Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Solar – Future energy

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 15:52:12 GMT

Jonas Stojiljkovic Pedersen and Magnus Borgkvist Johansson. Malmö based instrumental duo Solar is a cosmic blend of postrock and John Carpenter flavoured influences where drums and synthesizers is the driving force.

The expression is wide, from vast soundscapes with hypnotic arpeggios and expressive drums to dark, doom influenced tracks that seems to reflects a place where darkness has reigned since the beginning of time. Solar produces music in a high pace and keep exploring and widen their sound and influences on every new track produced. It’s manifested on stage where they take the audience on a journey through time and space, light and darkness. This piece, called "Future energy", was created especially for the closing keynote of The Conference 2019.

Dr. James Beacham – What's outside the universe?

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:54:27 GMT

Dr. James Beacham is a particle physicist searching for answers to the biggest open questions of physics using the largest experiment ever, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He hunts for dark matter, gravitons, quantum black holes and dark photons as a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the teams that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. He ended The Conference 2019 with a science class out of this world and a reminder of that to physics – we're all the same.

Jonas Hedman – Out of cash

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

“What is money? In my meaning it’s the best innovation ever. It’s a trust system, we put more trust in money than we do in religion.”

Jonas Hedman is Professor at the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School. His research interest concerns the digital transformation in the finance sector and includes topics such as cashless society, fintech revolution, payment ecosystems, payment innovations, open API and central bank digital currency.

Money – such as coins, banknotes and account money – are global, general purpose mediums of exchange with an unrestricted usage. In the future, however, experts like Jonas foresee a new type money: one that is intelligent or smart, money that we can program for specific uses. In essence, “smart money” is a value exchange instrument that is based on computer protocols which can facilitate, verify or enforce present conditions for its appropriation as a means of payment.

Jacopo Pompilii – Out of cash

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

Jacopo is an interaction designer at frog, a global design and strategy firm. He works on design research and product definition for a range of digital channels, from consumer applications to corporate websites. He’s fascinated by complex systems and how they can be optimized for usability and delight through design.

His experience spans into different industries like financial services, telco, automotive and consumer electronics and at The Conference he shared some design opportunities risen from the dawn of the cashless society.

Brett Scott – The war on cash

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

“Cash allows everybody to use it, it doesn’t care who you are.”

At The Conference 2019, author and economic hacker Brett Scott made the case for keeping cash. He talked about – not a “cashless society” – but a “bankful society”, referring to institutions and states that all are pushing for a more digitized money system.

Claire L. Evans – The pioneering grandmothers of the internet

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

Anyone who’s seen AMC’s series Halt and Catch Fire knows the importance of representation. Two out of four main characters are female tech pioneers in the early 80s. Claire L. Evans’ book Broadband traces the real story of women behind the solitary geniuses of history, who tend to be men. What if unique solutions and social networks like Microcosm or Echo (both created by women) had received the same attention and capital that e.g. the WWW got in the early 90s? In her talk Evans explores the untravelled paths of history to balance the narrative and to show us the radically different now we could have lived in. Outreach, representation and care – what if all those things were taken into account when designing and coding solutions? Care, especially is a word we don’t hear a lot anymore. But if we’re going to survive the future and its challenges, we need all the help we can get. Which means we need to see more non-males represented in the tech industry.

Andrea Jones-Rooy – Under measure – measuring what matters

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

"Measurement is the beautiful act when humans get involved and take facts to data"

At The Conference 2019, Data science professor Dr. Andrea Jones-Rooy (NYU), talked about the pitfalls to be mindful of when working with data. Andrea explained the dangers of just scratching the surface of the data and how important it is to look beyond. We should look at the data as subjective because if we look at the data with an expectation of answers, we will find them and miss out on everything else. Instead, Dr. Andra Jones-Rooy wants us to start with the question. E.g. Why are women leaving the company? Why are they more unlikely to have higher positions? By asking questions, maybe we someday can point out a good measurement for diversity. What are the inputs and outputs and how do you create diversity?

