Sissel Tolaas is an artist and smell researcher known for her work with diverse aspects within the topic of smell. From the beginning of 1990, she researched the importance of smell in different fields of science, art and design and developed a multiple archives I.E.  smell Molecule recordings & replications; Para sounds & phonetics. In 2004, she established the Smell Research Lab Berlin, supported by IFFInc.US. She founded the Institute of Functional Smell Coding in 2010 and in 2016 she was the founder of Future of Education Platform, a collaboration with the Nanyang Technical University Singapore and The Future Education PF, Berlin. Tolaas has completed 55 City SmellScape research projects since 1998, of, for and with major cities all over the world. She has worked on the topic of extinction & SMELL in multiple contexts such as world’s oceans biodiversity & sensory ecology and others project on the morbidity and decay of Detroit (2018) and is currently working on a Smell Heritage archive for the Pompeii Ruins, Italy.

Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist and artist. In her scientific work, she has examined enzymes involved in the production of biofuels, ecological design principles for synthetic biology, and the evolution of microbial communities in the soil. As an artist, she has mapped the microbial diversity of California, isolated halophilic bacteria from the Salton Sea and made cheese from bacteria living on human skin. She collaborated with Sissel Tolaas and Daisy Ginsberg on Resurrecting the Sublime (2019) to produce the scent of an extinct flower. Since 2015, she works as the creative director of Ginkgo Bioworks, where she engages with people, policies, and potential futures involved in synthetic biology, working for more open, equitable, and renewable technologies.

Ingo Niermann is a writer and artist. He made his debut with the novel Der Effekt published in 2001. Starting from his essay collection Umbauland (Suhrkamp, 2006), he has been editing the speculative book series Solution (Sternberg Press). Niermann initiated numerous projects: In 2000, he co-founded the revolutionary collective Redesigndeutschland; in 2007, he conceived a tomb for all people, the Great Pyramid, that made global headlines; in 2014, he and Rem Koolhaas have been building a tool for public ballots – Vote – in Gwangju, Korea. Since 2016, Niermann has been collaborating with the filmmaker Alexa Karolinski. Their film Army of Love (2016) premiered at the 9th Berlin Biennale and has since been shown in exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, MACBA, Castello di Rivoli, the CCCB and the Wiesbaden Biennale. Their second film, Oceano de Amor (2020), was part of a three-month exhibition at London’s Auto Italia gallery. His Ocean Wants (2021) podcast confronts humanity with creatures living in the ocean.

Working in the Behavioural Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute in Konstanz, Alex Jordan aims to answer a foundational question: how does social behaviour evolve? He asks this question by situating his studies in the natural, often underwater, world. In pursuit of the answer, his research traverses borders of subject and scale—from the neurobiology of social interactions, to the development of cognition, to the ecology of entire communities. Jordan harnesses recent advances in machine learning and automated tracking techniques, but anchors them in behavioural experiments conducted in the wild environments in which animals evolved. His work takes him from ancient lakes in the African Rift Valley, through tropical reefs in the Pacific, to highland cloud forests in Costa Rica. Among other scientific highlights, he was the first to demonstrate that a fish can pass the classic mirror test for self-recognition. The innovative methods for capturing and analysing complex data in Jordan’s lab have animated partnerships across fields. Jordan has worked with artists and academies such as SUPERFLEX, TBA-21, and Tomas Saraceno, to explore the uncharted crossroad of computational ethology, animal intelligence, philosophy, and human perception.

Michelle-Marie Letelier’s multidisciplinary work embrace orchestrated transformations of natural resources, alongside extensive wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research into the landscapes where their exploitation and speculation take place. Through her work, she blends different epochs, regions and societies, examining political-economic, historical and cultural aspects. Letelier’s work carries socio-political overtones, as it reflects on the globalisation, the increasing scarcity of raw materials and the crisis of the neoliberal model. She spent her early life in Chuquicamata, a space of copper deposits in the Atacama Desert mined since pre-Hispanic times, annexed by Chile in the Saltpetre War, and home to the largest copper mine in the world. When the town was to be buried due to new mining policies, Letelier returned to document this process—a pivotal moment in her artistic career. Since establishing in Berlin in 2007, she has been particularly invested in examining specific resources: coal, copper, saltpetre, wind and salmon.

Professor Karin Pittman is an internationally experienced Canadian marine biologist publishing continuously since 1982. She has worked in fisheries and aquaculture in Europe, North America and many developing countries, under NORAD, FAO, and various other NGOs as well as bilateral programs. She received  Hordaland Inventor prize in 2013 and the Norwegian Thon national award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016, the same year she won a global prize for Aquaculture Leadership and Innovation for the invention of Mucosal Mapping technology, now trademarked as Veribarr™. She has taught fish culture and larviculture in many countries and has developed the first fish-based health standard focusing on mucosal barriers. As a researcher, she has studied egg and larval development and metamorphosis of marine species, epigenetics, nutrient uptake, marine ecosystem changes and aspects of fish health. She is the producer and librettist for the rock Opera Fish to Mars (2017-ongoing). She is a Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences (BIO) at the University of Bergen, Norway, Chief Scientific Officer of the startup QuantiDoc and developer of an ethical role play about science, aquaculture and social impacts.

Zheng Bo is an art maker, a researcher, and a teacher who is known for his unorthodox approach to multispecies relationships. He creates weedy gardens, living slogans, and eco-queer films.In his ongoing project Pteridophilia (2016-present) he investigates the co-existence of men and ferns based on mutual understanding and pleasure. In the second chapter, (2018) a protagonist makes love to a fern’s nest and then eats it, raising questions about the morality that it is ok to eat plants but not to make love to them.

Matthias Rillig is Professor of Ecology at the Institute of Biology at the Freie Universität Berlin. His versatile field of research is in soil and plant ecology, where his research interests include the symbiosis of fungi with plants and its effects on soil aggregation. His research group examines the effects of multiple factors of global change on soil processes andl biodiversity, and terrestrial ecosystems. He uses fungi as model systems to test ecological principles. Rillig heads several joint projects, including “µPlastic”, which studies the effects of microplastics on agricultural soils.

In her installations, videos and performances, Riikka Tauriainen is interested in historical narratives, postcolonial theories and gender issues. She navigates on the boundaries between art and science, between fact and fiction. In the series of works Hydrocommons she deals with hydrological phenomena and with a posthumanist world of ideas, in which she explores to what extent our kinship with other bodies can be understood as a deeply materialistic relationality. Tauriainen is working as a lecturer and mentor at art schools and universities in a transnational context. Among others at Zurich University of the Arts, F+F School of Art and Design Zurich, École de design et haute école d’art du Valais, University of Cologne, University of Potsdam, HGK FHNW Hyperwerk Basel and ETH Zurich, Art and Architecture.

Meike Vogt is a senior scientist at the Institute for Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics within the Environmental Systems Sciences department at ETH Zurich. She is a marine ecosystem modeler, who assesses the links between marine ecosystem structure and function in terms of global biogeochemical cycling. Her work pairs ocean observations with statistical and numerical marine ecosystem models to reveal the drivers of present and future global plankton biogeography and biodiversity, and to understand the impact of anthropogenic climate change on these systems. In recent years, Meike has been pioneering the use of statistical and machine learning models to understand global plankton biogeography based on in situ data.