Activist Neuroaesthetics in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2021 | online

in collaboration with artbrain.org
July 1 – 16

Faculty Bios


Elena Agudio is a Berlin-based art historian and curator. She studied Art History at the University of Venice – Ca’ Foscari and in 2010 she received her PhD in Contemporary Art and Design. She is interested in curatorial practices as forms of troubling, with a focus on its performative and relational aspects. Since 2013 she has been artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary, where she curates and co-curates exhibition projects, discursive programmes and series, among which recently: Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry and Resistance; Soil is an Inscribed Body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics; and the series Speaking Feminisms/We Who Are Not The Same dedicated to an exploration of current feminist practices and alliances. She is also artistic director of the non-profit association Association of Neuroesthetics (AoN)_Platform for Art and Neuroscience, a project in collaboration with the Medical University of Charité and The School of Mind and Brain of the Humboldt University encouraging both a dialogue and lasting cooperation between contemporary art and the cognitive sciences. She writes and teaches, and since 2017 she has been invited to offer art histories classes and run seminars at the Weissensee School of Art in Berlin. In 2017 and 2018 she was Guest professor at HfBK (Kunsthochschule für Bildende Künste) in Hamburg and Resident Fellow at Helsinki University of the Arts.

Kathryn Andrews (b. U.S. 1973) is a conceptual artist who works in sculpture, painting, large-scale printmaking and performance. Andrews frequently transforms the relics and tropes of pop culture, including art and cinema history, into absurd combines that question the excesses of capitalism and its imbalanced power structures. Andrews received a BA from Duke University, Durham and an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Among recent group exhibitions are Tense Conditions, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; In Production: Art and the Studio System, Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Mad World, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Good Dreams, Bad Dreams: American Mythologies, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami; The Los Angeles Project, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Made in L.A. 2012, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Andrews lives and works in Los Angeles.

Marie-Luise Angerer is professor of Media Studies/European Media Studies – joint program of the University of Potsdam and the University of Applied Sciences of Potsdam. From 2000-2015,  she was professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She is the Spokesperson of the Graduate Program Sensing: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media (funded by Volkswagen Foundation) and Acting Director of the Brandenburg Center of Media Studies (ZeM).The focus of her research is on media technology, affect and neuroscientific reformulations of the human and nonhuman agency. Her most recent publications include Feministisches Spekulieren. Genealogien, Zeitlichkeiten, Narrationen (co-edition with Naomie Gramlich, 2020) Ecology of Affect. Intensive milieus and contingent encounters (2017), Desire After Affect (2014), Timing of Affect (co-edition with Bernd Bösel and Michaela Ott, 2014).

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.

Ina Blom is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and Wigeland Visiting Professor in the Department of Art History, University of Chicago. Recent books include The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016), On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture  (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007/2009) as well as the edited volumes Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and Raoul Hausmann et les avant-gardes (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2014).  

Yann Moulier Boutang, born in 1949, is a graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure (Philosophy 1970). He is now emeritus professor of economics at University of Technology of Compiègne which is part of Alliance Sorbonne University France, teaching political economy, socio-economics, economy of complexity, law economics of intellectual property rights. He is a member of the Costech Laboratory (Knowledge, Organization and Technical Systems) in the same University. From 2007 to 2015, he taught culture and digital contemporary culture at the Superior School of Arts and Design at Saint-Etienne and innovation by design at ENSCI (National Superior School of Industrial Creation). In 2008, he was appointed first visiting professor in economics  at the National Superior School of Architecture (Paris-Malaquais). He was invited to many universities and Institutes in France (STRATE school of Design) as well as abroad (UFRJ, UNISINOS Brasil), SUNY Binghamton (New York), CIESPAL (Quito), UNAM (Mexico). He has been running the quarterly Multitudes since its foundation (82 issues published). He is an associate professor at the Sino-European Faculty of Technology (UTSEUS) in Shanghai University (SHU) and also at the Offshore Platform in Shanghai of the National Superior School of Art and Design of Nancy (ENSAD).