Anna Åhnberg – Under measure – measuring what matters

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

"We’re all going to fucking die"

Green house emission, climate change. Big words with a scary tone. At The Conference 2019, Sustainability specialist Anna Åhnberg from Oatly told us that we SHOULD be scared but she also encouraged us not to freeze in panic. Everyone should, and could, act and that includes the food companies too. The food industry accounts for 25% of the worlds global gas emissions which is more than all the transport industries together. Anna Åhnberg has one strong message – the food industry should talk more about their environmental impact. By acknowledging the impact every product has, the consumers finally have the opportunity to be aware and compare different food. How much impact on the environment had your breakfast today?

Alina Bliumis – Most of us are

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

Who is the every day person? What is your identity? And more importantly, is there such a thing? A while ago, Alina Bliumis went out on a mission to find the answer. She searched the web and after diving into big chunks of data she found out that most of us are 28 years old, have black hair and brown eyes. She also found out that most people don't believe in global warming and that most of us owns a bed and a smartphone. By analyzing the numbers, we would now believe that we have the answer to the question of how a every day person looks and act like, but be aware. Alina Bliumis warns us that in reality this might look a bit different. “It seems unlikely that all metrics reflects the true reality” she says.

Meghan O'Gieblyn – God in the machine

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

Sci-fi and religion alike, have always been concerned with dilemmas we now associate with transhumanism. What does resurrection or immortal life feel like? Will you still be ”you”? The idea of mind uploading has been a prevalent feature in wildly imaginative series like Altered Carbon, but now we seem to be on the verge of realisation of similar technologies with Elon Musk’s Neuralink project. Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn shares her story that begin as a devout Christian, later to become fascinated by the seemingly secular narratives of Kurzweil. From Dante to 20th century transhumanists via the alchemists, O’Gieblyn shows how ”existential questions are always going to rely on metaphors”. We need to be wary of the metaphors we use, because they shape our consciousness and have had a history of leading to fundamentalism, religious or secular. Who knows that the right answers are, but at least we need to look beyond our Cartesian dualism of body and mind.

Nicole He – Say my name, say my name

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

"Voice technology is the gap between what AI actually is and what people believe it is"

Nicole He is an artist and programmer who use technology for creative work, combined with an interest in current technology of AI and the character of AI. Voice technology could be seen as the gap between the real AI and the AI character in our imagination. The cutting edge tech is created for things that can make money, but that shouldn’t stop us from using them to make art. In different creative projects Nicole has incorporated voice technology, such as the” True Love Tinder Robot”, the “Secret Dunny Box” and “Garden Friends”. They all have in common that we can interact with the technology in different ways and it creates different feelings and experiences. However - according to Nicole voice technology is not perfect yet. There’s a difference in how we think it should work and how it actually works. It’s interesting now and we don’t have to wait for the AI to be perfect to use it, there’s room to make great things with it.

Anthony Onumonu – Say my name, say my name

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

With help from Amazon’s Alexa, Anthony Onumonu, Principal software engineer from BBC R&D, talks about designing and developing interactive experiences on smart speakers. Anthony shared research from BBC’s ”Talking with machines!” project, combining cutting edge technology and storytelling. Skipping to the million dollar question: Have we solved interactive voice technology? No, this is just the beginning.

Daniel Padgett – Say my name, say my name

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

We’re entering the beginning of a technological shift where machines get more and more humanized. Daniel Padgett, Conversational Design Lead at Google, works to put people in the centre and optimize technology for the future, and in this talk from The Conference 2019, Daniel draws from from his vast experience within voice technology and teach us about the complexities and opportunities of working with voice as an interface.

Kris De Decker - Look back, move forward

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

Journalist Kris De Decker writes about low tech solutions to high tech problems. At The Conference 2019, Kris walked us through his solar powered website Low tech magazine and the design decisions required to make it work. Internet, and with it, the digital industries consumes enormous amounts of energy and as such, has a huge impact on the climate. To create a more sustainable online magazine, Kris and his team revisited old school techniques in web design.

