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Join us for Hopeful Monsters, an artist talk/panel discussion featuring Georgina Voss, Tim Maughan and Jane Frances Dunlop, moderated and curated by Maria Yablonina. This event is co-presented by the Daniels Faculty and the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCT) at the University of Toronto.

Hopeful Monsters, or How to Technology and Not Despair, brings together an interdisciplinary panel of artists, researchers and authors to share recent and ongoing work, and have a frank discussion about technology as a tool, medium and subject of creative work. Finding ourselves in the overwhelming context of interdependent technological shifts and social, political and environmental crises, the panel hopes to figure out, as the subtitle suggests, how to technology and not despair, looking for ways to engage with technology that bend rules, break protocols and shift our point of view outside the established narrative such that we might hope to see its layered contexts.

Each of the three guest speakers will share some of their ongoing work that critically engages with technology and its infrastructures, histories, politics, aesthetics and metaphors. In this un-disciplinary conversation, speakers will show work in installation, scholarship, performance, sound, sci-fi, video and much more.

Guest speakers

An artist and writer, Georgina Voss (she/her) is the author of Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World (Verso 2024). Her work explores the presence and politics of large-scale technologies and heavy industry through performance, multimedia installation, visual practice and writing. Voss has exhibited and performed at institutions transmediale, Auto Italia South East, TAC Eindhoven, STUK, V&A London, Brighton Digital Festival, Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Tate Modern and London Digital Festival; she has published in The Guardian, Harvard Design Magazine, The Atlantic and more. Georgina co-founded and led the creative studios Strange Telemetry and Supra Systems Studio (University of the Arts London) and holds a PhD in Science and Technology Policy from SPRU, University of Sussex.

Jane Frances Dunlop is an artist, writer and educator. She creates installations, videos, essays, poems and performances. Dunlop has exhibited and performed in galleries and cultural institutions internationally including Kunstlerhaus (Vienna), Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK) and ACMI (Melbourne). Her writing has appeared in academic journals, art catalogues and magazines. Dunlop holds a PhD from the University of Brighton and is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Greenwich in London, UK.

Tim Maughan is an author and journalist using both fiction and non-fiction to explore issues around cities, class, culture, technology and the future. His work has appeared on the BBC, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, One Zero and Vice/Motherboard. His debut novel, INFINITE DETAIL, was published by FSG in 2019, selected by The Guardian as its Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Locus Magazine Award for Best First Novel. Maughan was a story consultant and writer on the recent Netflix show THE FUTURE OF, and he uses fiction to help clients as diverse as IKEA and the World Health Organization to think critically about the future. Maughan also collaborates with artists and filmmakers and has had work shown on Channel 4 and at the V&A, Columbia School of Architecture and Vienna Biennale. Originally from the UK, he recently became a Canadian citizen.