Media Evolution

Andrea Jones-Rooy – Under measure – measuring what matters

"Measurement is the beautiful act when humans get involved and take facts to data" At The Conference 2019, Data science professor Dr. Andrea Jones-Rooy (NYU), talked about the pitfalls to be mindful of when working with data. Andrea explained the dangers of just scratching the surface of the data and how important it is to look beyond. We should look at the data as subjective because if we look at the data with an expectation of answers, we will find them and miss out on everything else. In...

Nicole He – Say my name, say my name

"Voice technology is the gap between what AI actually is and what people believe it is" Nicole He is an artist and programmer who use technology for creative work, combined with an interest in current technology of AI and the character of AI. Voice technology could be seen as the gap between the real AI and the AI character in our imagination. The cutting edge tech is created for things that can make money, but that shouldn’t stop us from using them to make art. In different creative projec...

Jacopo Pompilii – Out of cash

Jacopo is an interaction designer at frog, a global design and strategy firm. He works on design research and product definition for a range of digital channels, from consumer applications to corporate websites. He’s fascinated by complex systems and how they can be optimized for usability and delight through design.  His experience spans into different industries like financial services, telco, automotive and consumer electronics and at The Conference he shared some design opportunities r...

Anna Åhnberg – Under measure – measuring what matters

"We’re all going to fucking die" Green house emission, climate change. Big words with a scary tone. At The Conference 2019, Sustainability specialist Anna Åhnberg from Oatly told us that we SHOULD be scared but she also encouraged us not to freeze in panic. Everyone should, and could, act and that includes the food companies too. The food industry accounts for 25% of the worlds global gas emissions which is more than all the transport industries together. Anna Åhnberg has one strong message...

Anthony Onumonu – Say my name, say my name

With help from Amazon’s Alexa, Anthony Onumonu, Principal software engineer from BBC R&D, talks about designing and developing interactive experiences on smart speakers. Anthony shared research from BBC’s ”Talking with machines!” project, combining cutting edge technology and storytelling. Skipping to the million dollar question: Have we solved interactive voice technology? No, this is just the beginning. 

Zara Rahman - Look back, move forward

At The Conference 2019, Zara Rahman, Director of Programs at The Engine Room spoke about the unintended impact of technology in relation to identity. How do identification technologies shape our own identities? And how did we come about to decide how to measure this? The talk examines who gets to decide the borders that tell you who you are and how the ability to self-identify is what makes us human. Does more data and tech automatically mean progress? What is progress and how does human pow...

Brett Scott – The war on cash

“Cash allows everybody to use it, it doesn’t care who you are.” At The Conference 2019, author and economic hacker Brett Scott made the case for keeping cash. He talked about – not a “cashless society” – but a “bankful society”, referring to institutions and states that all are pushing for a more digitized money system. 

Daniel Padgett – Say my name, say my name

We’re entering the beginning of a technological shift where machines get more and more humanized. Daniel Padgett, Conversational Design Lead at Google, works to put people in the centre and optimize technology for the future, and in this talk from The Conference 2019, Daniel draws from from his vast experience within voice technology and teach us about the complexities and opportunities of working with voice as an interface.

Need for speed – Soft touch

”An inferno of will and intentions, all suppressed feelings, two dogs and a speed lane. Things that leads up to Need For Speed a two man gang from Malmö Sweden.” Need for Speed is a Malmö duo consisting of the fabulous Martin Nilsson & Felix Mårtensson.  It is chill pop music with a healthy dose of dark indie electronic RnB. They both have their roots in noir punk band RA. Soft touch can be found on Spotify together with their other releases.

Vincent Bahar – Transendence

Poet, composer and musician Vincent Bahar has quickly made a name for herself at the cultural stages in south of Sweden and Copenhagen. With a combination of experimental drones, Persian instruments and timeless spoken poetry, she lets you into her very own universe and opens the door to an undiscovered, transcendent space. Earlier this year Inkonst described her performance as: “Rolling Persian rhythms that carry hypnotic flows of words and electronics. Intonal quality, no less!” Vincent p...