Zara Rahman - Look back, move forward

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:43 GMT

At The Conference 2019, Zara Rahman, Director of Programs at The Engine Room spoke about the unintended impact of technology in relation to identity. How do identification technologies shape our own identities? And how did we come about to decide how to measure this? The talk examines who gets to decide the borders that tell you who you are and how the ability to self-identify is what makes us human. Does more data and tech automatically mean progress? What is progress and how does human power affect humans?

Che-Wei Wang – When Design Gets Swallowed by Engineering

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

”AI is just another tool, but also not just another tool”

Che-Wei Wang runs a small design studio with his wife, where they explore computational and generative design. In their studio they have the tools to build prototypes in a single day. Working with CAD (computer-aided design) tools for many years, he has seen how these have always been meant to facilitate a human process. With the recent influx of AI in design however, generative design software has arrived big time. In many cases however, these tools are digital black boxes that often produce results that are surprising to the designers themselves. Showing examples of actual products he has created, Wang shows how human aesthetics and intuition often gets lost along the way. He argues that we should work to adapt AI software to accept human feedback, instead of reducing all kinds of inputs to numbers. Rather than going down the rabbit hole with automated design, we should really be looking at how things like CAD can become tools for human-aided design - especially now that we’re beginning to produce three-dimensional objects like furniture using generative design.

Mark d'Inverno – AI, creativity and all that jazz

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

”it’s a profoundly human act to give feedback to each other on our creative work”

Mark d’Inverno is not only a professor of computer science – he is also an accomplished jazz musician with both skill and feeling. His talk is more concerned with the latter: the craft of creative production. He believes the discourse has focussed too much on creativity as a power in the mind which leads to us trying to create computer systems which simulate ’heroic agency' where what matters is the final product. He believes that the modern understandings of creativity from psychology which lead to this way of designing and envisaging AI is a mistake. He subscribes instead to Dewey’s notion that art is not about the final piece itself but about the human experience of making and experiencing it. In his background as a teacher, d’Inverno works a lot with creative feedback – creating safe environments – physical and virtual - where feedback can be motivational and personalised. And he believes this is where AI can help. If we want to approach the world with the curiousity of a musician or artist, then rigorously designed AI can help us get a stronger sense of our shared world.

Vincent Bahar – Transendence

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Poet, composer and musician Vincent Bahar has quickly made a name for herself at the cultural stages in south of Sweden and Copenhagen. With a combination of experimental drones, Persian instruments and timeless spoken poetry, she lets you into her very own universe and opens the door to an undiscovered, transcendent space. Earlier this year Inkonst described her performance as: “Rolling Persian rhythms that carry hypnotic flows of words and electronics. Intonal quality, no less!”

Vincent plays the 6,000 year old frame drum called Daf that carries mystical mantras dating back to the Sassanian Empire. Right now she is working on an immersive Virtual Reality healing experience that centres around the rhythm of Daf to help people come back to their very own pulse and come back to themselves.

Need for speed – Soft touch

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

”An inferno of will and intentions, all suppressed feelings, two dogs and a speed lane. Things that leads up to Need For Speed a two man gang from Malmö Sweden.” Need for Speed is a Malmö duo consisting of the fabulous Martin Nilsson & Felix Mårtensson.

It is chill pop music with a healthy dose of dark indie electronic RnB. They both have their roots in noir punk band RA. Soft touch can be found on Spotify together with their other releases.

Mollie Claypool – Discrete automation

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

“I find it incredibly odd that our world has changed but our vision of the built environment hasn’t”

Mollie Claypool dives into her work as an architecture theorist concerned with “discrete automation”. This is a way of bringing the so-called digital architecture of our current practices together with automation of processes familiar from other industries. With a post-work future in mind, we need to reimagine the way we construct buildings. The elements that make up a building have, in fact, not changed essentially since the industrial revolution. While the tools architects use have developed to handle more and more complex designs, the actual process of building large-scale structures still requires thousands of individual parts and a myriad of contractors and subcontractors. Automation could help in reducing the resources required, as well as giving the end user a more direct role in shaping the built environment. It could help drive systemic change and result in more flexible, agile and resilient buildings with smaller carbon footprints.

