Organized by Michael Connor and Zachary Kaplan, this edition of Seven on Seven was held on May 14, 2016 at the New Museum. Whitney Mallett covered for Motherboard, and Connor reported at rhizome.org on the full event.
Keynote: Astra Taylor
Astra Taylor's films include Žižek!, a feature documentary about the world’s most outrageous philosopher, and Examined Life, a series of excursions with contemporary thinkers including Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Peter Singer, and others. Both films premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Taylor’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The London Review of Books, n+1, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Examined Life, a companion volume to the film, and co-editor of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America. She helped launch the Rolling Jubilee and co-founded the Debt Collective. Most recently she is the author of the book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, winner of a 2015 American Book Award. She is an EHRP Puffin Fellow and a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow.
Jenna Wortham & Junglepussy
Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times Magazine, among other things.
Junglepussy is an artist and rapper based in NYC.
Paul Ford & Miranda July
Paul Ford is the co-founder of Postlight, a New York-based digital project studio, as well a writer, product strategist, educator, programmer, and software consultant. He has consulted on and managed digital and editorial strategies for Harper’s Magazine, Condé Nast, Credit Suisse, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, VICE Media, and for the media consulting firm Activate. He was also an advisor to the White House Office of Digital Strategy during the Obama Administration. Ford teaches at the School of Visual Arts and has appeared on countless radio programs, TV programs, and podcasts.
Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her most recent book is The First Bad Man, a novel. July’s collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; It Chooses You was her first book of non-fiction. She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know — winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. July’s participatory art works include the website Learning to Love You More (with artist Harrell Fletcher), Eleven Heavy Things (a sculpture garden created for the 2009 Venice Biennale), New Society (a performance), and Somebody (a messaging app). She is the recipient of a 2016 USA Artist fellowship award and is a member of The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
Grant Olney Passmore & Hito Steyerl
Grant Olney Passmore has more than ten years’ industrial formal verification experience. He has been a key contributor to safety verification of algorithms at Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Edinburgh, Microsoft Research and SRI. He earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
Rana el-Kaliouby & Jennifer Steinkamp
Rana el-Kaliouby is a scientist, innovator and entrepreneur. As Affectiva's co-founder and CEO, she is on a mission to bring artificial emotional intelligence to our digital world, creating a new paradigm of data & interactions that will improve how people interact with technology and each other.
Jennifer Steinkamp is an installation artist who works with video and new media in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.
Tracy Chou & Claire L. Evans
Tracy Chou is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and diversity advocate. She is currently exploring and advising a range of new projects across the startup world, civic tech and engagement, and diversity activism. For her advocacy and activism work, she has appeared on the covers of The Atlantic, WIRED, and MIT Technology Review; been named Forbes Tech 30 under 30, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35, and Fast Company Most Creative People in Business; and been profiled in Vogue, ELLE, and other media outlets.
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and co-author of the pop group YACHT, and the founding editor of Terraform, VICE's science-fiction vertical. She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, WIRED, and Aeon; previously, she was a contributor to Grantland and wrote National Geographic's popular culture and science blog, Universe. She is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.
Mike Woods & Trisha Baga
Mike Woods founded both the Digital Department and VR Studio at VFX giant Framestore. In June 2015, he co-founded a new virtual reality company called White Rabbit. With creative and technical knowledge of all things gaming, social, and experiential, Mike became a pioneer of real-time filmmaking, animation, and VR. Successful campaigns for Coca-Cola, Geico, and Beats by Dre led to a huge amount of pure VR work, including directing the groundbreaking HBO Game of Thrones Oculus Rift exhibit, a virtual tour of the Endurance spaceship for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and two groundbreaking Marvel experiences, among others.
Trisha Baga is an artist living and working in New York, generating mainly video and performance work through a multi-disciplinary practice which uses common things to guide phenomenological compositions about the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap in between. She has had solo exhibitions at Vilma Gold Gallery in London, the Kunstverein Munich, and has shown her work at Greene Naftali Gallery, EAI, PS1, Johann Koenig Gallery, Performa09, The Housatonic Museum, LAXART, and El Centro Cultural Montehermoso.
Meredith Whittaker & Ingrid Burrington
Meredith Whittaker is the co-founder of the AI Now Initiative, and the founder and lead of Google’s Open Research Group, where she architected and created novel models for cross-industry and cross-sector research. In this capacity she founded M-Lab, a globally distributed open measurement system that provides the largest open, verifiable source of data on internet performance. In addition to expertise on measurement, she has done extensive work on privacy and security, both advising on policy and technical implementation. She co-founded Simply Secure, helped build and currently advises the Open Technology Fund, and is a leader in the development of core infrastructure security work within Google and beyond. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many civil society organizations on artificial intelligence, internet policy, measurement, privacy, and security.
Ingrid Burrington is an artist who writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about places, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. She's the author of Networks of New York, an illustrated field guide to urban internet infrastructure, and has previously written for The Atlantic, The Nation, The Verge, and other outlets.
See their work: THE REALM OF ROUGH TELEPATHY
Partners
Major support for the eighth edition of Seven on Seven is provided by founding partner, Wieden+Kennedy; Samsung 837; GIPHY; the Sara & Evan Williams Foundation; and CHOPT Creative Salad Company.
Exclusive media partner: Refinery29
Exclusive hotel partner: Ace Hotel
Additional support is provided by Paddle8, Electric Objects, and Print All Over Me.
