Technoculture

Chris Salter is an artist, Concordia University Research Chair in New Media and the Senses, Co-Director of the Hexagram Network and of the Milieux Institute, and Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. He moves between high profile cultural venues, high profile scholarship, and a range of academic disciplines that bridge Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology of the Senses, Computational Arts and Design, and Techno-cultural studies.

Jürgen Hagler is the head of the research group "Playful interactive environments" at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. He studies Virtual and Augmented Reality installations, and is involved with Ars Electronica and expanded animation.

Richard Romaniello is a Grammy® award-winning audio engineer and producer, with numerous nominations for engineering and producingRichard Romaniello is a Grammy® award-winning audio engineer and producer, with numerous nominations for engineering and producing audiobooks. Richard talks about the "behind the scenes" of audiobooks, with anecdotes of his recording sessions with Christopher Plummer, Michael Moore, JFK Jr. and many more.

Brent Lee is first and foremost a Canadian musician and an art maker. He has some of the most fascinating - and useful, which is important - theories on the boundary between installations and performances, the use of technology in music/multimedia.

Bruno Jehle is the embodiment of an extraordinary range of talents: trained as a photo lithographer, he embraced and mastered the revolution in digital imaging, never losing a clear vision on where we should stand concerning cultural heritage and human values in the digital age.

Steven Laureays leads the Coma Science Group at the GIGA Consciouness Centre of the University of Liège in Belgium. He applies the scientific method to problems that historically have been prerogative of religion and philosophy: what is consciousness? Are near death experiences just fantastic stories, or there's something more to them? Can patients in a coma recover and how? How do you measure consciousness? And finally: what effects will this podcast episode have on your mind? :)

Hans Tammen's music performance has been called "a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage". I asked him why, and the response is a summary of why I like Hans: clever, honest, and engaging at intellectual as well as practical level. The interview covers Hans work, the concepts behind his experimentation with science data and difference music genres, his own "hybrid" profile of musician-programmer, with a special treat: three music excerpts from his published compositions.

Sabina Leonelli is an expert in Open Science, a movement that promotes 'openness', transparency, participation, and innovation in science. She is professor of philosophy and history of science at the university of Exeter in the UK, and her research focuses on big data for discovery, the challenges involved in the extraction of knowledge from digital infrastructure, and the role of the open science movement within current landscapes of knowledge production.

Dr. Frederick Baker is Research Associate at the Centre for Film Studies at Cambridge University. But he is also the author of the Virtual Reality Experience "Klimit's Magic Garden", created on the centenary of the death of G. Klimt. I interviewed Dr. Baker at the opening of the exhibition "Beyond Klimt" at BOZAR in Brussels, asking him about the vision behind the installation, his ideas about VR, and "art in terms of technology". Enjoy your journey into Dr. Baker's Magic Garden!

Zoltan Istvan is the "global leader of the transhumanist movement" (The Mirror). The "embodiment of the Californian, libertarian, start-up culture tech-utopian dream" (BBC), Zoltan talks about what transhumanism stands for today and what awaits us in the near future if the right money is put in the right place.