Curiositi – Ready

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Curiositi is the musical project of Matilda Berggren and Emil Johansson. Being veterans of the swedish electro/indie-scene the couple met while touring italy with their respective bands in 2007 but took up writing and producing together in 2016 when Johansson put his old project Parker Lewis to rest. Since Curiositis first release the act has slowly built a reputation for being next level producers and writers, making heavily R&B-influenced pop music echoing of soft rock, quiet storm and even new jack swing. The debut album Skin Love came out through the band’s own Inertial Recordings in March 2019, celebrated by the band through an exhibition and gesamtkunstwerk at art space Makeriet in their native Malmö. Instead of a release party, Curiositi collaborated with performance artist Daniel Kokko, artist Lisa Peterson, graphic designer Ivar Lantz and various fragrance artists and distillers to create an all round experience of the themes of Skin Love. This event also marked the premiere for Curiositi’s silent live shows. A concept where the band perform their music in a storefront window to bypassers who are able to listen through headphones on the other side of the storefront window. Curiositi is currently doing finishing touches on their sophomore album Kenoma, slated for release early 2020. The first single Accidie was released early summer 2019 and was by far the smallest act to be featured on the Spotify playlist New Music Friday Sweden

Petra Lilja – Multi-species thinking

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Industrial designer and co-founder of non-agency Petra Lilja speaks about the weight of human influence on the earth and how to design for a better future for all species. Can we go from a human centered to a multi-species centered future?

Cyrus Clarke – Playing with biology

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Cyrus Clarke is storing holiday pictures in his plants. Yes, you read that right. This talk is about how to grow your own Cloud and what happens when combining art with science. What will it take for humans to truly value nature and how can we intervene and draw attention to something as seemingly abstract and immaterial as data consumption before it’s too late. DNA as a storage medium is the most efficient known data storage medium in the universe, so why not storage the whole planet’s data in organisms such as plants and trees? Clarke has worked with nature as technology and plant geneticists to develop techniques to embed plants with data and how this might lead us to Data Forests.

Abie Philbin Bowman – Crash course in the Irish voting system

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Abie Philbin Bowman is an Irish comedian, broadcaster, podcast host and also quite the expert on voting systems. In particular Ireland’s voting system. During his talk at The Conference 2019 he tried to make the Irish voting system more sexy by explaining how Ranked Choice Voting works. This ranking system can create a more collaborative politics and could help resolve the identity crisis currently fracturing big-tent parties like the Democrats/Labour. It’s a different way to work with ongoing democracy systems and rates don’t always win. Different counts give different numbers and it could be seen as a way how to hack the democracy and voting systems around the world.

Maria Malho – Universalism and fairness for the next era

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

“It is not about who owns what, but how to give access to everyone”

Maria Malho (M.Soc.Sc.) is an expert in societal transformations. She works at the leading Nordic think tank Demos Helsinki, who’s mission is to reconfigure society in the post-industrial era. Maria is specialized in future studies and at The Conference 2019, she shared her thoughts on universalism and fairness for the next era.

Ryosuke Sakaki & Takashi Koyama – Playing with biology

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Have you ever fantasized about 3D printing your own food? Sakaki and Koyama from Open Meals are making a 3D printing sushi restaurant in Tokyo and want to visualize how the future of food will look like. Can you, and should you, digitalize, transmit and reproduce all kinds of food and perhaps create a digital food revolution?

Sam Gregory – Trust, Truth and Deepfakes

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:14 GMT

Sam Gregory is an award-winning technologist and advocate who is currently the Program Director of WITNESS, an organization which supports anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to fight for human rights.

Sam leads work around emerging opportunities and threats like artificial intelligence, proactive approaches to malicious ‘deepfakes', innovation in eyewitness video, and challenges to trust and evidence. He also supervises WITNESS’ Tech Advocacy work, which advocates to technology companies on how products protect human rights and develops tools such as ProofMode for better authentication of contentious video.

