Lawrence Lek
London-based artist Lawrence Lek unites filmmaking, video games, and electronic music in a singular cinematic universe. He is best known for advancing the concept of Sinofuturism with immersive installations that explore spiritual and existential themes through the lens of science fiction. Lek is the winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist award and was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people working in AI.
Dr Ramon Amaro
Dr Ramon Amaro is Senior Researcher in Digital Culture at Nieuwe Instituut, the national institute for architecture, design and digital culture in The Netherlands. An engineer and sociologist by training, Ramon's writings, research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, digital culture, psychosocial study, and the critique of computational reason. Before joining Het Nieuwe Instituut, Ramon worked as Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at UCL (London), Engineering Program Manager for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Quality Design Engineer for General Motors. His recently published book, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (Sternberg, 2023) contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy, to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice.
