DISSECT

Xenia Chiaramonte is a jurist and a socio-legal scholar. She graduated in Law from the University of Milan where she also defended her doctoral dissertation in 2017. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna and Roma Tre as well as a CAS SEE (Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe) fellow at the University of Rijeka. Xenia Chiaramonte is interested in the intersection of law and social movements. Her research has moved from the ‘negative’ relationship between public law (criminal and administrative) and protests to a project on new social institutions designed to enhance the legal capacity to craft a fictional conception of nature.

Peter Jäger is a German arachnologist, and current Head of Arachnology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. He has described 513 new species of spiders within the last 20 years. Thunberga greta (named after Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg) is exactly the 400th species he discovered. Over and over again, he uses prominent names to draw attention to problems affecting our planet’s environment. The best known example so far was the Southeast Asian huntsman spider species Heteropoda davidbowie. https://www.senckenberg.de/en/pressemeldungen/a-spider-named-greta/ 

Alice Jarry is Assistant Professor in Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality (New Scholar), Design and Computation Arts. She is an artist, researcher, and educator who specializes in site-specific responsive works, socio-environmental design, digital arts, tangible media, and community-oriented projects. She is a member of Montreal-based Digital Arts Collective Perte De Signal (Montréal), Milieux Institute for Research-Creation (Concordia University), and Hexagram (Montréal). Her works have been presented in several exhibition locations in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Alex Jordan studies the evolution of social behaviour in animals – the ways single individuals come together to form stable social groups, and the behavioural, cognitive, and neuroanatomical mechanisms that have evolved to facilitate group living. His research program encompasses traditional field behavioural ecology, computational ethology, physics of social behaviour, neurobiology, and most importantly evolutionary theory, aiming to understand both the mechanisms and the outcomes of social behaivour across species, with a focus on cichlid fishes and social spiders. His research is primarily field-focused, attempting to understand animal behaviour in the places it has evolved; Lake Tanganyika, the Mediterranean Sea, Coral Reefs in the Caribbean and Red Sea, as well as Central American rainforests.
He is a permanent Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, heading up the Behavioural Evolution Research Group. He has held editorial positions at The American Naturalist and Movement Ecology. He is also active at the interface of science, art, and community engagement, working with artists and academies like Tabita Rezaire, SUPERFLEX, TBA-21, and Tomás Saraceno. Previously, Alex was the Integrative Biology Fellow, working in collaboration with Mike Ryan, Dan Bolnick, and Hans Hofmann at UT Austin, and before that a JSPS fellow in Osaka working with Masanori Kohda. He completed his PhD with Rob Brooks at the University of NSW, and did his undergraduate honours thesis with Madeleine Beekman and Ben Oldroyd at the University of Sydney.

Martin Müller is a Cultural Historian working at the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity where he is researching on the epistemology, materiality and operativity of the genetic code. Since 2015 he has been researching and teaching at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Research interests: Theory of synthetic biology and genome editing, history of biopolitics, genealogies of the technocene, theory of the postmetabolic. Visiting scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo (2019), Universidad de Buenos Aires (2017), Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2013), Columbia University in New York City (2012).

Patricia Ribault is a professor for »Performative Design Research« in the Department of Theory and History at weißensee school of art and design berlin and was most recently Junior Professor for History and Theory of Gestaltung at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She was involved in the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung, the forerunner of Matters of Activity, for which she is also a Principal Investigator. Patricia Ribault started her career in design, ceramics, and glassblowing and her research interests cover the fields of design, craft, art, body, work, technology, industry. Since 2011 she has also been leading a master’s seminar at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris.