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Gerfried Stocker (AT) is a media artist and an electronic engineer. Since 1995 he has been a managing and an artistic director of Ars Electronica. 1995/1996 he developed the groundbreaking exhibition strategies of Ars Electronica Center with a small team of artists and technicians and was responsible for the set-up and establishment of Ars Electronica’s own R&D facility, Ars Electronica Futurelab. Since 2004 he has been in charge of developing Ars Electronica’s program of international exhibition tours. From 2005 on he planned the expansion of Ars Electronica Center and implemented the total substantive makeover of its exhibits.

Micol Talso’s adventure as the Art Director of Toiletpaper begins in 2010, after working 11 years in different advertising agencies in Milan and Buenos Aires (AR) where she has followed International Clients (Coca-Cola, Sky, Diesel, Telecom) and after founding Apart-Collective a brand solution agency based in Milan. Toiletpaper was born as a collection of images where naughtiness, irony, humor, shock value and plenty of potty mouth are not just accepted but wilfully cultivated.

Irma Boom is amongst the most remarkable and original designers of our time. She brings the single-mindedness and absolute dedication to her craft – mostly book design – that characterizes all great designers.

Hartmut Esslinger was born at Altensteig in the Black Forest in 1945. He studied electrical engineering at Stuttgart University before switching to industrial design at the Fachhochschule in Schwäbisch Gmünd (1966-1969). In 1969 Hartmut Esslinger founded a design agency in Altensteig, which became Frogdesign in 1982. “Frog” is an acronym for “Federal Republic of Germany”

Originally from Windhoek, Namibia, Max Siedentopf works as an artist, publisher, director at “riffraff”, co-founder of “Ordinary magazine” and creative director and partner at “KesselsKramer”.

Refik Anadol is a media artist and director born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1985. Currently, he lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a lecturer and visiting researcher at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. Embedding media arts into architecture, Refik Anadol questions the possibility of a post-digital architectural future in which there are no more non-digital realities. In this talk, he will share his studio’s unique journey with light as a material and architecture as a canvas. His recent experiments and permanent public art installations will collide with machine intelligence and future-forward insights to conclude his keynote.