State of the Contemporary: NFTs and the Global South

Pattie Maes is a professor in MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences and until recently the chair of the Media Lab's executive committee. She founded and directed the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Maes is particularly interested in the topic of cognitive enhancement, or how wearable, immersive and brain-computer interface systems can actively assist people with issues such as memory, attention, learning, creativity, decision making, communication, wellbeing, and sleep. Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. She has received several awards: Newsweek magazine named her one of the "100 people for the new century", TIME Digital selected her as a member of the Cyber-Elite (the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world); the World Economic Forum honored her with the title Global Leader for Tomorrow; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council. In 1997, Maes was listed in People Magazine's annual 50 Most Beautiful People feature. She has also received an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and has given several TED talks. In addition to her academic endeavors, Maes has been an active entrepreneur as co-founder of several venture-backed companies.

Madeleine Pierpont Driven by her desire to engender new ways of experiencing cultural and material aesthetics, Madeleine Pierpont is a creative-innovator working at the intersection of art and technology. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Madeleine produces and facilitates meaningful engagement with the arts. With a core focus in Web3 activations, she is particularly dedicated to developing programming that actively engages the broader public through unconventional and fresh creative outputs.

Anand Venkateswaran is the Co-Founder and CEO of eDAO, a Web2-Web3 barge for brands, IP holders, and fan communities. eDAO launches global art, media and entertainment IPs at scale, into the world of Web3. Anand has been a journalist, an ad-man and a writer for hire. In the metaverse, he was Twobadour, one half of the duo that won the historic $69 mn Christie’s auction for Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days. He was the Steward of Metapurse - the largest NFT fund in the world. He found his groove as a capital allocator, storyteller, community builder and artist fanboy. He was the executive producer of Metapalooza, then the biggest metaverse event, and of Dreamverse, the first and largest ever NFT Art Exhibition and EDM Concert, held in New York.

Myna Mukherjee is a cultural producer, curator, and the founder/director of Engendered, a New York/New Delhi based Transnational Arts and Human rights organization with a focus on the intersections of gender and marginalities in South Asia. She is interested in art curation as a feminist practice, an instigation/investigation and reflection of aesthetics and visual spectacle, as means towards subversion of a hegemonic culture. A technology, finance and management strategy consultant by training, Myna left a successful career on Wall Street, to produce and curate the best in contemporary South Asian art, cinema and performance festivals in New York. She has curated internationally at the Lincoln Center, Asia Society, Tribeca Film Center, Queens Museum, and others. For the India Chapter of Engendered, she initiated Delhi’s first and only alternative art space that served as no one of the first gallery and artist residency dedicated to incubating a space for cultural production around issues of gender, sexuality and rights for marginalities over the years. She has curated some of India’s most prolific touring visual arts exhibitions, and brought to Delhi North America’s largest South Asian Human Rights film festival, I View World in 2016. In 2019 LifeStyle Asia magazine listed her as one of the top 5 curators revolutionizing the Indian art scene. She was featured in Harper’s Bazaar’s HOT LIST of top curators in India. In 2020, she was invited to co-curate a museum exhibition at the Museum of Eastern Art in Turin, Italy and Hub India, a survey program representing the contemporary art and ecosystem of India for Artissima, one of Italy’s most pivotal art fairs. She was also on the board of Lumen Prize 2021 and has also exhibited India’s first solo show on Artificial Intelligence (AI) art.

Raghava KK has pioneered a groundbreaking body of diverse works that explore transcendence through the lens of the current digital era. Raghava’s work traverses traditional forms of painting, installation and performance while also embracing new media to express post-human contemporary realities. He figured on CNN’s 2010 list of the 10 most remarkable people of the year and the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Creative Indians. He was the first Indian artist to auction an NFT at Sotheby’s in 2021 with great success. Raghava’s storytelling migrates among his various disciplines through 50 foot live paintings, interactive books on Apple’s iPad, music inspired art for Erykah Badu and Paul Simon. As a creator in residence at Viacom, NY, Raghava premiered Must# at both TED and Viacom HQ, A Visual Empathy Algorithm that learned how the viewer made meaning visually and pushed him to transcend the limits of his taste. In 2017, Raghava was invited by Jeff Bezos to conduct an art workshop for leading creative minds from around the world. The same year, as a partner, he helped set up the vision and strategy for India’s largest venture fund for wellbeing. In 2018, Raghava, along with Karthik Kalayanaraman, co-founded 64/1, an art collective dedicated to blurring the lines between art, art criticism and art education. He currently lives and works out of New York and Bangalore, India.

Harshit Agrawal is an artist working with artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab and IIT Guwahati, his work has been nominated twice and shortlisted for the top tech art prize, the Lumen Prize. He did India’s first solo show of AI Art in 2021 and was the only Indian artist at the first global group exhibition of AI Art at a contemporary gallery in 2018. His work is part of the permanent collection of the largest computer science museum in the world, and has shown at group shows at the India Habitat Center (India), Asia Culture Center (Korea), Ars Electronica (Austria), Museum of Tomorrow (Brazil) among others.

Brian Trunzo, comes to Web3 and the metaverse with a unique perspective. Having started his professional career as a financial services attorney, he pivoted into the creative world, becoming a leading voice in men's fashion. After successfully exiting two fashion businesses, Brian went on to lead WGSN, the authority in trend forecasting, in growing their North American consulting business. While there, he earned a reputation as a leading thinker on the burgeoning metaversal economy: from digital scarcity to crypto-economics, Brian consulted clients on how to think about this emerging world. In leading up to his post as Metaverse Lead at Polygon Studios, Brian built a metaverse consultancy to advise legacy brands on how to leverage their IP in the metaverse while heading up America's largest men's fashion trade show at Informa Markets.

Craig Hatkoff is cofounder of the Tribeca Film Festival, as well as the Disruptor Foundation and annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards, two collaborations with the father of disruptive innovation theory, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. Hatkoff began his career at Chemical Bank, where he was a pioneer of the real estate securitization industry, and went on to cofound Capital Trust before serving as a board member and the chairman. He left Capital Trust in 2000 to pursue his passion for entrepreneurial and creative endeavors focused in the field of disruptive innovation. In addition, Hatkoff is a director of both Taubman Centers, Inc. and SL Green Realty Corporation, and serves on a number of boards including Tribeca Film Institute, Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, Child Mind Institute, Wild Bird Fund and the Borough of Manhattan Community College Foundation. He is also a coauthor and founder of Turtle Pond Publications, a leading publisher of Scholastic children’s books, including #1 New York Times bestseller Owen & Mzee. Craig graduated from Colgate University in 1976 and received his MBA from Columbia University in1978. He is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School where he created and teaches the course on Disruptive Innovation

Kunal Sood is an avid art collector and the founder of X Fellows and #WeThePlanet, both of which are a part of his life’s purpose and journey. He is a TED Resident, Tribeca Disruptor Fellow, and Ambassador for the Non-Violence Project, Singularity University and OpenEXO. With a Masters in Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, Kunal also has a long list of educational qualifications. With his startups X Fellows, NOVUS Impact and #WeThePlanet, he hopes to bring together global leaders to unite them against climate change, and help make the world a better place for the less fortunate.

Shazia Ilmi, is a former well-established prime-time television anchor and political correspondent. She led a media campaign for an anti-corruption bill (to institute an ombudsman popularly known as the Jan Lokpal Bill) and was a member of the Aam Aadmi Party's National Executive but left the party in May 2014 and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in January 2015. She is also a social activist and a documentary filmmaker.