Media Evolution

What connects Leonardo DiCaprio with the Grateful Dead, a 16th century Dutch diplomat, and a tech CEO recently arrested in a French airport. To answer we have to zoom out and look back. Ten years after three days ago, the last decade of the old millennium, revolutionary 1789, and further back still. Where did we come from and where are we going? Dan Shefet is a lawyer, specialising in European law...

“We are the time travelers we’ve been waiting for”. Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes – Gust for short – founder of Temporality Lab, takes us on a whirling tour of wisdom on the philosophy of time and temporality. Or should we say, temporalities. For every society has had distinct experiences of being, doing and existing in their relationship with time. Take the very calendars we use – 12 mont...

”What future will we dream when we dream with plants?” Jemma (she/her) is an artist, writer and curator working with plant intelligence and vibrational medicine. If you wonder what plants sound like – check out this talk. After a guided visualisation, where we imagine going back to a state of being before our human form – we see ourselves as plants. But what is your texture, your aroma – as a plan...

“As we eat food we are consuming things that we don’t even know what’s in there, because they are unknown and we don’t even know where to look for them.” What really makes up the food we eat? Dr. John De La Parra (he/him) invites us to decode the magic and mystery of our food, challenging the conventional ways we understand its composition and impact. He argues there is a deep knowledge often over...

The Q&A from the session Planting the Seeds with Jemma Foster and John De La Parra

Moderator Johanna Koljonen speaks to a packed Theatre stage before the closing keynote on Wednesday. She talks of the collective dreams that have been manifested through Jemma Foster's Geomantra app and helps us to land in the space of hopefulness and melancholy that is present in them before introducing Nipun Mehta and his keynote on Who Must We Be.

The Q&A from session Rewilding Us with Giulia Testa, Michael Kibedi and Seowoo Nam

”Climate change is hard to sense but we can try to rewild ourselves by reconnecting our senses to the planet.” Data definitely feels more hard than soft and it’s not something you generally associate with nature. But in her contribution to the session ”Rewilding Us”, Seowoo Nam (she/her) shows how useful it can be for green infrastructures. Currently doing design and research for award-winning Dut...

“We should look inwards and consider who gets to be called a designer and think of the cultural exclusion that’s happening there.” In this insightful talk, Michael Kibedi (he/him) challenges us to rethink our impact on the earth, ourselves, and our future. He explores how a human-centered economy and isolating technology contribute to environmental harm and social disconnect. Kibedi encourages us...

“By adding AI to software we can create something magical.” Ella Fitzsimmons cleverly draws parallels between AI and how magic has been used, portrayed and worked in  medieval courts and beyond. It is something that we are fascinated by – a great power that allows us to create something from “thin air” with minimum work. She suggests that we as a collective need to deepen our understanding of...

“Sometimes one has to travel to another planet in order to understand what is going on in one’s own”.  — Trojan Horse James Taylor-Foster explores the meaning and power of design through concepts such as ASMR and LARP-ing. He introduces the audience to the concept of "world glimpsing," where we learn about our own world by experiencing the worlds of others. Using live action role-play (LARP)...

“Through others we become ourselves, we learn, we grow and acquire knowledge”. As society becomes increasingly digital, people become more socially awkward. But, learning through interactions with other human beings is an essential part of life. So how can we learn from each other when there are less opportunities to meet in person? According to Lore Oxford, the answer lies in community building....

The Q&A from session Learning How to Learn with Ella Fitzsimmons, James Taylor-Foster and Lore Oxford

“Do we want species to exist only at the bare minimum, just above the threshold of being considered endangered, or do we want a thriving nature?” Giulia Testa’s (she/her) talk dives deep into the concept of shifting baseline syndrome—a gradual change in accepted norms that has led us to unknowingly accept the decline of wildlife populations as "normal." She challenges us to recognize how our refer...

What does a climavore eat? More than a diet, it’s a call to address the manmade seasons created by pollution, soil exhaustion, and fertiliser runoff. How we structure our food systems in turn structures the environment, directly impacting the climate. Rosa Whiteley is Director of Material Research at CLIMAVORE, a research platform and agency who ask the question of how to eat in the anthropocene....

The Q&A from the session Manufacturing Materiality with Rosa Whitely and Laura Feinstein

Beloved The Conference moderator Johanna Koljonen opens the 2024 edition with restating the question Joshua Idehen asked in his performance: How did you get here? The theme of the first day is a wake-up call – a kind of “oh shit” moment that forces us to turn to that scary corner in the room, but to light it up with rationality, with community, with poetry.

British artist Joshua Idehen (he/him) opens The Conference 2024 with a spoken word performance in which he asks the audience “how did you get here”. The electrifying performance is an homage to David Byrne’s 1980 track "Once in a Lifetime", originally performed by Talking Heads.

”We need to move from transaction to relationship.” Nipun Mehta brings us on a transcendental journey to find our compassionate selves. Through the transforming story of his walking pilgrimage across India, Nipun kicks off by sharing his three key values: success, service and stillness. Further life snippets trigger us to ask ourselves fundamental questions such as “Where did you learn to be good?...

Johanna Koljonen closes 2023's The Conference with a recap how we as participators have tried to move away from oppositional binaries but  also reflects that how these binaries also work as an aid to understand the world. Not only that, we are also able to shift and remix the the meanings of these opposites. Remembering a recent conversation at The Conference where she got to question "w...

Examining the creativity of generative artificial intelligence tools brings up interesting parallels with human cognition. Just as AI systems predict and fill gaps, our brains do so too, drawing from a wide range of learned behaviours, experiences and beliefs. Both entities heavily rely on their training data: AI on diverse datasets, humans on factors like personal histories, culture and upbringin...

BITOI stands for Bass is the original instrument. BITOI are exploring the boundaries of the voice and the electric bass. The band is made up of one electric bass player and three vocalists from Denmark and Sweden (Cassius Lambert, Alexandra Shabo, Lise Kroner, Anja Tietze Lahrmann). They are working with an extended electric bass neck to allow quartertones and the lyrics of tracks are ba...

Q&A from the sessions Tending To Transformation – For Creative Leaders Who Stay With The Trouble with Pernilla Glaser (Author, Educator), Lydia Slaby (Community Leader and Author) and Holley M. Kholi-Murchison (Oratory Glory)

“Are you willing to dig deep and choose what your heart wants in the face of fear?” How can we begin to view the work that we do as a journey towards self-actualisation? Holley began in their own journey of resignation from a toxic workplace, to found Oratory Glory, and has continued to work in spreading stories and helping people find meaning in their life and work. Many people find that they don...

“Take time to pay attention. Not everything can be solved in 15 minutes, let it take the time it takes” “Stay in the hard and uncomfortable conversations” Lydia Slaby learned the hard way that to live a life that is worthwhile, you need to find space for the heart and the brain. At the end of a long-list of achievements, and on a trajectory towards immense corporate success, Lydia suffered a cance...