Ray Chan is the CEO and Co-founder of 9GAG, a global multi-platform community for viral content and interests. Founded in 2008, 9GAG’s mission is to make the world happier. The platform has a global audience of 200 million, including 56 million followers on Instagram, 42 million followers on Facebook, and 16 million followers on Twitter. Ray graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in Law.

Auriea Harvey is a digital artist and sculptor living in Rome. Her practice encompasses virtual and physical sculpture, drawings, and simulations that blend technology and handmade production such as 3D printing and XR. With an extensive experience in producing video games, Harvey creates mythological worlds visible through form, animation, and immersion. She is engaged to define what sculptural production means in the present moment. Her works are part of the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, KADIST Collection, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology.

Keiken is an artist collective co-founded by Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori, and Isabel Ramos in 2015. Based between London and Berlin, the artists come from mixed diasporic backgrounds including Mexican. Japanese, European. And Jewish. Keiken’s collective title originates from the Japanese word for experience, in which the lived experience is at the core of their practice. They collaboratively build and imagine a metaverse to simulate new structures and ways of existing and to test drive possible futures. Keiken creates speculative worlds through filmmaking, gaming, installation, extended reality (XR), blockchain, and performance. Through these varied mediums, they explore how societal introjection governs the way we feel, think, and perceive.

Lu Yang is an artist who works in Tokyo and Shanghai. Lu’s works combine fantasy, pain, and astonishment, which represent the cross-disciplinary integration of religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and modern technology as allusion to the real-life form and structure of nature and the origin of religion. Lu’s artistic practice spans game engines, 3D animated movies, electronic gaming devices, live motion capture performance, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

Dr Gabriella Lukács is a cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan (Duke University Press, 2010) and Invisibility by Design: Women and Work in Japan’s Digital Economy (Duke University Press, 2020). Lukacs is currently working on a third book The Aesthetics of Populism: Media Activism in Illiberal Hungary, which examines how activists harness analog and digital media to creatively engage with authoritarian populism and to build new cultural, social, and political commons in Hungary.

Ruini Shi is an animation director and crypto researcher based in London. She explores virtual intimacy and creates narratives that interrogate the compatibility between humanity and emerging technologies. Shi is an award-winning animator who has received awards including the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica. Her work has been presented worldwide such as at Animafest Zagreb, Royal Television Society Award, transmediale, and the Lumen Prize, and nominated for the Rapport award for Women in Art and Tech in 2019. She is currently a PhD candidate, investigating the possibilities presented by the confluence of crypto and animation.

Sputniko! is a multimedia artist and filmmaker, who creates works that span biotechnology, gender performance, to interspecies communication. Employing science and technology to investigate society and contemporary social values, Sputniko!’s work stimulates discussions on cultural, social, and ethical implications of emerging technologies. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre-Pompidou, Metz; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York; among others. Sputniko! was Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab and was Director of Design Fiction Group (2013-2017). She is currently an Associate Professor at the Tokyo University of Arts.