Rafael Dernbach is a researcher and curator of experimental conversations. He is interested in unexpected encounters between people and ideas in a world that is increasingly formatted. Currently, he is a CIRCE Fellow. In 2022, he curated a 24h long conversation on The Future of Attention at the Locarno Film Festival. Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Universitá della Svizzera italiana and helped to open Futurium in Berlin as a researcher and strategist. He holds a PhD on aesthetics of anticipation from University of Cambridge.

Jaakko Pallasvuo (born 1333) is an artist living and working in Helsinki. Pallasvuo's work has been exhibited at Documenta 15, CCA Derry~Londonderry, American Medium, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and New York Film Festival, among other places. Pallasvuo's comics for the instagram account avocado_ibuprofen, followed by more than 100k, were recently collected into a book by Chicago-based publisher Perfectly Acceptable Press. Jaako will visually record the Long Night of Dreaming about The Future of Intelligence.

Gala Hernández López is an artist-researcher and filmmaker. Her work articulates interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations and performances on the new modes of subjectivation specifically produced by computational digital capitalism. She examines from a feminist and critical lens the discourses and imaginaries circulating in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of a state of the world.

Her work has been shown at DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and the Salon de Montrouge, among others.

At the University Paris 8 she is currently developing a research-creation project on screen capture. She co-directs the research and creation collective after-social-networks.com

Christopher Small is a writer and curator. He is the editor of Outskirts Film Magazine and the head of the Locarno Critics Academy. He also regularly programs films online, at DAFilms.com, and at Kino Petrohradská, in Prague.

Laura Papke is an interdisciplinary designer and artistic researcher, currently living and working in the Netherlands. With a keen interest in the intersection of ecology, culture, and mental health, her work investigates new perspectives on healing processes and care practices in a technology-driven world. She brings together science and spirituality, drawing inspiration from queer ecologies, techno-feminism, and shamanic practices.
Her graduation project in Social Design from Design Academy Eindhoven Sonic Driving was nominated for the Planetree Design Award 2022 and presented at various events, including Dutch Design Week 2022 and New Now Festival 2023. Laura is recently continuing her research on interoception — the perception of inner-body activities — and the process of synchronization, which she further incorporates in her embodied sound experiences.

Kevin B. Lee is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at USI Università della Svizzera italiana, supported by Swisscom. Combining filmmaking, media research and criticism, he has produced 400 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format and was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound. His video essays Reading // Binging // Benning and Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox received the most mentions respectively in the 2017 and 2020 Sight & Sound video essay polls. His current feature documentary project Afterlives is supported by the Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the Eurimages Lab Project Award, the German Federal Ministry for Culture and Media, and Field of Vision.

Andreas Bütler and Fabian Frey are designers and researchers based in Zürich. Besides their individual practice they work together as the Dialoguing with Ecologies Group on speculative forms of dialogue with other species and ecologies. This research leads them from biochemical experiments, over embodied experiences to discussions between humans and non-humans. The work questions the relationships between different forms of intelligence and envisions practices for mutual understanding.

Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020), and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014).

Wailea has a multifaceted political science, futures and strategic foresight background. Working for the foreign policy grassroots think tank foraus has made her a specialist in participatory processes. Her studies in Political Science (MSc), Law, Management, Cultural Studies, and Languages have led her to the Universities of Versailles, Amsterdam and the Zurich University of Applied Science. Based in Zurich, she enjoys experimenting with methodologies, knowledge practices, and communication forms to challenge disciplinary paradigms and build bridges. Nowadays, she works in varied constellations to deepen and share her understanding of futures thinking, value creation and appreciation, and regenerative innovation. Exploring the landscape of knowledge-transmission possibilities.

Anna is a Zurich-based visual designer with extensive experience in design research, futures studies and art direction. She holds a MSc in Design & Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and works at the intersection between design and futures research.

In her work, Anna focuses on various design practices as means to tackle the relationship between humans and uncertainty, particularly the one related to the perception of the future. She is also a creative fellow at the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE) where she is conducting research on the topic of privilege in local settings.