Jaron Lanier, best known as a humanist in Silicon Valley, also plays a pathological number of rare acoustic musical instruments, a malady he described in the New Yorker Magazine.  He has played with all kinds of people, like Les Claypool, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, Sean Lennon, Stanley Jordan, Will Calhoun, Harper Simon, Bill Frisell, and many others.  He has toured with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Ornette Coleman.  He’s also a writer of books like You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.  He’s won literary awards like the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the world’s highest lit honors.  He’s that guy on Social Dilemma on Netflix.  He also writes for movies and TV and is currently making a movie with Natasha Lyonne.  He’s also a scientist and technologist, known for his work initiating the field of Virtual Reality (which he named) among other things.  He won a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE.   Wired named him one of the 25 most influential people in tech of the last 25 years, and there are other puffy things like that.  He has connected with the hip hop world in various ways over time, including making a video with Kwame a few years ago, and, back in the day, joining Jesse Jackson, KRS-One, and Q-Tip to defend hip hop from criticism at a mock trial at the Barbican in London.  He also makes jewelry and will probably be wearing too much of it this evening.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is currently at work on two books – one about the impact of algorithms on how we think of storytelling – Digital Fiction for Duke University Press, and The Future of Food, about the impact of AI on how we think of the production of food in the 21st Century. He was Artist in Residence at Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (2023-2024). He is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work engages audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Metallica, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono amongst many others. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae. His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include “Rebirth of a Nation,” Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013. In 2014, he was named National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He produced Pioneers of African American Cinema, a collection of the earliest films made by African American directors, released in 2015. Miller’s artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic, and; The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding Executive Editor of Origin Magazine.