Artist Profile

Heidi Boisvert

Heidi Boisvert (PhD) is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is currently mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications. She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination. She also co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body. Presently, she is working with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, a new immersive theater piece. Boisvert is the Director of Emerging Media Technology at CUNY, where she teaches advanced classes in game design, virtual and augmented reality. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, a research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT and a member of NEW INC’s Creative Science track.

Artist Profile

Kat Mustatea

Kat Mustatea is a playwright and technologist whose tech-native storytelling stretches theater into the digital age. She has written plays of transformation and hybridity in which people turn into lizards, a woman has a sexual relationship with a swan, and a one-eyed cyclops tries to fit into Manhattan society by getting a second eye surgically implanted in his head. Her TED talk examines AI systems as a form of puppetry, and she speaks and writes frequently about the intersection of cutting edge technology and art. Her most recent language-based digital performance, VOIDOPOLIS, won the 2020 Arts and Letters “Unclassifiable” Prize for Literature, was a finalist for the Chautauqua Janus Prize, and received a literary grant from the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. It was an official selection at the New Images Festival Paris, has been exhibited internationally (The Grid: Exposure Festival, ELO-Electronic Literature Organization), and premiered at Ars Electronica 2021 in the form of an AR book that disappears.