A scholar and curator of contemporary art, Valentino Catricalà is interested in the relationship between art, technology, and media. A lecturer in digital art at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom. He is also the Director of the Art section of the European edition of Maker Faire, Europe's largest fair of creativity and innovation and also a Consultant at Paris Sony CS Lab and principal investigator for London Serpentine Gallery’s STAR LAB. Valentino was previously in charge of the Media Art Festival of Rome (MAXXI Museum) and Program Manager of Fondazione Mondo Digitale’s art programs.He is also the curator of the Kunstraum Goethe (Art Space) for the Goethe Institut in Rome and a member of the Hyphen Hub Community in New York. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts - University of Roma Tre. He has been PostDoctoral visiting scholar at ZKM-Center for Arts and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), University of Dundee (Scotland), Tate Modern (London). His most recent publications are Media Art. Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo. Storie, teorie, preservazione (Mimesis, 2016) and Art as Inventor (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Valentino’s curatorial practice includes exhibitions in major museums and international institutions. Among others, Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), Ermitage (St. Petersburg), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), MAXXI (Rome), Museo Riso (Palermo), Media Center (New York ), Stelline (Milan), Istituto Italiano di Cultura Nuova Dheli (India), Manchester Metropolitan University (UK), Ca’ Foscari (Venice), Centrale Idrodinamica (Trieste), Museo Centrale Montemartini (Rome).
Marco de Mutiis
Marco De Mutiis is Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur and an artist working with different media and technologies and with an interest in issues of perception and communication. Often re-engineering and transforming old analog and mechanical devices, De Mutiis creates kinetic installations that concern with communication, language and physicality. Graduated with distinction from the MFA program at the School of Creative Media (City University of Hong Kong), he has shown his works internationally in festivals and galleries. He has been the recipient of the Bloomberg Digital Arts Initiative in 2013. He has worked as a senior research associate and part-time lecturer at City University of Hong Kong and he is pursuing a Doctorate Program.
Stefano Locati
Stefano Locati is a post-doctoral research fellow at IULM University in Milan, Italy. His research focuses on Chinese and Japanese cinemas, transmedia, adaptation studies, periodical studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Literatures and Media and a master’s degree in philosophy. Heis the author of Sistema media mix. Cinema e sottoculture giovanili del Giappone contemporaneo (The Media Mix System. Cinema and Youth Subcultures of Contemporary Japan, 2022), La spada del destino. I samurai nel cinema giapponese dalle origini a oggi (The Sword of Doom. Samurai in Japanese cinema from the origin to the present, 2018), Il nuovo cinema di Hong Kong. Voci e sguardi oltre l’handover (New Hong Kong Cinema. Voices and Sights beyond the Handover, 2014, with Emanuele Sacchi), and Evolution. Darwin e il cinema (Evolution. Darwin and cinema, 2009, with Elena Canadelli). He has co-edited with Dario Boemia the volume Book Reviews and Beyond. Critical Authority, Cultural Industry, and Society in Periodicals Between the 18th and the 21st Century (2021). He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival in Venice and the artistic director of Sognielettrici/Electricdreams International Film Festival in Milan.
HENRY LOWOOD
Henry Lowood is Curator for Germanic Collections and Harold C. Hohbach Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. As a curator, he is part of the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department best known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues. Henry Lowood has written several essays on such topics as game studies, game preservation, and machinima. Among his most recent books are The Machinima Reader (2012) with Michael Nitsche and Debugging Game History (2016) with Raiford Guins, both published by MIT Press and Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi with Matteo Bittanti in 2013, published by Edizioni Unicopli. Along with Guins, Lowood is now editing a new series for MIT Press about the history and culture of gaming. Since 2000, Lowood has headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries. Among other projects, Lowood curated the Machinima Archive for the Internet Archive, which is dedicated to the academic investigation and historical preservation of the emerging art form known as machinima. From 2008 to 2013, Lowood led the HTGG Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called Preserving Virtual Worlds.
JENNA NG
Jenna NG is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Film and Interactive Media in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media (TFTI) at the University of York. She designed and taught a wide range of cinema and digital media courses, including convening and teaching the module "Coding the Frame: Space and Time with Digital Media", for the Screen Media and Cultures MPhil at Cambridge, and supervised several MPhil essays and theses. She was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Jenna NG works primarily on theoretical, cultural and critical analyses intersecting digital and visual culture, with particular interests in the imaging technologies of CGI, mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems. Her research interests also include the philosophy of technology, the posthuman, computational culture, interactive narrative, and the digital humanities. She has published widely on digital and visual culture. Among her many publications is The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Understanding Machinima, Essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds (Bloomsbury, 2013).