Derrick de Kerckhove

Derrick de Kerckhove was born in Belgium in 1944 and naturalized Canadian in 1967. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1974 and a post-graduate doctorate in Sociology of Art from the University of Tours in 1979. He taught at the University of Toronto from 1967 to 2012 and is Professor Emeritus in the Department of French. Associated with Marshall McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology since 1968, he worked with Marshall McLuhan for a decade as his assistant, translator, and co-author. He became Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology from 1983 to 2008. Several of his dozen books were published in as many languages, including Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (1991), The Skin of Culture (1995), Connected Intelligence (1997), The Architecture of Intelligence (2001), and The Quantum Ecology, in collaboration with Stefano Calzati (MIT Press, 2024). His latest book, L’uomo quantistico (Rai libri, 2025) extends and develops his contributions in the previous one. From 2004 to 2014 he was a professor in the sociology faculty at the Università Federico II in Naples and was guest professor at the Design School of the Polytechnic Institute of Milano (2016–25) and director of research at the Interdisciplinary Institute on the Internet at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He lives in Rome, where he is scientific director of the monthly magazine, Media Duemila, and of the Osservatorio Tuttimedia.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. At the Institute, she leads the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies Project, which combines the interpretative traditions of the arts and humanities with critical work in the STEM to express, imagine, and create innovative engagements with (and resistances to) artificial intelligence and our data-filled world.

She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an International Fellow of the British Academy and has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.