Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman—A Symposium on Art, Technology, and Empathic World Building

Chalet Comellas’s interdisciplinary projects explore computational abstraction and ways that technology can intersect with a range of spiritual practices, including divination and healing. Employing elements of chance, randomness, and generative processes, her multimedia and text-based works also evoke conversations on the ever-growing presence of nonhuman intelligences in our daily lives.

Anna Dumitriu works with bioart, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology, AI, and robotics.

Charlotte Kent is an arts writer and associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University, New Jersey. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, digital culture, and emergent technologies, with a focus on situating these fields within a historical and ecological trajectory of culture and politics. She coauthored Midnight Moment: A Decade of Artists in Times Square (Phaidon Press, 2024). She is a coeditor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect, 2024) and Generation to Generation (Vetro, 2026). An editor at large with a monthly column on art and technology for The Brooklyn Rail, she contributes to assorted magazines, academic journals, catalogues, and books. She serves on the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property.

Lutz Koepnick is the Max Kade Foundation Chair of German Studies and a professor of cinema and media arts at Vanderbilt University. Koepnick has published widely on art, film, sound, aesthetic and media theory, and intellectual history. Over the last years, his writing has focused on how contemporary artists work in different media to complicate our understanding of human and nonhuman timescales and probe non-extractive models of planetary coexistence. Koepnick’s podcast, Art of Interference, explores creative responses to climate change in the arts today.

Katja Loher’s immersive video-sculptures focus on fragile ecosystems and the essential yet often overlooked role of their smallest inhabitants. Moving beyond traditional screens, Loher integrates video into hand-blown glass sculptures and other materials, creating seamless, self-contained installations. Each piece emerges from a collaborative process with architects, designers, poets, composers, glassblowers, and performers—blurring the line between nature’s impermanence and technological innovation.

Alex May’s work forges creative links between art, science, and technology through a wide range of digital new media, including virtual and augmented reality, photogrammetry, algorithmic photography, interactive robotic artworks, video projection mapping, generative works, performance, and video and sound art.

Rachel Rossin is a New York–based cross-disciplinary artist, painter, and computer programmer whose work examines the phenomenological impacts of technology on human autonomy and sovereignty. Rossin has developed a practice that moves fluidly between the virtual and physical, utilizing a diverse array of media, including DNA programming, virtual reality, custom AI networks, oil paint, and holographic displays. Across her hybrid practice, Rossin develops new vocabulary for our understanding of volition and control in a technologically mediated age.

Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala focuses on engaging with contemporary art to create exhibitions that museum visitors will find emotionally impactful and intellectually stimulating. With its emphasis on bridging humanity, technology, and nature, Shimmer is the latest in a series of exhibitions curated by Scala that find common ground in the representation of the human body as a site of metamorphosis, instability, and possibility.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is the Banks Family Preeminence Chair, Associate Professor of AI and the Arts: Digital Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute. As a Seneca-Cayuga artist, academic, and writer, she has created a research framework called antecedent technologies, which identifies sovereign technological histories as a starting point for generating possible futures.

Saya Woolfalk uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions. In her multiyear projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created stories based on the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic makeup and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to question the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes, offering new ways of knowing, connecting, and feeling. Zurkow’s most recent work, Parting Worlds/Hyundai Terrace Commission, was on exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025–26). Currently, she is working on an algorithmic radio work about fish, with a focus on carp, supported by the Simons Foundation as part of its Infinite Sums initiative.