Che-Wei Wang – When Design Gets Swallowed by Engineering

”AI is just another tool, but also not just another tool” Che-Wei Wang runs a small design studio with his wife, where they explore computational and generative design. In their studio they have the tools to build prototypes in a single day. Working with CAD (computer-aided design) tools for many years, he has seen how these have always been meant to facilitate a human process. With the recent influx of AI in design however, generative design software has arrived big time. In many cases how...

Maria Malho – Hacking democracy

“It is not about who owns what, but how to give access to everyone” Maria Malho (M.Soc.Sc.) is an expert in societal transformations. She works at the leading Nordic think tank Demos Helsinki, who’s mission is to reconfigure society in the post-industrial era. Maria is specialized in future studies and at The Conference 2019, she shared her thoughts on universalism and fairness for the next era.

Curiositi – Ready

Curiositi is the musical project of Matilda Berggren and Emil Johansson. Being veterans of the swedish electro/indie-scene the couple met while touring italy with their respective bands in 2007 but took up writing and producing together in 2016 when Johansson put his old project Parker Lewis to rest. Since Curiositis first release the act has slowly built a reputation for being next level producers and writers, making heavily R&B-influenced pop music echoing of soft rock, quiet storm and eve...

Maria Malho – Universalism and fairness for the next era

“It is not about who owns what, but how to give access to everyone” Maria Malho (M.Soc.Sc.) is an expert in societal transformations. She works at the leading Nordic think tank Demos Helsinki, who’s mission is to reconfigure society in the post-industrial era. Maria is specialized in future studies and at The Conference 2019, she shared her thoughts on universalism and fairness for the next era.

Abie Philbin Bowman – Crash course in the Irish voting system

Abie Philbin Bowman is an Irish comedian, broadcaster, podcast host and also quite the expert on voting systems. In particular Ireland’s voting system. During his talk at The Conference 2019 he tried to make the Irish voting system more sexy by explaining how Ranked Choice Voting works. This ranking system can create a more collaborative politics and could help resolve the identity crisis currently fracturing big-tent parties like the Democrats/Labour. It’s a different way to work with ongoi...

Mark d'Inverno – AI, creativity and all that jazz

”it’s a profoundly human act to give feedback to each other on our creative work” Mark d’Inverno is not only a professor of computer science – he is also an accomplished jazz musician with both skill and feeling. His talk is more concerned with the latter: the craft of creative production. He believes the discourse has focussed too much on creativity as a power in the mind which leads to us trying to create computer systems which simulate ’heroic agency' where what matters is the final pro...

Cyrus Clarke – Playing with biology

Cyrus Clarke is storing holiday pictures in his plants. Yes, you read that right. This talk is about how to grow your own Cloud and what happens when combining art with science. What will it take for humans to truly value nature and how can we intervene and draw attention to something as seemingly abstract and immaterial as data consumption before it’s too late. DNA as a storage medium is the most efficient known data storage medium in the universe, so why not storage the whole planet’s data...

Petra Lilja – Multi-species thinking

Industrial designer and co-founder of non-agency Petra Lilja speaks about the weight of human influence on the earth and how to design for a better future for all species. Can we go from a human centered to a multi-species centered future?

Mollie Claypool – Discrete automation

“I find it incredibly odd that our world has changed but our vision of the built environment hasn’t” Mollie Claypool dives into her work as an architecture theorist concerned with “discrete automation”. This is a way of bringing the so-called digital architecture of our current practices together with automation of processes familiar from other industries. With a post-work future in mind, we need to reimagine the way we construct buildings. The elements that make up a building have, in fact...

Sam Gregory – Trust, Truth and Deepfakes

Sam Gregory is an award-winning technologist and advocate who is currently the Program Director of WITNESS, an organization which supports anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to fight for human rights. Sam leads work around emerging opportunities and threats like artificial intelligence, proactive approaches to malicious ‘deepfakes', innovation in eyewitness video, and challenges to trust and evidence. He also supervises WITNESS’ Tech Advocacy work, which advocates to technology c...

