Born 1952, living in Frankfurt/Main, belongs to the most important exponents of the contemporary music and theatre scene. Graduated in sociology and music, he composed and created internationally celebrated music-theatre works, staged concerts, radio plays, sound- and video-installations, compositions for ensemble and orchestra (Surrogate Cities, A House of Call a.o. CD productions for ECM Records).

1999–2023 — Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies and Centre for Media and Interactivity at Justus Liebig University Gießen. Artistic Director of Ruhrtriennale — International Festival of the Arts

2012–2014 — Anthology “Aesthetics of Absence”. Numerous international awards (Prix Italia, European Theatre Prize, International Ibsen Award, Grammy nominations a.o.)

Olga is a cultural theorist, working across technology, philosophy and aesthetics. Her latest book, Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI (2025) explores how data and artificial intelligence abstract people into new kinds of subjects.

The questions of subjectivation in relation to art and technology have been central to her work. Her previous book, Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (co-authored, 2019) explores aesthetics, ethics and ecology during times of multiple crises. This work traces connections between large scale systems such as ecologies, technical infrastructures or mechanisms of calculation and processes of subjectivation.

Her first book Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2012) conceptualises aesthetic and political engagements with technology at the dawn of the World Wide Web, proposing the concepts of organisational aesthetics and art platforms to understand collective art practices and art movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. This book is based on her work as a co-organiser of software art repository Runme.org and a co-curator of software art festivals (four editions of the Readme festival between 2002 and 2005 in Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus and Dortmund) and other exhibitions.

She edited or co-edited four Readme publications, the most significant of which is Readme. Software Arts and Cultures (Aarhus University Press, 2004).

She is also the editor of Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (2014) and a co-founder and co-editor of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.

He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and member of the Board of Directors of GLOBSEC.

He is a Financial Times contributing editor and the author of "Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe" (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes - won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize;

“After Europe” (UPenn Press, 2017); “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest” (UPenn Press, 2014) and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?” (TED Books, 2013).

Prof. Sir Konstantin “Kostya” Novoselov FRS is a physicist and artist whose career bridges science, technology, and culture. Best known for isolating graphene—a discovery that earned him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics—his research has shaped the fields of nanotechnology, 2D materials, functional intelligent materials, and the application of AI for materials design.

Alongside his scientific achievements, he is also an accomplished artist. He received a formal education in Chinese art, working in the studio of Zheng Shenglong (Xiamen University, China). His background in Physics links nicely with the traditional Chinese art, both following reductionism approach. Also interested in modern art, he collaborated with a number of artists, including Cornelia Parker and Mary Griffiths. In his artwork Kostya uses novel approaches and materials. He expanded the range of topics far beyond the traditional Chinese ones, producing a novel, refreshing view on many subjects.

Also, he introduced the use of graphene ink in his painting. Together with the inks based on other two-dimensional materials such media strongly expands the expressiveness and functionality of his artwork. Following Hofstadter’s idea, Kostya is fascinated with the concept of strange loops, which can be traced throughout many of his works.

He is Director of the Institute of Functional Intelligent Materials and Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore, as well as Langworthy Professor of Physics and Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester. He was knighted in 2012.