Stefan Al is an architect, urban designer, researcher and writer. Early in his career, Stefan worked on the winning competition design and development of the 600-meter tall Canton Tower, briefly the world’s tallest tower. Upon its construction, he has focused on designing high-rise towers and large-scale masterplans across the globe, including as a senior associate partner at KPF. In addition to his work as a designer, he serves on the faculty of Virginia Tech and has published seven books about architecture and urban design that have been widely acclaimed including by the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Record, The Times and NPR.
Ágnes Karolina Bakk is a researcher at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. She is the founder of the immersive storytelling conference and magazine Zip-Scene; cofounder of Random Error Studio, a lab that supports various VR productions; curator of Vektor VR. She was previously a research fellow at Sapientia – Hungarian University of Transylvania. She is teaching escape room design, immersive & VR storytelling and speculative design, and she is also a board member of the COST Action INDCOR. Bakk presented her research on immersive theatre, science of magic and VR at various conferences and platforms from Moscow (CILECT, 2019) to Montreal (SQUET, 2019).
Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Internationally known for her interdisciplinary research on visual arts, architecture and media, she is the author of several award-winning books, including Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (Verso, 2002), winner of the Kraszna-Krausz prize for best Moving Image Book in the world; Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993), winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies book award; Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT, 2007), and Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Her new book is Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Konstantinos Dimopoulos, following a PhD and over 10 years of research in urban planning and geography, moved on to combine his knowledge of urbanism with game design, and to help establish the field of game urbanism. Since then he has designed cities, systems, and geographies for tabletop and video games, and has worked on projects like The Sinking City, Lake, Seed, and Ex Novo. Konstantinos teaches level design at SAE Athens, maintains Wireframe magazine’s CityCraft column, lectures on game cities, and is the author of Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities. He has contributed to The Architectonics of Game Spaces, and to Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames 2nd edition.
Florian Freitag has been professor of American Studies at the U of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) since 2019. Freitag received his PhD from the U of Konstanz (Germany) in 2011 and his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) from JGU Mainz (Germany) in 2019. He is the co-founder of three research groups on theme parks, two of which have been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Freitag is the author of Popular New Orleans: The Crescent City in Periodicals, Theme Parks, and Opera, 1875-2015 (Routledge 2021) and the co-editor of Key Concepts in Theme Park Studies: Understanding Tourism and Leisure Spaces (Springer Nature 2022); his other work on theme parks has appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, Continuum, and Journal of Themed Experience and Attractions Studies.
Andri Gerber is an architecture and urban design theoretician and urban metaphorologist. He earned his MSc in Architecture as well as his PhD (awarded with an ETH medal) and his habilitation from the ETH Zurich. He is a professor for Urban History at the ZHAW and a private lecturer at the ETH. His current research and publications focus on matters relating to spatial perception from a cognitive perspective, and on the potential of board and video games in architecture and urban design. Among his recent publications are Architectonics of Game Spaces (with Ulrich Götz, transcript 2019, Training Spatial Abilities (Birkhäuser 2019) and a Covid-19 themed videogame, Dichtestress.
Ulrich Götz is professor at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), where he has headed the ZHdK Subject Area in Game Design since 2004. He was trained as an architect at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Escola Técnica Superior D’Arquitectura in Barcelona. He lectures and publishes on the comparative analysis of spatial design in architecture and game spaces. He has built up extensive experience in research and development of serious & applied games over years of cooperation with numerous partners from medical, therapeutical, educational and economic contexts. His university teaching focuses on the analysis and design of game mechanics, game concepts, motivation design, and spatial design in virtual environments.
Stefano Gualeni is a philosopher who designs digital games and a game designer who is passionate about philosophy. He is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta), and a Visiting Professor at the Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD) in Laguna Beach, California. Stefano is the writer and designer of the point-and-click video game adventure series Tony Tough (2001–2007) as well as many other titles both commercial and experimental. He is the author of four monographic books: Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools (Palgrave, 2015), Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds (Palgrave Pivot, 2020—with Daniel Vella), Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (Bloomsbury, 2023—with Riccardo Fassone), and The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction (forthcoming, Routledge).
Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. Previously he was Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo, where he spent sixteen years on the faculty. He is a founding member of the Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology movements, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Open Philosophy, Series Editor of the Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press, and Series Co-Editor (with Bruno Latour) of the New Metaphysics Series at Open Humanities Press.
Johan Höglund is professor of English at Linnaeus University and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published extensively on the relationship between imperialism and popular culture in a number of different contexts and media. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (2014), and the co-editor of several scholarly collections and special issues, including “Nordic Colonialisms” for Scandinavian Studies (2019), “Revisiting Adventure” for Journal of Popular Culture (2018), Gothic in the Anthropocene (2021), Nordic Gothic (2020), B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (2018), and Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (2015).
Laura Hollengreen is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. Earlier, she was a member of the faculty of the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech and an administrator in the provost’s office there. Trained as an art historian at Princeton University and as a medievalist at UC Berkeley, she has spent most of her career in schools of architecture teaching nascent architects. This has allowed her not only to explore but also to move beyond medieval topics in her teaching and research. That research and her publications have focused on medieval urban public space and monumental sculpture, sanctity and space, landscapes of war, and, most recently, on medieval antecedents to contemporary mixed reality. She has edited a book on the phenomenon of translation in culture and has co-edited two other volumes on the vernacular landscapes of Southern Arizona and on world’s fairs, respectively.
Cornelius Holtorf is Professor of Archaeology and holds a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. He is also directing the Graduate School in Contract Archaeology (GRASCA) at his university. In his research, he is currently particularly interested in contemporary archaeology, heritage theory, and heritage futures, with numerous international publications in these areas. He is the author of From Stonehenge to Las Vegas (2005), Archaeology is a Brand! (2007) and has co-edited collections of papers on The Archaeology of Time Travel (with B. Petersson, 2017), Authenticity and Reconstruction (for International Journal of Cultural Property, 2020), and Cultural Heritage and the Future (with A. Högberg, 2021).
Anna Klingmann is an architect, urbanist, and researcher. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. Anna is driven by a relentless desire to shape places and communities. Guided by an ongoing passion for discovering what is next, her work investigates proactive methods and cross-disciplinary techniques that can meet today’s challenges of urbanization and the progressive interlacing of global and local economic and cultural environments. By integrating multiple scales and disciplines into a holistic approach, her work aims to develop nuanced expressions of urbanity tailored to the needs and means of specific regions and cultural contexts. Resilience is understood here as a multidimensional and heterogeneous process that integrates the fields of ecology, economics, sociology, and culture in a dynamic cross-disciplinary palimpsest, depending on each context. Anna lectures internationally and serves on academic and professional juries and symposia. In the past, she was Chair of Architecture at Dar Al Hekma University in Jeddah and has held guest professorships at Prince Sultan University in Riyadh, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Architectural Association in London, the ETH in Zurich, the University of Arts in Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. Her book Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (MIT Press 2010 [2007]) investigates the concept of branding in architecture and its effects on the global urban landscape. Anna is currently working on new research exploring the inverse effects of global consumer culture. While her earlier research focused on the iconicity of global cities as “branded phenomena” this project undertakes a strategic reversal of emphasis to examine the deeper and more perplexing issue of the local in a climate in which the particularities of regional cultures are under immense pressure.
Jennifer A. Kokai is the Director of the School of Theatre and Dance at University of South Florida. Her research interests concern performances of identity, ecology, and non-human animals in popular entertainments and tourist attractions in the United States. Publications include: Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Actor as Tourist (Palgrave 2019), co-edited with Tom Robson, and Swim Pretty: Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature (Southern Illinois University Press 2017) as well as numerous articles and essays.
Péter Kristóf Makai recently finished his Crafoord Postdoctoral Fellowship in Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. He is set to join the University of Duisburg-Essen’s Cultural Studies Institute as an International Visiting Fellow to study how theme parks are transmediated into digital and board games. He got his English Literature PhD from the University of Szeged. He has published work on Tolkien, games and worldbuilding in Reconstructing Arda, Tolkien Studies, and in Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales. He is a member of COST Action 18230, Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations.
