Nikolay Smirnov – artist, curator, geographer and researcher. Curator of the projects «Metageography» and «Eternal Frost» (Zero Arctic Biennale, Yakutsk, 2016). Member of scientific expeditions and former employee of the Laboratory for Comprehensive Geocultural Research in the Arctic. Participant in a number of art and scientific conferences, including «Navigation Beyond Vision». Participant of the main projects of the Fifth Ural Biennale (2019, curator Shaoyu Weng) and the Second Riga Biennale (2020, curator Rebecca Lamarsh-Vadel). Supervisor of the Summer School of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art - «Space and Letter: A Study of the Anthropocene».
Karine Bonneval – a French visual artist, her work focuses on plant otherness and the complex and specific interactions that link humans and plants. In her sculptures and installations, we are immersed in a world of organic forms with strong fictional power, where hybridizations of vocabulary and techniques go hand in hand with the marriage of art and science. With a degree from the ESAD of Strasbourg, she has exhibited in France, Germany, Latvia, Denmark, United States, Argentina and Sri Lanka. Together with the scientist Eric Badel from INRAE PIAF and the Studio Décalé, she won the 2019 Carasso Foundation grant «Composing knowledge».
Oron Catts – a legendary Australian artist, researcher and curator, head of the SymbioticA laboratory. Founder of the Tissue Culture & Art project. The main artistic and research interest for Catts is life, or rather, changing its perception in the light of new knowledge. Catts has developed a number of works that speak volumes about the need for a new cultural articulation of evolving concepts of life.
Polina Khanova – a translator, editor, assistant of the Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University, member of the editorial board of the Logos journal. Graduated from Moscow State University (2012), received a master's degree in Continental Philosophy from the University of Warwick (UK) (2015). She translated into Russian the works of John Law, Steve Fuller, Graham Harman and others, published in Logos, New Literary Review. Since 2017, he has been teaching at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, lecturing on contemporary post-continental philosophy, dark ecology and pop-culture, and working on a dissertation on performative ways of self-justification of philosophical texts.
Ben Woodard – a contemporary philosopher, specialist in the field of media, natural philosophy, cinema and literature in the genre of horror. He is engaged in post-doc research at the Institute of Philosophy and Theory of Art at the University of Lüneburg, Leifan (Germany). The author of «Slime Dynamics» translated into Russian. He is a representative of speculative realism.
Andrey Tetekin, Luciano Brina, Yu Gong – the Terraforming research team. The group researches the sustainable transformation of Earth's cities, technologies and ecosystems.
The Terraforming research team
Stefan Schwabe and Jannis Hülsen – the Farming the Uncanny Valley research team. The project studies issues of social change against the backdrop of the development of biotechnology. This study is intended to serve as a starting point for shaping open discourse and exploring new ways to engage the general public in co-creation. The developed methods and tools were applied during a series of workshops dedicated to various aspects of the surrounding world (soil, air, landscape, insects, plants).
Farming the Uncanny Valley team
Yulia Timofeeva – a researcher at the Central Museum of Soil Science named after V.V. Dokuchaev in St. Petersburg.
modеrator – Natalia Fedorova
Natalia Fedorova – curator, artist and researcher working in the field of science art and new media. Her work as a curator also includes media art laboratories in the Theatre of Nations (Moscow) and Big Drama Theatre (St Petersburg), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), National Centre for Contemporary Art ( Moscow). Her artistic work was demonstrated at such festivals as Manifesta, ISEA, EVA.