The night showcased two cutting edge artists: Fito Segrera and Winslow Porter. 

Fito is an artist and creative technologist working at the intersection of art, philosophy, and technology. His works of philosophical and poetic systems investigate our conventional models of cognition and perception, the limitations of the mind, and our relationship with the world and ourselves. For this evening, Fito spoke about an area of research that he has been focusing on over the past ten years. He presented his exploratory work using a brain-computer interface to capture moments of absent-mildness and daydreaming through a dataphone that he programmed to read these signals. This information was then fed to an artificial intelligence entity which created visualizations of these moments, resulting in new forms of digital stories. Questions from the audience varied from how to verify the accuracy of his findings and the potential of this technology to cure brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease to potential forms of surveillance into the mind or potential lessons for mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Fito is the former head of the Department of Research and Creation at Chronus Art Center in Shanghai. He received his MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons, The New School in New York and his BFA in Fine Arts and Audiovisual + Multimedia Production from Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano. He is a Fulbright scholar and winner of several international grants for research and creation in the field. Fito lives in Cartagena, Colombia.  

Winslow Porter is an award-winning director, producer, and creative technologist specializing in impact-based virtual/augmented reality as well as large-scale immersive installations. His work often plays with time, space, and scale with the goal of gaining new perspectives.  For this evening, Winslow presented a new project that he has been working on at his artist residency at the Smallhold Mushroom Farm in Brooklyn, NY. Winslow and his team are creating Forager, an immersive VR/AR experience featuring the first ever volumetrically captured time lapse of mushrooms. Like Tree, one of his former collaborative projects in which the person wearing the headset becomes a tree, the artist plays with the psychology of the viewer to transpose the Anthropocene angle for the one of the plant, in this case, the mushroom: its birth, life and decay are all captured with the latest 360 video and volumetric capture room of the NewLab at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. 

Winslow formed the pioneering, new media studio the New Reality Company in 2016 with Milica Zec, creating the critically acclaimed cinematic VR experiences Tree and Giant. Shortly after, he received an Epic Games MegaGrant for the Amazon conservation project Rainforest. Winslow’s work has been shown at more than 100 conferences and festivals including the World Economic Forum’s Davos conference, the UN General Assembly, TED, Sundance, Tribeca Film Festival, Maxxi, New Museum and Burning Man, to name a few. He is currently a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum and a mentor in residence at NEW INC.