On Media, On Technology, On Life - Interviews with Innovators

The book 'On Media, On Technology, On Life: Interviews with Innovators' features thirteen artist-researchers whose artworks reconfigure the relationships between living bodies, microorganisms, tools, techniques, and institutions to ask new questions of life itself. When encountered for the first time, these are works that seem to challenge a conventional understanding of what artists and scientists do. Through the words of the artists themselves, these interviews explore what it means to spearhead innovative new partnerships able to create work that takes on a life of its own. By posing new questions at the interface between media, technology, and life, the book explores themes such as the life of multi-species bodies, the future of food security in the age of biotechnology, the microbial lives of historic archives, and the biohacker communities of the future. Together, they reveal how we are all actors in this theatre of life innovation.

Arthur Clay has designed and implemented transdisciplinary events focusing on creatively connecting art, science, and technology within diverse cultural contexts in many parts of the world. As co-founder and artistic director of at ETH Zurich, his activities include developing and platforming projects that pioneer new technologies including working with renowned institutes such as EPFL, ETH Zurich, University of the Arts, Zurich, Sogang University, Seoul National University, and for various private and government agencies and institutions including SAST, Create Center at NUS, A2Star, and more. He has been supported by governmental agencies, art councils, private foundations, and industry partners such as Presence Switzerland, Pro Helvetia, Swissnex China, Swissnex Singapore, Japan Foundation, the Canada Council, LG Electronics, etc. He is renowned as a versatile artist working in diverse genres and has been awarded prizes for performance art, media art, music theatre, and composition. As an educator, he has taught at high-ranking institutes in diverse parts of the world. At present, he continues to perform at international venues, is Guest Professor at Sogang University of Seoul South Korea, and directs the Virtuale Switzerland, a festival for invisible arts that promotes art using augmented, virtual, and mixed reality.

Timothy J. Senior is a cross-disciplinary collaboration specialist. His work focuses on how traditional forms of disciplinary activity in the arts, sciences, and humanities might be opened up to new collaborative interactions – a process of creatively challenging disciplinary values and methodologies to drive innovative lines of shared inquiry. He is co-founder and director of supersum, a not-for-profit consultancy based in the UK - the wicked problems agency; supersum supports new and unconventional partnerships to tackle shared problems that resist siloed ways of working (supersum.works). Tim holds an undergraduate degree in Biological Natural Sciences from The University of Cambridge, and post-graduate degrees in Neuroscience from The University of Oxford (DPhil 2008). He has held a variety of research and teaching positions at universities in the UK (The University of the West of England and Arts and Humanities Research Council), Germany (Jacobs University and the Hanse Institute for Advanced Studies), and the US (Duke University). Tim has published more than twenty peer-reviewed articles, edited-books, working papers, and reports. These span subjects as varied as medieval European urbanism, social neuroscience, the design of dementia friendly communities, and knowledge exchange in the creative and cultural industries.