Jury 2021

Juliane Götz (DE) is a Berlin based artist, using various media such as time-based performance and installation as well as classical sculptural and two-dimensional works. Since 2013 she is part of the artist group Quadrature. With her partner Sebastian Neitsch, their artistic explorations gravitate towards data, physical experiments and new technologies as means to read and write todays realities. Their works have been shown internationally and they have been awarded several residencies and grants for their artistic practice.
quadrature.co

Hsin-Chien Huang (TW) is an artist who specializes in mixed media. Science, technology, new media, programming, and algorithms are tools he uses to bring the universe of his imagination to life. He is especially enthusiastic about VR because it opens up a world of possibilities, free of any constraints. He collaborated with Laurie Anderson and their VR work “La Camera Insabbiata” won the best VR experience Award at the 74th Venice Film Festival. His latest work “Bodyless” also won the Special Mention at 2019 Kaoshiung Film Festival, the Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2020 and the Golden Mask Award at 2020 NewImages Festival.
www.storynest.com

Randa Maroufi (MR/FR). Born in 1987 in Casablanca. She currently lives and works in Paris. Randa Maroufi is a graduate of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Tetouan, Morocco (2010) and the School of Fine Arts, Angers, France (2013). She also earned a diploma from Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing, France (2015). Randa Maroufi has been Artist Member of Academy of France in Madrid at Casa de Velázquez in 2017-18. She has received many awards for her film Le Park (2015), and Bab Sebta (2019).
randamaroufi.com/

Casey Reas (US) is an artist and educator who lives in Los Angeles. His software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work ranges from small works on paper to building-scale installations and he balances solo work in the studio with collaborations with architects and musicians. Reas’ work is in a range of private and public collections at institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences and a bachelor’s degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001; Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.
reas.com

Helen Starr (TT) is an Afro-Carib curator, producer and cultural activist from Trinidad, WI. She began curating exhibitions with artists such as Susan Hillier, Cindy Sherman and Marcel Duchamp in 1995. Helen founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010, to give marginalised artists access to technologies such as Game Engines, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR). Helen has worked with many public institutions such as Wysing Art Centre, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD in Derby. Being Indigenous-American Helen is interested in how digital artforms transform our understanding of reality by world-building narratives through storytelling and counter-storytelling. How, by “naming one’s own reality” we can experience the Other. Helen is on the board of QUAD, Derby and in 2020 she co-founded DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Salma Noor.

Jens Hauser (DE/FR/DK) is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology, trans-genre and hybrid aesthetics. He is a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, following a dual post-doctoral position at the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, and coordinates the (OU)VERT network for Greenness Studies. He is a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program, and an affiliated faculty member at the Department for Image Science at Danube University Krems, He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of Innsbruck, a guest professor at the Department of Arts and Sciences of Art at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a researcher affiliated with École Polytechnique Paris-Saclay. Hauser has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals.

Kenric McDowell (US) is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and are co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They record and release music under the name Qenric. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.

Karen Palmer is the Storyteller from the Future. An Award Winning International Artist and TED Speaker. She creates immersive film experiences that combine film, A.I. tech, Immersive Storytelling, Bias, Behavioural Psychology and Parkour. Articles include Wired Magazine, Forbes, PC Mag, Goethe Institute, Fast Company, Engadget, The Guardian “It leapfrogs over VR”… Exhibitions include V&A the PHI Centre, The Future of Storytelling, SXSW, The Museum of Modern Art Peru. Armoury Arts Week NYC and SIDF … Palmer has been described as a Thought Leader and has delivered keynotes all over the world including AT&T Shape Conference, Wired for Wonder Festival Microsoft, IFA+Summit and MIT to name a few. Recently she received an Honorary Mention for the STARTS Prize Ars Electronica for Perception iO, (Input Output), Enabling participants to experience the future of law enforcement. Her current project Consensus Gentium in R&D with the BFI, will be released late 2021 enables participants to experience the future today and and understand their agency within it.

