Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published thirteen novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction. His novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. In 1996 Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. He has been nominated four times for the Hugo award. He has won several awards abroad, including the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Ditmar Award (Australia), and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France). In 2001 he was awarded the Prix Utopia (France) for lifetime achievement. He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was filmed by Warner Bros. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went to No.1 US box office in its first week. It received two Academy Award nominations. Chris Priest’s most recent novel The Gradual will be published by Gollancz in 2016, and in the USA by Titan Books,
He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.
As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.
d-n-e (Donatas Tubutis & Katrina Burch) is a sleepwalking cru. Who has a million bucks to save them? Million bucks girl Katrina and million bucks boy Donatas excavate their kitchen to entangle their relatives into the nightmare via looping stepping-stones.
Laboria Cuboniks (b. 2014) is a xenofeminist collective, spread across five countries and three continents. She seeks to dismantle gender, destroy ‘the family,’ and do away with nature as a guarantor for inegalitarian political positions. Her name is an anagram of ‘Nicolas Bourbaki’, a pseudonym under which a group of largely French mathematicians worked towards an affirmation of abstraction, generality and rigour in mathematics in the early twentieth century. She will be represented by Katrina Burch and Patricia Reed for this event.
Metahaven Metahaven was founded by Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk in 2007. Originally experimental graphic designers, Metahaven turned to art and moving image as a natural progression of their research into aesthetics and politics after the internet. They worked with organizations like WikiLeaks and Independent Diplomat, and produce music videos with the progressive EDM superstar Holly Herndon. Metahaven’s recent publications include Uncorporate Identity, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?, and Black Transparency. Together, Kruk and Van der Velden teach at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Their work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Artists Space, and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, among others.
Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies, and was 2012-15 Visiting Faculty at CCS Bard, New York. Recent and forthcoming publications include, as author, On the Necessity of Art's Exit From Contemporary Art (2016) and 'The Ontology of Finance' in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2015), and, as co-editor, Realism Materialism Art (2015), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), and The Flood of Rights (2016).
Born in Lebanon in 1980, Tarek Atoui moved to France in 1998 where he studied economics and electroacoustic music. In 2008 he worked as artistic director at Steim in Amsterdam, a centre for the research and development of new electronic musical instruments. Today Atoui is a sound artist and composer and is developing a permanent reflection on the concept of the instrument and the act of performance itself as a complex, open and dynamic process. He has also performed at the New Museum in New York (2009/2011); the Sharjah Biennial 9 and 11 in the United Arab Emirates (2009/2013); the dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel (2012), the 8th Berlin Biennial (2014) and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014/2015).
Born in 1981 in Toulouse, Tristan Garcia entered in 2000 the École Normale Supérieure. After working with Alain Badiou, he was awarded his PhD for a thesis on the subject of « representation » in human arts, which he had written under the supervision of Sandra Laugier. On the same year, he published his first novel, awarded by the Flore Prize : La Meilleure part des hommes (Hate : a romance, translated by Lorin Stein, Faber & Faber, 2011). Working as a teacher at the University of Amiens, he continued his career as a novelist (Mémoires de la jungle, 2010 ; En l’absence de classement final, 2011 ; Les Cordelettes de Browser, 2012 ; Faber. Le destructeur, 2013 ; 7, 2015) and he conducted further researches in metaphysics, leading to the publishing of Forme et Objet. Un traité des choses (Form and Object. A treatise on things, translated by Jon Cogburn and Mark A. Ohm, Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He wrote critical essays about animal suffering (Nous, animaux et humains, 2011), political subjectivity (Nous, 2016) or TV series (Six Feet Under. Nos vies sans destin, 2012). Since 2015, he's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Lyon-3.
Yoneda Lemma is a quasi-causal brainchild for abstract exploration, experimental research, and a platform for productions, plotted by archaeologist, composer/producer and feminist thinker, Katrina Burch, who practices music to deepen the game of thinking with the universe. Yoneda Lemma's complex harmonic layers dig into sound densely, shifting sonic elements from one fiction to another.