Juli Carson is Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Critical and Curatorial Area in the Department of Art. She is also Director of UCI’s University Art Galleries. From 2018-2019 she was Philippe Jabre Professor of Art History and Curating in the Department of Fine Art and Art History at the American University of Beirut, where she curated the exhibition caesura-a moment in time, again rubbed smooth. Her books on the convergence of psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and conceptual art include: Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007), The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011) and The Hermeneutic Impulse: Aesthetics of an Untethered Past (Berlin: PoLyPen, b_books Press, 2019). She is also author of the website pharmakon.art, which hosts the Life Worth Living Series, a rotation of conversations among filmmakers, artists and scholars on contemporary cultural phenomenon, as well as an archive of Carson’s select exhibitions and essays.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. Her genre bending gender hacking art practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the imposed boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structures. Cheang constructs networked installation and multi-player performance in participatory impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interfaces with transgressive plots and an open network that permits public participation. As a net art pioneer, BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first work of web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.  From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works. She represented Taiwan with 3x3x6, a mixed media installation  at Venice Biennale 2019. Cheang is currently at work on UKI, a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema and UNBORN0x9, a hacking performance.

Yves Citton is a professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 and co-editor of the journal Multitudes. He recently published Faire avec. Conflits, coalitions, contagions (Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021), Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020, in collaboration with Jacopo Rasmi), Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard, 2018), The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016). Most of his articles are in open access online at www.yvescitton.net.

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts (USA), where he also directs the MA Aesthetics and Politics program. He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham, 2018), and Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (Minnesota, 2019). His most recent book François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction was published by Rowman & Littlefield (2020).

Jacquelene Drinkall is an artist, writer, theorist, independent curator, and an educator, with research expertise in telepathic art and contemporary art practice and theory. She was awarded a RANT RAF grant to co-curate Word of Mouth, a 2019 Venice Biennale pop-up exhibition with lead-curator Peter Hill (also shown at Grau Projekt, Melbourne) and curated Energy, Data Abstraction and Cognitive Capitalism (2017) funded by Create NSW and mentored by Tony Bond OAM. She has written several book chapters and articles on telepathy in art, culture and science, most recently in a Leonardo Electronic Almanac special issue on “New Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics”; Postmodernism and Narratives of Erasure in Culture, Literature, and Language (2020); Energy Cultures (2019); Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Three (2017); and more. Additional related past accomplishments include: University Medal awarded Honours in Art; Paris research with AGNSW residency, Dyason Bequest and Marten Bequest (1999); Visual Art (Painting) Masters thesis ‘Metaphors of Telecommunications, Transference and Telecommunications’ (2000); and APA funded Art History and Theory PhD thesis ‘Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art’ (2006). Jacquelene has worked as an artist learning facilitator at University of Sydney, James Cook University, University of Tasmania, University of New South Wales and Australian National University. She is co-curator (with Warren Neidich) of the Activist Neuroaesthetics exhibition Telepathy and New Labor at Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V. in July 2021 (Berlin, DE).

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and an author working in art, media theory, software studies, cultural theory, and contemporary fiction. In the last few years he has collaborated with Shu Lea Cheang on a series of exhibitions and events on the theme of sleep. Recent books include How to be a Geek essays on the culture of software (Polity 2017), How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness, (Bloomsbury 2018) with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (MIT 2012), with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys, aesthetics of ecology and impossibility (Minnesota 2019) and with Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics (Verso, 2021).  With Rosi Braidotti, he was co-editor of the Transversal Posthumanities special issue of Theory, Culture and Society, (2019). 

Katie Grinnan (b. U.S. 1970) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles and received her M.F.A. from U.C.L.A. Grinnan’s work stems from the body, specifically the relationship between visual, kinesthetic and cognitive experience, and the way these different knowledge systems affect one’s perception of reality and sense of self. Most recently her focus has incorporated various states of consciousness such as meditation and dreaming. Many of her sculptures use performed gestures as a system of movement. These mapped motion systems are often in conversation with mapped data systems from different ideological frameworks, ranging from astrology charts to EEG diagrams. These diagrams are often translated into instruments, sounds, scores, and choreographies favoring experiential and somatic interpretations of the information. Her work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Whitney Museum in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, MAK Center in Los Angeles, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Diverse Works in Houston, and Modern Art Oxford in the UK. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, and most recently a COLA fellowship among many other awards. Grinnan’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond. Grinnan is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, where she is currently program head of the Sculpture/New Genres area.

