Memo Akten, originally from Istanbul, Turkey, is an artist, musician, and researcher whose practice bridges machine learning, consciousness, perception, and spirituality. A pioneer in artistic explorations of Deep Neural Networks, he holds a PhD in this topic from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. His works have been exhibited worldwide, from the Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum, to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, to the Grand Palais in Paris, the Venice Biennale, and he is also a recipient of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.

Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter are Southern California based interdisciplinary artists, researchers, and collaborators whose work investigates the entanglements of technology, consciousness, embodiment, 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.

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.