Ryosuke Sakaki & Takashi Koyama – Playing with biology

Have you ever fantasized about 3D printing your own food? Sakaki and Koyama from Open Meals are making a 3D printing sushi restaurant in Tokyo and want to visualize how the future of food will look like. Can you, and should you, digitalize, transmit and reproduce all kinds of food and perhaps create a digital food revolution?

Dr. Bahareh Heravi – Big data or small data?

"I am in huge favor of low tech data journalism" Dr. Bahareh Heravi is a Data and Computational Journalism researcher, trainer, practitioner and innovator who will share how news rooms of all sizes can work with data to construct stories, and that not only being big data but small data sets.

Lisa Ding – Creating the new social web

At The Conference 2019, Lisa Ding, product designer at Twitter's “Design for Conversation” department shared insights and considerations on how to design for a healthy public conversation in a digital universe. Drawing from her actual work and experiences at Twitter.

Lara Houston – The art of maintenance

Lara Houston, researcher at City, University of London, lifts the importance of maintenance and repair in the digital age. Can we have a right to repair? In the lack of information and access, we tend to upgrade to new things, instead of value the things.

Xiaowei Wang – No time for the future

Xiaowei Wang is a designer, engineer and researcher who focuses on the centrality of landscape and ecology in the digital world, building inquiry and community through public art, data visualization and writing. At The Conference 2019, they shared their research on consumerism in China, with an extra focus on the rural Taobao villages.

Amanda Michel - Tomorrow's story

At the Guardian, Amanda Michel is Global Director and senior product manager of Contributions, a core part of the Guardian’s expanding reader revenue model. In 2018 the Guardian announced the support of more than one million readers around the globe and in 2019 that it had broken even. While subscriptions and paywalls have been the preferred solution of many renowned news outlets, The Guardian has chosen the route of voluntary donations. At The Conference 2019, Amanda shared the story of t...

Natalie Remøe & Kristoffer Kumar – Tomorrow's story

Natalie and Kumar are both video journalists at VGTV, a Norwegian TV-channel connected to the Verdens gang news outlet. At The Conference 2019, they showcased their work behind ”The Tinder Swindler” story that has gained a lot of attention wide and far for it’s format as well as content.

Charles Broskoski - Creating the new social web

“If you think of your most favorite or least favorite social network, and then try and imagine what it would look like as a physical space. It’s really easy to imagine if it’s a space you would like to go to every day or not.” How can we sort out the good attributions from existing platforms and create new ones? Social networks have been deeply criticized over the years, but Are.na founder Charles Broskoski wants to turn the subject on how to develop and improve them instead. He wants to st...

Paul Soulellis – Urgentcraft

Paul Soulellis is an artist and educator based in Providence, RI. His practice includes teaching, writing and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies and network culture. Paul poses important questions about history and erasure and has long been using publishing as a form of resistance. Innovation and creation is about power, but so is the act of deciding what to maintain and preserve, not least in the digital world. What is signal and what is noise?

Giorgio Patrini – Deepfakes – not based on a true story

Giorgio Patrini is CEO and Chief Scientist at Deeptrace, an Amsterdam-based startup building deep learning technology for detecting and understanding fake videos. An anti-virus system for deep fakes, kind of. Video manipulation is getting more refined and whilst a fake Obama speech might be fairly easy to unravel, the danger lies in the subtleties and details.

Gabi Ivens – Verifying media at scale

Open source investigator Gabi Ivens works as a human rights researcher focusing largely on visual documentation of human rights abuses. She locates, analyses and preserves publicly available information to use in human rights investigations and researches the ethical and social implications, as well as the technical challenges, of this work.

Darius Kazemi – Social solutions to social networking

“You can have weird and dangerous features in a platform if the core is that you are never gonna scale.” Internet artist Darius Kazemi is known for his many (and funny) Twitter bots under the moniker Tiny Subversions. He is also the founder of Friendscamp, a Twitter like social network with only 50 users which is run from a server in his own home. A more human scale social network built upon the input from the users. At The Conference 2019, Darius shared his vision of a radical new directio...

The Conference 2018

Bits and pieces from The Conference & The Festival 2018.

Q&A: Broken Promise Land

How can we design an internet that works for and not against us?

