Andrew McLuhan is a grandson of Marshall McLuhan, noted Canadian professor from the University of Toronto who was a pioneer in the field of Media/Communications studies. Andrew's father, Eric McLuhan, was Marshall's eldest son, who worked with Marshall from the mid-1960s until Marshall died in 1980. From 1980 until his death in 2018, Eric McLuhan continued the work he began with his father, completing important works such as Laws of Media: The New Science (1980) Media and Formal Cause (2011) Theories of Communication (2011) among other solo works. In 2009 Andrew began work documenting and inventorying Marshall McLuhan's annotated library (now at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and named to UNESCO's 'Memory of the World Register' of globally-significant cultural artifacts) which was his first major McLuhan project, and has been the subject of several speeches.

For about a decade, Andrew acted as Eric McLuhan's part-time assistant, student, and travel companion, accompanying him on speaking tours near and far, getting deeper and deeper into the unique McLuhan tradition of exploring culture and technology. Andrew acted as Eric McLuhan's part-time assistant, student, and travel companion, accompanying him on speaking tours near and far, getting deeper into the unique McLuhan, tradition of exploring culture and technology. The more he learned, the more he wanted to share, and he has been writing and speaking and teaching workshops, classes, and courses. Following Eric’s unexpected death in 2018, Andrew has kept going on his own.

Andrew is director of The McLuhan Institute, created in 2017 to continue the work begun by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan in exploring and understanding culture and technology. He lectures globally at universities, speaks and gives workshops and consults at companies. Understanding Media Intensive is his most in-depth course, leading three full cohorts through Gray Area since 2020.

Raising McLuhan is an exploration of how to preserve, manage, and make accessible McLuhan work and archival materials for personal and public use.

karen darricades (Toronto, Ontario) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, host of the #WeMakeMedia podcast and head of Arts and Culture for Creative Commons Canada. This project is an opportunity for her to learn about while contributing to understandings of what artificial intelligence CAN and CANNOT be, and the very nature of being. Raising McLuhan is an extension of her work's explorations of power, access and non-human intelligence as they relate to collective consciousness, sentiences, and the social climate of hype and fear surrounding emerging tech. karen will talk about how this project relates to her new media and literacy education work as well as current Chalmers Fellowship research on response-able stewardship of culture heritage and GLAM collections.

Sandro Pasquali (New York City, New York) is a creative technologist, author, inventor, and Head of Engineering at Bulldog & Fisk, where he builds bespoke AI-driven software solutions for mid-market clients. For this project he is training a Large Language Model on the work of Marshall McLuhan, along with media objects from 1964. This model, when dialoged with, responds as Marshall McLuhan might have in that year — both textually and visually.

Raising McLuhan allows him to explore the full extent and pinnacle of retrospective synthesis generative AI might achieve. Can LLMs help us resurrect lost minds and empower them with foresight and hindsight they lacked while alive?

Freyja van den Boom (Singapore) is a transdisciplinary academic and beyond-human rights activist who uses arts, speculative (legal) design, and futures & foresight to provoke discussions on governing emerging technologies. Fascinated by human-AI interactions, she co-founded the first EU political party advocating for robot rights in 2014, urging the public to stand up for equal rights for robots and their representation in politics. The ROBOTPARTY aimed to ensure policymakers considered the interests of robots in digital innovation regulations. However, we were wrong, people continue to exploit at AI for political and personal gains which causes harm and injustice to people, communities, and ecosystems. To foster sustainable futures, we must rethink governance. This led to the founding of the first sovereign state, (www.UnmannedFutures.com) where we look at various beyond-human rights governance structures for true equality. The McLuhan Project, exploring the rights and responsibilities in raising autonomous beings, naturally followed, raising critical questions about the rights and responsibilities of those involved in the raising and adoption of autonomous beings in our present and futures societies.