Freddy Paul Grunert studied philosophy and anthropology in Stuttgart and Rome, is an artist and associate curator at ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (1992-2017) and  curator in the JRC_European Commission for the SciArt Initiative (since 2017) curating Datami 2109- 2020 JRC Ispra and Bozar Brussels: Chair for Humanities  in AI workshop, JRC Bozar, Bruxelles (June 2019); Datami SciArt workshop on Disinformation 10_12-2019, BozarLab, Bruxelles, with Warren Neidich; Datami SciArt workshop 10-11_01_2020, BozarLab, Bruxelles, with Nicolas Strappini , Michael Hoch (Cern), Lise Autogena e Joshua Portway; Datami SciArt workshop, BozarLab, Bruxelles, 19_01_2020, with Josephine Bosma. From the XLV Venice Biennale 1993 multimedia Installation Xenografia (a term coined by him) he launched a series of cross researches into new media art , philosophy and physics, presented in various festivals from Rome, to Locarno, to São Paulo to Berlin to Milan’ s Media Guru and 2017 again coins Datami concept for the European Commission Resonances’. He was engaged in political activity, cultural advisory  in Strasbourg  at The Council of Europe and the Brussels European Parliament. Engaged on the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen , Denmark and Rio, Brasil . From 2015. He runs a Scientist in Residence Program in the ZKM. Sciart Studies for the HLRS Stuttgart 2016/17. Recently participant  in Festival of the Earth (2017/18/19) Venice, Data Driven Innovation Rome (May 2019), Keynote speaker in Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape (CDCPP), Conseil de l’Europe, Strasbourg with Climate slits: art, facts and science (June 2019), participant of 01_Checkpoint Berlin in  Film Festival Rotterdam, Artistic Advisor  Board Baltan Laboratories (2020). Curator of HumAI project (HUman Behavior and MAchine INTelligence in the Digital Transformation) at the Centre for Advanced Studies of the European Commission-JRC (2020-2021), Bethan Huws, eye-floaters, video message Kunstjohanneskirche, Freiburg (DE).

Ed Keller: co-director of the Post Planetary Universal Design program at The New Centre. Designer, professor, writer, musician and multimedia artist. Has taught architecture + film/media + technology since 1996; his research and practice explores the structures of feeling which link cultural, infrastructural, ecological, and technosocial systems, revealing emergent terrestrial and cosmopolitical potential. With Carla Leitão, he is co-founder of Spec.AE, a speculative design practice, and AUM Studio, an architecture and new media firm with residential projects, competitions, and installations in Europe and the US. They have convened more than 20 international conferences and lecture series.

Agnieszka Kurant is a conceptual artist whose work investigates collective intelligence, non-human intelligences (from microbial to Artificial Intelligence) and the exploitations of social capital under surveillance capitalism. She explores the transformations of the human and the future of labour and creativity in the 21st century. Kurant is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award, the 2019 Frontier Art Prize and the 2018 Pollock-Krasner Award. She is currently an Artist Fellow at the Berggruen Institute and was an artist in residence at MIT CAST in 2017 – 2019. Her recent exhibitions include the Istanbul BiennialBroken Nature at the MoMA, Cybernetics of the Poor at Kunsthalle Wien, Uncanny Valley at the De Young Museum, The Age of You at MOCA Toronto and the Milano Triennale. In April 2021 Kurant launched her permanent public commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Kendall Square in Cambridge. In 2015, Kurant presented a commission for the Guggenheim Museum façade in New York.  In 2013-2014 she presented a major solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center in New York and at Stroom den Haag. In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (with A.Wasilkowska). Her work was also exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Bilbao, Witte de With, Moderna Museet; Cleveland Biennial; MUMOK, Vienna; The Kitchen; SCAD MoA, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Bonner Kunstverein; Grazer Kunstverein, Kunsthalle Meinz; Stroom Den Haag; MOMA in Warsaw; MOCA Detroit; CAC in Cincinnati; Mamco, Geneva; Frieze Projects, London, Performa Biennial and Momentum Biennial. In November 2021 her commission, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, will be presented at Castello di Rivoli. Kurant’s monograph book Collective Intelligence, will be published by Sternberg Press and MIT Press in the fall of 2021.