The Interview Stage by Aktarr – Fadi Barakat

"There is a lot of profit to be gained from all this diversity. The problem right now is that we're not really good at it."

Q&A: Play

The notion of "play" is changing. Let's look at the potentials and possible pitfalls of the new playful technologies.

The Interview Stage by Aktarr – Balqis Khattab

"I want to change the education in Sweden."

The Interview Stage by Aktarr – Maisa Dabus

"The Malmö model is quite flat, you don't feel much hierarchy here."

Q&A: Innovation is for Everyone

Let’s unleash the joy of co-creation. Featuring: Tendayi Viki (Benneli Jacobs), Charlotta Ahlberg (Volvo) and Kenjiro Kirton (HATO) during The Conference 2018.

Q&A: What Is Real?

What happens to realness when everything can be remixed or repurposed by anyone?

Dr. Lisa Mosconi – Designing Nature

“If you could see the future, what would you have for dinner?” Dr. Lisa Mosconi, one of the leading experts on how Alzheimer’s is related to our diets, knows better than most that a longer life doesn’t necessarily mean a more healthier life. In her talk, she theorizes about how we – through our diets – can try to slow down the aging process of our brains.

D. Fox Harrell – Impacts of the Avatar Dream

D. Fox Harrell is Professor of Digital Media and Artificial Intelligence at MIT. His research focuses on the relationship between imagination and computation. He founded the MIT Imagination, Computation and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) in order to develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming and digital media. With an emphasis on equity, Harrell explores how virtual identities both implement and transform persistent issues of class, gender, sex, race, ethnicity and the dynamic c...

Dr. Daisy Ginsberg – Designing Nature

“Better is not the same as good, better hasn't an agenda.” What is better? Who’s better? Who decides? The design of living matter can be seen as synthetic biology, a way of engineering biology for a better world. Could synthetic biology create life to save the environment? Daisy Ginsberg guides us through research done into the past to help us see what we value the most in the future. By using synthetic biology we can evoke a feeling of loss. Humans dream about better. But “better” isn’t th...

Subchamber Ensmble – "9-5-10"

Bo Mehr – "Crying"

Shu Yang Lin – Broken Promise Land

“We believe we all should have a say in how we make our society.” TaiwanPDIS co-founder Shu Yang Lin introduces us to rethink the interaction between the government and the civil society. In Taiwan, events for civil hackers are arranged in order for people to participate and together try to improve democracy by means of technology. By changing public websites and making them more democracy friendly, they are able to ”fork” the government and take down all the unwanted sites and make new one...

Karin Pettersson – Broken Promise Land

“You don't really know who you are until you're forced to defend it.” Journalism today is under a lot of pressure. At the same time, more and more hatred have grown on the internet over the past years. This has part to do with populism and other forces that are blatantly undermining the democracy. In her talk, based on years of research, Karin Pettersson examines how social media, Silicon Valley and different threats to democracy are interrelated. She states that the situation is complex, a...

Ståle Grut – Broken Promise Land

“This is all feels like a dream now, but technology and society went along really great some years ago.” Norwegian journalist Stråle Grut’s work for NRKbeta have been described as an experiment on how to make a better comment section. By creating a comment section quiz, it ensures that people know what they are commenting on online. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem, and also a way to improve internet debate by requiring participants to answer these few basic questions first. It a...

Ahd Kamel – Odd Camel from The Magic Kingdom

"I didn’t want to fight for my already god-given right to live." This highly personal talk start with actress and filmmaker Ahd Hassan Kamel telling us about her hometown Riyadh in Saudi Arabia (or, as Ahd calls it, the Magic Kingdom). She walks us through childhood traumas and events that has shaped and changed the course of her life so far, with death and rebirth as two constants. She tells us about being broken down and about trying to put her life back together again. It’s a wonderful f...

Shuli Gilutz – Play

“The problem is that the industry isn’t working with ethics and childrens rights.” On the topic of child-centric design, Shuli Gilutz talks about they way that children interact with technology. Many think that the mere interaction is changing the notion of play, but is it? Play, much like motivation, is central to a child’s development (physical, social, emotional and cognitive). All these important factors bring about another pressing matter: ethics. However, most of the industry working ...