Regine Rapp is an art historian, curator and director of Art Laboratory Berlin. Her research focuses on installation art, artist books, hybrid art and art & science collaborations. She has taught art history at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. As co-founder and director of Art Laboratory Berlin, she researches, curates and publishes on 21st century art at the interface of science and technology. In this context she conceived the international conferences Synaesthesia. Discussing a Phenomenon in the Arts, Humanities and (Neuro)Science (2013), Nonhuman Agents (2017) and The Camille Diaries (2020). In the project Mind the Fungi she has worked at the interface between artistic and scientific research and recently co-edited the project publication at TU Berlin University Press (2020).
artlaboratory-berlin.org

Marleen Stikker (NL) (1962) is founder of Waag Future Lab, a social enterprise that consists of a research institute for creative technologies and social innovation and Waag Products, that launched companies like Fairphone, the first fair smartphone in the world. She is also founder of ‘De Digitale Stad’ (The Digital City) in 1993, the first virtual community introducing free public access to the Internet in Amsterdam. Marleen Stikker strongly adheres to the Maker’s Bill of Rights motto: “If You Can’t Open It, You Don’t Own It”. Marleen believes that society needs open technologies that meet societal challenges.
waag.org/en/marleen-stikker

Ludger Brümmer (DE) holds a Masters in pedagogy at University Dortmund and a masters of Composition of the Folkwang Hochschule Essen. He worked with choreographer Susanne Linke and the Nederlands Dans Theater as well as Bernd Lintermann or rosalie. He was commissioned and performed at GRM, Paris, IMEB Bourges at ICMC’s in San Jose , Tokyo, Banff, Thessaloniki and other locations around the world. He was visiting Scholar at CCRMA Stanford University, teaching Assistant at the Folkwang Hochschule, TU Berlin, School of Design Karlsruhe, research fellow at Kingston University, lecturer for composition at the Sonic Arts Research Centre Belfast. Since 2003 he is head of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at ZKM|Karlsruhe now Hertz-Labor and guest professor at School of Design. Since 2017 he as well is professor of composition for digital media at the University of Music Trossingen and since 2009 member of the prestigious “Academy of the Arts Berlin”. His artistic work focusses on physical modelling of sound and visuals, Video art, granular synthesis, sound synthesis techniques, spatial music, databases. He developed the spatial audio system at the ZKM. Awards: Folkwang Award Essen, WDR Award Cologne. Busoni Award Akademie der Künste Berlin, Golden Nica Ars Electronica 1994 and second prize at the Ars Electronica 1997, Larry Austin Award, ICMA, Pierre d’Or Bourges 1997 and 2001, first prize at Rostrum for electroacoustic music by the UNESCO. Musica Sacrae 2001, Fribourg Switzerland. Menzioni D’Onore at the Luigi Russolo Award, Italy and the Stockholm Electronic Music Award.
zkm.de/de/person/ludger-bruemmer

Cedrik Fermont (CD/BE/DE) is a Berlin-based Belgian-Congolese composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host and label manager (at Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic, elctroacoustic and experimental music since 1989. He has toured extensively in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and North America. His main research focuses on electronic, electroacoustic, experimental and noise music from and in Asia and Africa. In 2017 he released together with Dimitri della Faille the book Not Your World Music about noise music in South-East Asia, winner of the 2017 “Golden Nica” Prix Ars Electronica in the “Digital Musics & Sound Art” category.
syrphe.com/c-drik.html

Rikke Frisk (DK) is executive producer at Copenhagen Opera Festival. A festival that uses the city as background and venue for opera in various formats. She is responsible for the strategic development and elevation of the relevance of contemporary opera to a broader audience. A position she is familiar with from her time as manager and co-creator of Strøm – the leading festival for electronic music in Scandinavia, which she ran for several years. Rikke is also co-founder of the community focused culture production company: Indgreb, which is based in Copenhagen. Indgreb specializes in projects within participant-driven art and innovation events. Within their portfolio is the creation of the international innovation and art competition festival, Afsnit I and Talk Town – a debate festival on gender, equality and feminism. Among several obligations she is head of the board of Denmark’s leading venue for experimental contemporary music and global roots: ALICE. With a background in architecture and communication she is an experienced creative leader, with renowned relational and strategic abilities to unfold people’s skills and ideas.

