Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter are California based interdisciplinary artists and researchers, whose work investigates the entanglements of technology, embodiment, consciousness, and culture. Merging backgrounds in dance, writing, poetry, drawing, sculpture, computer science, artificial intelligence, computational art, and public practice, they create speculative simulations, data dramatizations, immersive installations, and narrative experiments that probe the human condition in an age of artificial intelligence and accelerating transformation.
Memo Akten is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and computer scientist working with emerging technologies both as creative medium, and as subject of critical inquiry. He creates Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatizations that probe the cultural, social, and ecological impacts of our contemporary techno-lifestyles, and the collisions between science and spirituality, modernity and ritual, self and collective intelligence. For more than a decade, he has worked with AI, Big Data, and our Collective Consciousness as scraped and shaped by the internet, to reflect on the human condition. He holds a PhD in creative explorations into Deep Neural Networks (aka ‘AI’) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Biennale, Tribeca Film Festival, Barbican, Grand Palais, Mori Art Museum; presented at leading academic conferences such as NeurIPS and SIGGRAPH; and featured in major publications including Wired, Art in America, NY Times, and the Guardian.
Katie Hofstadter is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work investigates the complex relationships between embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. Through her diverse practice, she explores the dynamics between knowing and feeling, and examines how emerging technologies shape both cultural narratives and direct experience. She is co-founder of several global public art campaigns such as the ARORA network, bringing together over 70 artists creating new AR monuments to diverse female and gender-expansive voices in public spaces; and the Climate Clock in NYC, a global call to #actintime on the climate crisis. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, museums, festivals, and public institutions, including the Venice Biennale, Tribeca Film Festival, British Film Festival, and Jacob’s Pillow. Her work has been covered by major media outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine. Her writing appears in leading arts and literary publications including Flash Art, The Believer, BOMB, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Right Click Save.
Together, their collaborative research and practice explore how emerging technologies—particularly AI and data systems—interact with the embodied, emotional, and ecological dimensions of human experience.
