PETER BURR

Peter Burr (b. 1980) is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. A master of computer animation with a gift for creating images and environments that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Burr has in recent years devoted himself to exploring the concept of an endlessly mutating labyrinth. His practice often engages with tools of the video game industry in the form of immersive cinematic artworks. These pieces have been presented internationally by various institutions including Documenta 14, Athens; MoMA PS1, New York; and The Barbican Centre, London.

Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a Creative Capital Grant (2016), and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship (2016).

He is currently a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

HYPHEN-LABS

Hyphen-Labs is an international collective working at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Through their global vision and multi-disciplinary backgrounds they are driven to create engaging ways to explore planetary-centered design.

Hyphen-Labs designs and builds robust transmedia experiences by combining digital and physical mediums ranging in scale from small products and prototypes to large architectural pavilions and installations. Through their creative practice and artistic commissions, they blend architecture, speculative and interactive design, digital arts, fashion, creative writing, and film through new media and emerging technologies.

Hyphen-Labs is Ece Tankal, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, and Ashley Baccus Clark, and an international team of engineers, scientists, architects, and artists creating at the intersection of art and emerging technology. Ece Tankal is a Turkish born designer and new media artist based in London. Ece is interested in exploring interventions and interaction related to bodily, spatial and temporal concepts through mixed media installations, virtual reality experiences and speculative design. Trained in architecture, her approach is to place the viewer as a natural extension of the digital topographies she creates to expand and stretch the reality we currently occupy. She is a co-founder of Hyphen-Labs.

Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is a latinx structural engineer and artist synthesizing design and technology to develop immersive - transmedia experiences. Inspired by the translation of concepts to material expressions visualized through an aesthetic framework of science fiction, futurism, and surrealism her work expands on the principles of emotional design. She is a co-founder and creative director at Hyphen-Labs.

ANGELA WASHKO

TACTICAL EMBODIMENT (PERFORMANCE AND ACTIVISM IN HOSTILE ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS)
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Washko's practice spans interventions in mainstream media, performances in digital environments, video and video game development. She is committed to telling complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. She is currently working on an experimental documentary film about drag queen and RuPaul’s Drag Race reality television contestant Mrs. Kasha Davis.

A recipient of a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant, Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, and the 2018 Impact Award at Indiecade, Washko's practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Angela Washko is an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

ALEX THAYER
MIXED REALITY, BRAIN

INTERFACES, AND IRASCIBLE ARTISTS: APPLYING THE ANNE FRANK HOUSE, SETI, AND SALVATOR ROSA TO THE FUTURE OF IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES
Alex Thayer, PhD is the Chief Experience Architect for the Immersive Experiences Lab at HP. Thayer has a PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington plus degrees in Technical Communication and Art History. For the Immersive Experiences Lab, Alex guides research efforts around the future of mixed reality, 3D and 4D printing, and other topic areas at the intersection of people, practice, experience, and technology. Alex has also taught and published extensively in the areas of sociocultural impact and design of digital games, novel sensing and interaction models, user experience design and research, and the post-digital world of physical and digital tools and artifacts. Alex has over 20 years of professional experience in the tech industry at companies including IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and VMware.

ANNA DYSON

INVERTED EMBODIMENTS: PROJECTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ECOSYSTEMS THROUGH HUMAN BIOMETRICS
Anna Dyson is the Hines Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Professor of Forestry & Environmental Studies, at Yale University. In her role, Dyson directs the scholarship and research of the joint degree program, and will expand this graduate program to include PhD level funded research in Architectural Sciences / Built Ecologies.

Dyson is also the founding Director of the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA) within Rudolph Hall to connect to other interdisciplinary labs on campus towards the vigorous research, development and deployment of novel architectural systems that are focused on reinventing the DNA of the built fabric in order to take on the challenge of metabolizing energy, water and materials within architecture in radically new ways.

Anna Dyson has been a professor of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she founded the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) in Manhattan with Skidmore Owings and Merrill LLP in 2006. CASE hosts the PhD program in Architectural Sciences/Built Ecologies (BE), which has received multiple honors, including an Award of Excellence in pedagogy from the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), and the award for most innovative academic program from the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) in 2012. Over the last decade, the BE program has distinguished itself by competitively winning awards for design research from multiple sponsors such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and from private sponsors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the San Francisco Foundation, and others.

Recipient of the Innovator Award from Architectural Record in 2015, Dyson holds many international patents on building systems innovations for the collection and distribution of clean energy, water, air quality and material life cycle. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The World Future Energy Summit (WFES), and The Center for Architecture. Designs for novel systems have been recognized with over twenty awards, including a 1st prize from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for the Integrated Concentrating Solar Façade and Climate Camouflage systems, multiple Architect R&D for systems including the Solar Enclosure for Water Reuse (SEWR) and the Active Modular Phytoremediation System (AMPS). Multiple systems are being deployed, with the AMPS system recently installed into the Public Safety Answering Center (PSAC II) in the Bronx, included in the Best Architecture of 2017 by the Wall St. Journal, as the first full scale test of the production of fresh air from within a building through plant-based air handling systems.

KIMBERLY HIEFTJE, PHD

VIRTUAL REALITY AND HEALTH PROMOTION: A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO BRING VR TO SCHOOLS
Dr. Hieftje is a Research Scientist at the Yale School of Medicine and the Deputy Director of the Yale Center for Health & Learning Games, which focuses on the development and evaluation of videogame interventions for health prevention and promotion, behavior change, and education in adolescents and young adults. Dr. Hieftje is also the Deputy Director of the play2PREVENT Lab and Director of the play4REAL Lab at the center, which focuses on the use of VR/AR/XR in games. She is currently involved in the development and testing of several health behavior change videogames and has published frequently on developing, evaluating, and implementing serious games. She has worked on games that have focused on topics including JUUL/e-c-cigarette prevention, tobacco use prevention, risk reduction in adolescents, HIV/STI prevention, HIV/STI testing, empowering young women around sexual health, bystander intervention, LGBTQ bullying, school climate, and increasing math skills in first graders.

Most recently, Dr. Hieftje received a gift from Oculus to fully develop and evaluate smokeSCREEN VR, a VR videogame intervention focused on JUUL/e-cigarette prevention in teens developed by the play4REAL Lab in partnership with PreviewLabs, Inc. Created for the Oculus Go, the game uses voice recognition software to allow players to practice refusing peers in real time. With her team at the play4REAL Lab, she will conduct a randomized controlled trial with 230 teens, following them for six months to see if playing smokeSCREEN VR impacted their behaviors, attitudes, intentions, and social perceptions of JUUL/e-cigarettes. Additionally, the team will explore how VR can be leveraged to create the feeling of social pressure in simulated high-risk social situations involving peers.

Dr. Hieftje is also a K12 Scholar in the Yale Implementation Science program (YSIS), where she will collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data from teachers and students on the implementation of a web-based videogame intervention focused on tobacco use prevention with the goal of better understanding the factors associated with successful implementation of videogames in schools.