Back to the future: what does the future of AI and Entertainment hold for society?

Speakers

• Catherine Mathys Director, Foresight and Innovation
  

  Catherine Mathys

  Director, Foresight and Innovation

  Catherine Mathys has been working in the audiovisual and media industry for over 20 years. Initially a journalist and cultural animator, she later specialized in the analysis of technological and media transformations. With a bachelor’s degree in sociology, a master’s degree in communications and training in prospective analysis, she particularly enjoys observing our relationship with technology and its impact on our daily lives. Her work has been recognized at the Grands prix du journalisme indépendant du Québec and at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPA). She is a member of the Association des Futuristes Professionnels.

• Galit Ariel Head of Futures
  

  Galit Ariel

  Head of Futures

  Galit explores the wild and imaginative side of bleeding-edge technologies and their impact on our cultures, behaviours and interactions. She is passionate about a future in which technology is integrated into everyday life but does not control it. As an award-winning creative she generates and curates speculative art exploring nature vs. culture, self vs. otherness and reality vs. imagination.

  Her book Augmenting Alice – The Future of Identity, Experience and Reality explores the way Augmented Reality’s diffusion will shift cultural and functional paradigms and redefine core concepts related to culture, space, experience and ethics Her goal is to bridge the gap between digital, physical, and mental spaces to create tools and platforms that help people experience these worlds in new and better ways. Galit is an international speaker and mentor, featured at global conferences such as TED, The Next Web, SXSW, Fifteen Seconds, Slush Tokyo, FITC, IEEE, The European Union, Bell Labs, and many more.

  Currently residing in Toronto, Galit is consulting on art/tech impact projects via her agency Future Memory Inc. The consultancy helps organizations, policymakers and companies shape their technological futures and develop narratives, interaction & speculative design tools that translate to meaningful and innovative experiences. She is the co-founder of Humans of STEAM a co-creation non-profit that brings together companies, organizations and communities for better tech futures. Next to that, she is currently conducting her research-creation PhD at York University, exploring paradigms of immersive presence.

• Jonathan Belisle Head of Design
  

  Jonathan Belisle

  Head of Design

  Jonathan Bélisle has been a multimedia storyteller and creative UX visionary for 25 years. He brings innovation to society and starts new dialogues. He develop the faculty for poesis in people. More simply put, he develop new ways of thinking, learning, seeing and doing. Part of his role is to bring innovation to society and start new dialogues around usages of technologies that can build a preferable future.

  He works with companies, institutions, organizations, schools, museums & cities that want to integrate an Educational & Transformational Design practice into their culture. He creates experiences, interactive software & visual design concepts, and narratives dealing with the potential risks and rewards inherent in technological, sociological, and scientific development to exert an important influence on howour society and companies come to terms with these innovations.

  Jonathan co-founded the studio Stories of a Near Future institute, a Montreal-based Research & Creation consultancy firm. He also founder of the Transmedia Hello publishing house, Architekt! where he created the universe of Wuxia the fox. He is a Research Affiliate at the Annenberg Innovation Lab of Southern California University and a professor of experience architecture at INIS Media School in Montreal. He is currently the head of design at Prodago.