Karen Lofgren is a Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based artist working primarily in sculpture and artist books from a feminist and decolonial perspective, and holds an MFA from CalArts. Her research centers on ritual, history, mythology, and the construction of consciousness over time, forming relationships between cultural systems and other wild systems. She was a 2019 Pollock-Krasner grantee; receives Canada Council Grant support; was Fulbright Core Scholar at UAL, Central St. Martins College in 2017/2018; and is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Cécile Malaspina is directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2018) and principal translator of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minnesota University Press 2017).  She completed her PhD in Philosophy, Epistemology and History of Science and Technology at Paris 8 Denis Diderot, under the supervision of Alain Leplège and Iain Hamilton Grant, and obtained her MA in Contemporary French Philosophy & Critical Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), UK.

Anna Munster is an artist, writer and professor in Art and Design, and Deputy Director of the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW. She is the author of An Aesthesia of Networks (MIT Press 2013) and Materializing New Media (Dartmouth University Press, 2006). Both of these examine artists’ engagements with networks and digital culture and contribute a dynamic conception of digital materiality to digital arts and media studies. Anna newest major publication is the co-edited anthology, Immediation, I and II with Erin Manning and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (Open Humanities Press, 2019). Her current research, Re-imaging the empirical: statistical visualisation in art and science (funded by the Australian Research Council) examines the relations between machine learning and visuality, with a special emphasis on how AI assemblages require and generate operative images. She is investigating the ways in which machine learning assemblages re-configure seeing and perception by laying claim to pre-cognitive human capacities and by colonising futurity. She is also interested in the ways in which artists are exploring a more indeterminate machine learning sensibility, actively deploying its techniques outside its more techno-determinist political tendencies. Anna is also an artist, regularly collaborating with Michele Barker. Their most recent commission was pull (2017), for Experimenta Make Sense: International Triennial of Media Art. Their works use moving image, soundscapes, interaction and installation design to explore human and nonhuman movement and. perception. They are currently working with drones to critique and redeploy drone cinematography.

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer. He has lectured and taught at numerous international universities and institutes. His latest work is Intelligence and Spirit (2018, Sequence Press/Urbanomic/MIT), centered on the philosophy of German Idealism, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and theoretical computer science. Negarestani currently directs the critical philosophy programme at The New Centre for Research and Practice.

Having studied photography, neuroscience, medicine and architecture, Warren Neidich brings to any discussion platform a unique interdisciplinary position that he calls “trans-thinking.” He currently uses video and neon to create cross pollinating conceptual text-based works that reflect upon situations at the border zone of art, science and social justice. His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennial 2019, analyzed through a large hanging neon sculpture the relations of Fake News, networked attention economy, evolving techno-cultural habitus and the co-evolving architecture of the brain. His recent conceptual project Drive-By-Art (Public Sculpture in This Moment of Social Distancing) just opened on the South Fork of Long Island and Los Angeles to some acclaim including reviews in the NY Times, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Time Out and LA Magazine. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2015-), a theory intensive postgraduate course that attracts students worldwide operating in Los Angeles, NYC and Berlin. Additionally he was a tutor in the departments of visual art, computer science and cultural studies at Goldsmith College London as well as recently serving as Professor of Art at the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin. He has been a visiting lecturer at the departments of art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Southern California Institute of Architecture, UCLA, La Sorbonne Paris, University of Oxford and Cambridge University, UK. He is American editor of Archive Books and author of over 20 books. His recent books include The Glossary of Cognitive Activism, Archive Books, Berlin, and Neuromacht (in German) Merve, Leipzig.

