Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer and artist based in New York. He is a professor of design and media theory at New York University. He is the founder of the award-winning creative research and design studio 13101401 Inc.

Jason Scott is the free-range archivist and software curator at the Internet Archive, an increasingly foundational repository of the internet and web’s memories. His responsibilities put him in shipping containers, endless digital collections, long phone calls, stage appearances and social media melees. He is a co-founder of the activist archivist group Archive Team and has made multiple documentaries and a handful of short films. He has run the bulletin board system history website textfiles.com for over 25 years. The last time he visited Australia, he had a heart attack, so you know he really likes the place if he’s coming back.

Jessica Walthew is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow (Scotland, UK). Her current research investigates how plastics’ lifetimes are understood in the context of today’s discourses of sustainability. She investigates plastics and their “lifetimes” from the perspective of their caretakers in museum collections, employing interviews and case studies from practitioners to draw linkages between conservation and scholarship in environmental ethics, disability studies and other fields.

Sewon Chung Barrera is the head of digital content and initiatives in the curatorial department at M+, Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture located in Hong Kong.

With prior appointments at the Exploratorium and Samsung, Barrera is a digital strategy leader with extensive experience working at the intersection of art and technology at renowned cultural institutions, global brands and Fortune 500 companies. Barrera holds a Master of Arts from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and a dual BA in Literary & Cultural Studies and Sociology from the College of William & Mary.

Sofia Widmann is the founder and CEO of MUSEUM BOOSTER. She oversees operations and company strategy and steers its development. Having a background in economics, she gained experience working in both non-profit and for-profit cultural organisations in the fields of event organisation, marketing and PR. Widmann’s special focus is on new media technology and its influence on the success of museums. From 2014 to 2016, she was studying this correlation as part of her MBA studies at Modul University Vienna. She is a regular speaker at international conferences on the topics of visitor experience, digital strategies, new revenue models and innovation for the museum sector.