Artists:

Amay Kataria is a Chicago based artist, deriving interests from philosophy, history of control, and cybernetic theory. His art practice is a platform to think, elaborate on ideas, experiment, play and meditate on externalizing the internal affairs of his body’s interaction with our society. His creative acts create a bridge between the biotic (human) and abiotic (machine) in an attempt to pause and pay attention to the aesthetic possibilities of systems. His works have been showcased around the world, including at Art Center Nabi, Ars Electronica, TIFA etc.

Béatrice de Fays​, ​or B2Fays, is a French artist who designs devices, developed using diverse techniques and various media, allowing the visitor to enter the “space” of painting. Her paintings, composed of layers, feed multimedia installations or performances, and lay the framework of a digital palimpsest. Her works have been exhibited around the world, including exhibitions at the European Commission, World Women’s Forum, Nehru Science Center and so on.

Bidhata KC is a Kathmandu based artist whose primary mediums are painting, printmaking and installations. She reflects on human relationships, social identities and everyday objects in her work. Recently, she has ventured into the media arts, creating experimental video work and interactive installations. Bidhata has showcased her works across Asia and Europe, such as at the International Contemporary Art Exchange Exhibition and Workshop, Art Fair, National Museum, Dhaka etc.

Danushka Marasinghe is a Sri Lankan artist working primarily with video in expanded formats. He engages the moving image to reveal the entanglements between the lived environment, histories of violence, racism and surveillance culture. His animation and short films reveal a sense of poignancy and at times an irony in their approach to the darker recesses of the human condition. Marasinghe has taken part in a number of art events and exhibitions and is an active artist within the Sri Lankan art community with a strong interest in promoting video and multidisciplinary art. He has participated in international art festivals such as Colombo Art Biennale in 2012, 2014 and 2016 (Colombo) and Portraits of Resistance (), Serendipity Revealed (UK) among others.

Faisal Anwar is an interactive new media artist/producer from Pakistan, living and working in Canada. His practice explores socio-political spaces, which intrigues the mind and emotion by multiple layers of participatory experiences. His projects often bring together art, culture and technology in an odd configuration to explore our perceptions towards private versus public spaces, surveillance and social interactivity in modern urban cultures. He has showcased his work across the globe, including exhibitions at Canvas Gallery, KHOJ, Harborfront Center, Aga Khan Museum Toronto, Nuit-Blanche Toronto, Karachi Biennial etc.

Justine Emard is a -based artist whose artworks explore the new relationships that are being established between our lives and technology. By combining different image medias - from photography to video and virtual reality - she situates her work at the crossroads between robotics, objects, live 3D prints, organic life and artificial intelligence. Her works have been showcased across venues in Europe, America and Asia, such as the National Museum of , the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montréal), the Mori Art Museum (), the MOT Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Irish Museum of Modern Art () and the Barbican Center () and so on. She is currently in residence at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Palash Bhattacharjee is a Dhaka based artist who creates photo-video installations, site-specific interventions, and performances. He is also interested in working with sound. His works often involve a combination of all these forms. Palash, through his works, explores the body’s relationship with space and time. He has exhibited his works across Bangladesh and the world, including exhibitions at Dhaka Art Summit, Bengal Shilpalay, Fiva Festival Internacional de videoarte, the 15th Asian Art Biennale and so on.

Parvathi Nayar is a based artist, writer and poet, best known for her videos and complex drawing practices. She also engages with installations, painting and photography. Her black-and-white graphite drawings are multifaceted works that look at the internal/intimate spaces within our bodies, and the external/public spaces in which we live, often through the prism of science and technology. Her works have been exhibited around the globe, and include exhibitions at Galleries Francoise Livinec, India Art Fair, the Kochi Muziris Biennale, The Singapore Art Museum; and large-scale installations in public places such as the Mumbai airport.

Pierre Jean Giloux is a French artist positioned at the convergence of several practices- sound, video and image, with which he creates graphic interventions that challenge conventional perceptions of reality and generate “reconstructed worlds”. His films are presented as immersive installations, where the spectator is invited to roam inside multi-devices screens. The borders between computer generated images and real images become blurred and give free rein to the observes to invent their own stories. His films have been exhibited widely, including at Fort Kochi, DNA Gallery, Berlin, Kyoto Art Center etc.