Giorgio Patrini – Deepfakes – not based on a true story

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

Giorgio Patrini is CEO and Chief Scientist at Deeptrace, an Amsterdam-based startup building deep learning technology for detecting and understanding fake videos. An anti-virus system for deep fakes, kind of. Video manipulation is getting more refined and whilst a fake Obama speech might be fairly easy to unravel, the danger lies in the subtleties and details.

Gabi Ivens – Verifying media at scale

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

Open source investigator Gabi Ivens works as a human rights researcher focusing largely on visual documentation of human rights abuses. She locates, analyses and preserves publicly available information to use in human rights investigations and researches the ethical and social implications, as well as the technical challenges, of this work.

Lara Houston – The art of maintenance

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

Lara Houston, researcher at City, University of London, lifts the importance of maintenance and repair in the digital age. Can we have a right to repair? In the lack of information and access, we tend to upgrade to new things, instead of value the things.

Xiaowei Wang – No time for the future

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

Xiaowei Wang is a designer, engineer and researcher who focuses on the centrality of landscape and ecology in the digital world, building inquiry and community through public art, data visualization and writing. At The Conference 2019, they shared their research on consumerism in China, with an extra focus on the rural Taobao villages.

Darius Kazemi – Social solutions to social networking

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

“You can have weird and dangerous features in a platform if the core is that you are never gonna scale.”

Internet artist Darius Kazemi is known for his many (and funny) Twitter bots under the moniker Tiny Subversions. He is also the founder of Friendscamp, a Twitter like social network with only 50 users which is run from a server in his own home. A more human scale social network built upon the input from the users. At The Conference 2019, Darius shared his vision of a radical new direction for social network sites.

Lisa Ding – Creating the new social web

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

At The Conference 2019, Lisa Ding, product designer at Twitter's “Design for Conversation” department shared insights and considerations on how to design for a healthy public conversation in a digital universe. Drawing from her actual work and experiences at Twitter.

Charles Broskoski - Creating the new social web

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

“If you think of your most favorite or least favorite social network, and then try and imagine what it would look like as a physical space. It’s really easy to imagine if it’s a space you would like to go to every day or not.”

How can we sort out the good attributions from existing platforms and create new ones? Social networks have been deeply criticized over the years, but Are.na founder Charles Broskoski wants to turn the subject on how to develop and improve them instead. He wants to start a conversation about the important questions, What is a good platform and what patterns does it have? He describes Are.na as a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge and explains that the users have a lot of power and influence over the platform.

Paul Soulellis – Urgentcraft

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

Paul Soulellis is an artist and educator based in Providence, RI. His practice includes teaching, writing and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies and network culture.

Paul poses important questions about history and erasure and has long been using publishing as a form of resistance. Innovation and creation is about power, but so is the act of deciding what to maintain and preserve, not least in the digital world. What is signal and what is noise?

Natalie Remøe & Kristoffer Kumar – Tomorrow's story

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

Natalie and Kumar are both video journalists at VGTV, a Norwegian TV-channel connected to the Verdens gang news outlet. At The Conference 2019, they showcased their work behind ”The Tinder Swindler” story that has gained a lot of attention wide and far for it’s format as well as content.

Dr. Bahareh Heravi – Big data or small data?

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

"I am in huge favor of low tech data journalism"

Dr. Bahareh Heravi is a Data and Computational Journalism researcher, trainer, practitioner and innovator who will share how news rooms of all sizes can work with data to construct stories, and that not only being big data but small data sets.

Amanda Michel - Tomorrow's story

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:22:13 GMT

At the Guardian, Amanda Michel is Global Director and senior product manager of Contributions, a core part of the Guardian’s expanding reader revenue model. In 2018 the Guardian announced the support of more than one million readers around the globe and in 2019 that it had broken even.

While subscriptions and paywalls have been the preferred solution of many renowned news outlets, The Guardian has chosen the route of voluntary donations. At The Conference 2019, Amanda shared the story of this decision and its quite interesting effects.