Scott A. Lukas is Faculty Chair of Teaching and Learning at Lake Tahoe Community College, where he has taught Anthropology and Sociology. He was Visiting Professor of American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and taught Anthropology and Sociology at Valparaiso University. He was the recipient of the national AAA/McGraw-Hill Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology by the American Anthropological Association in 2005 and the California statewide Hayward Award for Excellence in Education by the California Community Colleges in 2003. He is the author/editor of seven books, including The Immersive Worlds Handbook, and has consulted for the themed entertainment industry. Scott has provided interviews for The Wondery, To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, The Independent, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times (of London), The Daily Beast, Huffington Post UK, Atlas Obscura, Skift, Caravan, the Angie Coiro Show, and was part of the documentary film and video series, The Nature of Existence.
Sabrina Mittermeier is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Kassel, Germany. She is the author of A Cultural History of Disneyland Theme Parks – Middle-Class Kingdoms (Intellect Books 2020), the co-editor, among other volumes, of Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books 2022), The Routledge Handbook to Star Trek (2021), and Fighting for the Future: Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool University Press 2020). Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and many other edited collections and journals.
Michael Nitsche works as Associate Professor in Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches mainly on issues of hybrid spaces and performance as interaction. He is fascinated by the intersection of the digital with the physical domain and explores this borderline in video games and VR as well as craft and performances. He directs the Digital World and Image Group and is involved with various interdisciplinary research centers. Nitsche has contributed to numerous journals and conferences, his books Vital Media (2022), Video Game Spaces (2009) and The Machinima Reader (2011) (co-edited with Henry Lowood) were published at MIT. Since 2015, he is co-editor of the Taylor&Francis journal Digital Creativity.
Tom Robson is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Academic Programs in the Millikin University School of Theatre & Dance. With Jennifer A. Kokai, he is the co-editor of Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). In addition to his work on theme parks, he has published on topics including early 20th century Black performance, historical stage technology, and baseball movies.
Rebecca Rouse is an Associate Professor in Game Development at University of Skövde, Sweden, where her research focuses on investigating new forms of storytelling with new technologies such as immersive and responsive systems via queer, critical, feminist perspectives and methods. Rouse’s applied design and artistic research is complimented by work in critical pedagogies, design methods, queer feminist media theory and history of technology.
Bobby Schweizer is an Assistant Professor in Creative Media Industries in the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. As a media scholar and educator interested in themed space and expressive environments, he researches experience design, technology, and play in theme parks. He is also interested in media archaeology of theme park attractions and the role that amateurs and fans in the preservation of theme park memory. His writing can be found in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, Widescreen, and Well Played.
Deniz Tortum works in film and new media. His work has screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, IFFR, SxSW, Sheffield, True/False and Dokufest. He has worked as a research assistant at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where his research focused on virtual reality. In 2017–2018, he was a fellow at Harvard Film Study Center, working on “Phases of Matter”, which premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020 and received the Best Documentary awards at Istanbul and Antalya Film Festivals. His film “If Only There Were Peace” (co-dir Carmine Grimaldi) received the best short documentary award at Dokufest and his latest VR film “Floodplain” premiered in Venice Film Festival. He was recently featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.
Nele Van de Mosselaer is a postdoctoral researcher (Research Foundation Flanders – FWO) at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her fields of interest are the philosophy of fiction, game studies, and narratology. In her research, she explores the relation between imagination, emotions, actions, and desires in the context of fiction experiences. She is especially interested in how the boundaries between reality and fiction can be blurred within virtual environments.
Daniel Vella is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, where he teaches classes in digital game studies, player experience and narrative in games. His research interests including the phenomenology of player experience, aesthetic theory and digital games, subjectivity and identity in virtual worlds, and narrativity and fictionality in games. His work has been published in a number of international journals, including Game Studies, Countertext and the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. He is the co-author of Virtual Existentialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and is also a narrative designer for board games.
Jon Yoder is a designer and scholar of modern architecture and visual media who received his Ph.D. in Architecture from UCLA. He teaches design and theory at Kent State University and taught previously at Syracuse University and SCI-Arc. His designs with Pei Cobb Freed, ZGF Architects and SPF:architects have been published widely, and his research and teaching have been supported by numerous grants and awards. These include an ARCHITECT Studio Prize for his design studio, “Graphic Novels / Novel Architecture,” and a Graham Foundation grant for his forthcoming Getty Research Institute Publications book, Widescreen Architecture: Immersive Media and John Lautner.