Daito Manabe (JP) Tokyo-based artist, interaction designer, programmer, and DJ. Launched Rhizomatiks in 2006. Since 2015, has served alongside Motoi Ishibashi as co-director of Rhizomatiks Research, the firm’s division dedicated to exploring new possibilities in the realms of technical and artistic expression with a focus on R&D-intensive projects. Specially-appointed professor at Keio University SFC. Manabe’s work in design, art, and entertainment takes a new approach to everyday materials and phenomenon. However, his end goal is not simply rich, high-definition realism by recognizing and recombining these familiar elemental building blocks. Rather, his practice is informed by careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelationships and boundaries delineating the analog and digital, real and virtual.
www.daito.ws

Christine McLeavey Payne (US) is a research scientist at OpenAI where she created MuseNet and collaborated to create Jukebox. Groups such as the BBC Philharmonic and SF Symphony have performed pieces co-composed using MuseNet. Also a Juilliard-trained pianist and avid chamber musician, she is particularly interested in Human/AI musical collaborations. She holds a masters in neuroscience from Stanford, and a degree in physics from Princeton.
christinemcleavey.com

Sirikit Amann (AT) has been a juror since the very inception of the u19–create your world category for youngsters under 19 years of age in Austria. She was director of cultural education at KulturKontakt Austria. Since 2020 she is the head of the sector “Education and Society” with a focus on digital education at the OeAD-GmbH. The OeAD is the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalization. She had previously served as an expert advisor in artistic affair at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture and in the Office of the former Federal Chancellery Minister.

Josef Dorninger (AT) has been exploring new forms of digital artistic expression with the Viennese collective OMAi since 2007. His team presents the results worldwide in live performances, art installations and workshops. The primary medium is digital light projections, implemented with the specially developed visual instrument Tagtool. This is used by an international community and was featured by Apple at the World Wide Developer Conference in 2014 and 2016. As a trained social worker, Josef has also been involved in regional youth work in his hometown of Tulln since 2005. With this dual role, he incorporates state-of-the-art technologies into creative youth projects. Since 1996, Josef has also held a leading position in the non-profit cultural association Kunstwerkstatt, which he uses to implement regional art and youth projects.
www.omai.at

Conny Lee (AT) Conny Lee is already part of the core team of u19–create your world. The host of Radio FM4 is known nationwide – there she hosts the afternoon show FM4 Connected, produces and co-hosted the bilingual FM4 Morning Show and a show about video games in a socio-political context. In addition, Conny Lee is head of the “love department”, which deals with current topics in the areas of sex, love and dating. As an editor she reviews games, literature and comics.
fm4.orf.at/tags/connylee

Mira Lu Kovacs Lives and works in Vienna. With her numerous and diverse projects, MLK has a permanent place in the Austrian music landscape as a producer/composer of consistently high-quality pop music (and everything around it). As a singer, ‘head of’ and songwriter recently under her own name (formerly as “Schmieds Puls”), with “5K HD” (progressive cinematic electronic music), as well as side woman and guitarist with “My Ugly Clementine” (rock/pop). In addition to these 3 main projects, the musician regularly collaborates with artists of various genres. Nominated several times, she won the FM4 Amadeus Award in 2016, and in 2020 her band “5K HD” was honored with the “Music Moves Europe Talent Award”.
www.miralukovacs.com

Tori Reichel (AT) is a freelance journalist, moderator and conceptionist based in Vienna. His work is almost always at the interface between social politics and pop or subculture. Growing up as the child of a Nigerian father and an Austrian-Swedish mother in Salzburg, he later studied journalism and communication science at the University of Vienna and worked as an editor and moderator at VICE Austria from 2014 to 2018. Tori writes for media such as Die Zeit, among others, and has been the host of AUX, a weekly music and pop culture magazine on A1Now, since February 2021.
torireichel.com