Florencia Portocarrero (Lima, 1981) writes, lectures, teaches and organizes both exhibitions and public programs. Her research interests are focused on how to rewrite art history from a feminist perspective, regimes of subjectivation in the context of neoliberal globalization and the questioning of hegemonic forms of knowledge. Between 2008 and 2010, she completed a master’s degree in Theoretical Studies in Psychoanalysis at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Later, from 2012 to 2013, Portocarrero participated in the Curatorial Program of the Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, and in 2015 she completed a second master’s degree in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths University in London. She has participated in several international conferences and her writings on art and culture appear regularly in specialized magazines such as Atlántica Journal, Artishock and Terremoto. In 2017/2018 Portocarrero received the Curating Connections scholarship, awarded by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and the KfW Stiftung. In Lima, she has worked as a Public Program Curator at Proyecto AMIL (2015-2019), was a Curatorial Advisor of the Museo de Arte de Lima–MALI Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee (2018-2020) and is a member of Bisagra, one of the few art collectives in the city.

Tony D. Sampson is an academic, author and editor. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, co-edited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). His new book – A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media was published by Polity in 2020. Tony is the host and organiser of the Affect and Social Media conferences in east London and a co-founder of the public engagement initiative the Cultural Engine Research Group. He currently works as a reader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London in the UK where he also leads the MA Media and Communication Industries and supervises PhDs and Prof Docs in Fine Art.

Lorenzo Sandoval works as an artist and curator. He holds a B.F.A and a Masters in Photography, Art and Technology from the UPV (Valencia, Spain). He received curatorial prizes such as Inéditos 2011, Can Felipa curatorial prize and Nogueras Blanchard 2012. He won the art prize ‘Generación 2017’ presented in La Casa Encendida (Madrid) and ‘V Beca DKV- Álvarez Margaride’ for ‘Shadow Writing (Algorithm /Quipu)’ at LABoral, Gijón, 2017. Sandoval was nominated for the ‘Berlin Art Prize 2018’ and ‘Premio Arte Contemporáneo Cervezas Alhambra 2020’. He presented ‘Shadow Writing (Lace/Variations)’ in Lehman + Silva Gallery in Porto and Nottingham Contemporary. He was part of ‘Canine Wisdom for the Barking Dog. Exploring the sonic cosmologies of Halim El Dabh’ curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Kamila Metwaly and Marie Helénè Pereira for Dak’art Biennale 2018. Sandoval was artist-in-residence with Bisagra in Lima, culminating in an exhibition at Amano Museum Textile Museum. He was part of the Miracle Workers Collective representing Finland in the Venice Biennale 2019. He presented ‘Shadow Writing (Fábrica Colectiva)’ at IVAM Alcoi, a research on the collectivization of factories related to sound. In 2020, presented “Shadow Writing” with pieces from all the chapters of the project, curated by Emanuele Guidi at Centro Párraga in Murcia. Together with Tono Vízcaino, he’s preparing  ‘Industria. Matrices, tramas y sonidos’ for IVAM. Since 2015, Sandoval runs The Institute for Endotic Research, which opened as a venue in 2018, co-directed by Benjamin Busch, and recently by Amouefa Amoussouvi.

Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and educator. Vikram is co-curator (with UCLA Art Sci Center director Victoria Vesna) of the upcoming Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (opening 2024), and guest curator for The Craft Contemporary (fka CAFAM) of the upcoming solo retrospective Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children (opening 2022). Her book, “Decolonizing Culture,” is a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017). Vikram is faculty in the UCLA Department of Art and at USC Roski School of Art and Design. She is a member of the editorial board for X-TRA, an advising editor for Curationist, and an editor for X Topics, an imprint of X Artists’ Books.

Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or co-edited volumes on monsters, brains, empiricism, biology and vitalism, including currently (w. D. Jalobeanu) the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences and (w. J. Symons) The History and Philosophy of Materialism. He is co-editor of the book series ‘History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences’ (Springer).