Pierrick Mouton is a Paris- based visual artist whose work examines multiple narrative models that bring to light the roles of the subject and the author. His practice engages with film, installation and sound. In the process of crafting documentaries, he conducts immersive research with different groups and communities.

His work has been exhibited at Salon de Montrouge (Paris), Villa Belleville (Paris), Institut Français (Chandigarh), Rencontres internationales (Paris – Berlin) etc.

Vincent Moon is a filmmaker and a sound explorer. For over ten years, he has been traveling around the globe in search of sounds, from stadium rock music to rare shamanic rituals. He is also interested in experimentations with electronics. Most of his work is under a creative common license – he is very much an artist of the internet era. He is one half of the artistic duo Petites Planètes, with Priscilla Telmon. Together they produce, direct and curate ethnographic experimental films and music that are based on material collected from their numerous travels.

Researchers/Organisations:

IN COMMON is a cooperative data library that allows civil society and social economy actors to map and share their data. The IN COMMON project brings together different community mapping projects, it aims to share information on community resources and to support the articulation of citizens’ movements around a shared platform.

IN COMMON aims to:

● Use free software to defend the Commons. ● Enable the public to regain control over our data, ● Pooling the maintenance of this information and technical capacities. ● Amplify the use of this information to help trigger social transformation.

Hidden Pockets Collective is an India based charity organisation run by young people focussed on rights based framework on abortion and adolescent sexuality. It conducts research and gathers community driven information on sexual and reproductive health and helps policy makers in making community assisted decisions.

Aisha Lovely George is the Fellow of the Unleash Innovation Lab, and the Fellow of Asia Safe Abortion Partnership (ASAP), India. She is also a Trained Peer Educator by Enfold, India. As an Executive Coordinator at Hidden Pockets Collective for the last 4 years she has budgeted, coordinated and executed various projects. As a trained counsellor and a trained sexuality educator, Aisha has been developing Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) curriculums in India. She has been using audio podcast methods to educate young people in government schools and underserved communities. She has been awarded for her contributions by Digital Empowerment Foundation's (DEF) Social Media for Empowerment Award and Population First's Laadli Award.

Anushka Rajendran ​is a curator and art writer based in New Delhi. She is the curator for Prameya Art Foundation (PRAF), a not-for-profit arts organisation based in New Delhi committed to approaches that enable audience-thinking for contemporary art in India. She is also the Festival Curator of the 2021 edition of Colomboscope and was assistant curator for Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018. As a research scholar, Anushka is completing her PhD in Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For her curatorial practice, she has been awarded fellowships that supported residencies with Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori, Japan; the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (by Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation); and Theertha International Artists’ Collective, Colombo. Her contribution as an art writer and editor was recognized in 2015 when she received the Art Scribes Award for emerging/mid-career art writers of Indian origin.

Jasmine Lovely George is a lawyer, Tedx Speaker and sexual and reproductive health advocate who sees social value in technology. As a feminist activist she is working on Sexual and Reproductive Rights as a member of RESURJ - An international feminist collective. She founded the Hidden Pockets Collective and currently works as the Coordinator of Knowledge Production. The collective works within the intersection of sustainable development, health and cities. She is a fellow of Women Deliver, and also received the YCI Rise Up Fellowship.

Natacha is active in free software communities, and in related academic and art practices. She has been an active member of several groups producing critical software, alternative social media and art installations in Europe, such as Experientiae Electricae, Constant vzw, and ​dyne.org.​ She recently co-founded the research organization Petites Singularites in Brussels, which concentrates on the specificities of free software and particularly its benefits to collective practices.

Pauline Fournier is one of the curators of the Toulouse HackerSpace Factory, a space for exploring different facets of hacker culture, including reappropriation and diversion of technologies, art and science, defense of rights and freedoms on the Internet, computer security, media and citizen investigation, politics and society. The festival hosted three hundred participants over four days. Fournier has over five years of experience in the field.