and an educator. Having taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and Royal College of Arts in London, but lecturing around the planet, he is actively involved in the ever expanding field of new media, working with digital materiality and interaction design. In parallel to the academic work, he has served as Creative Director at ART+COM Studios, where his work in public art commissions, exhibitions and installations are consistently yielding international recognition.

His design ethos is leveraging hardware, software, physical and visual design in the search for elegance in spatial communication, where the meaning is inseparable from the medium communicating it.

Emiko Ogawa (Head of Prix Ars Electronica)
Emiko Ogawa is a Japanese curator and artist based in Linz, Austria. Since 2018, she is Head of Prix Ars Electronica which is known as the world’s most time-honored media arts competition organized by Ars Elecronica. She has worked for the launch of the new Ars Electronica Center in 2008 and since then she has curated the exhibition for the Ars Electronica Center, Ars Electronica Festival and Ars Electronica Export. She has also been involved in many of Ars Electronica’s art thinking programs for educational institutions, companies, and governments, where essential questions are discussed and shaped as a starting point for the future.

“Art creates creative questions and design creates the creative solutions. Art is a catalyst for shaping a better future society, a way to open up new perspectives, encourage curiosity to look at what is behind the scenes and to stimulate creative solutions. Art Thinking is a process of applying artistic thinking and an artful view to a broader range of challenges.”

Peter Freudling (Lead Designer & Artist at Ars Electronica)
Peter was one of the first members to join the Ars Electronica Futurelab during his studies of Industrial Design at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz. As a researcher in the Virtual Environments group he helped to create several projects in the field, among other the CAVEin the Ars Electronica Center. Peter has passed on his knowledge by teaching the course Virtual Reality for Industrial Design at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz. As an Industrial Designer his focus shifted slowly from the virtual to the physical world joining the Media Art and Architecture research team. Recent works mainly focus on artistic interventions in the semi-public space as well as design-related work on many projects.

Laura Welzenbach (Head of Ars Electronica Export)
Laura Welzenbach produces and directs projects in art, technology and politics. She is a strategic planner with the current superpower: so much love for social impact through art and public engagement.

As the Head of Ars Electronica Export Laura creates experiences through connecting art and science. The international collaborations take shape of exhibitions, workshops and art science residencies. In the past she ran the artist residency program at Eyebeam in New York (2014-2017) and was executive manager of the sound:frame festival in Vienna (2010-2013). She collaborated with arts organizations such as the Guggenheim Museum, Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, tiff Toronto International Film Festival in Canada, MAK Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, MQ Museums Quartier, and k/haus Kuenstlerhaus in Vienna.