We are proud to share with you the first confirmed speakers at this year's BAUTOPIA festival, taking place in Athens from October 7th to 9th!
Each BAUTOPIA event is co-hosted by one of ECHN's member hubs. This October, our host will be BIOS in Athens. Under the title CREATIVE AGENCY: Sustaining Culture & Creativity in the Age of Intelligence, creative hub managers, CCSI stakeholders, artists, creative professionals, students and the general audience will explore sustainability not only from the environmental standpoint, but also the sustainability of creative professions in the face of multiple crises, the technological challenges posed by the use of AI in creative processes, and the impermanence that many creative professions will be facing in the period ahead of us.
Hundreds of fellow creatives, colleagues, peers and human agents from across Europe will be awaiting you in Athens! Expect inspirational keynote lectures from some of the leading creators, researchers and managers, as well as a multitude of panels, workshops, participatory sessions, performances, exhibitions and music programs. In the coming weeks and months, we will be announcing the program highlights, but we are already proud to share with you some of the first names who will be sharing their inspiring projects, stories and insights with you.
Vladan Joler is the co-founder of Share Foundation and Sharelab, as well as a distinguished professor of arts and design from Novi Sad, Serbia. Over the past few years, his collaborative projects with Kate Crawford gained critical acclaim, with their ground-breaking Calculating Empires research and exhibition being awarded the Silver Lion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 2025. His work blends critical and system design, data investigations, counter-cartography, data visualization, and numerous other disciplines, and is included in the permanent collections of the MoMA in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Design Museum in London and the Rijksmuseum in Twenthe, as well as in the permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center.
In Slovenia, Meta Štular led the creation of one of Europe’s largest hubs for sustainable design and manufacturing - Center ROG in Ljubljana - which earned her team the Eurocities Innovation Award. For over 20 years, she specializes in in social innovation, public space regeneration, and building sustainable creative ecosystems. Her expertise includes stakeholder engagement, strategy development, participatory design, and the implementation of transformative cultural programs. She will be sharing with us Center ROG's stories of sustainable approaches to maker culture, and innovative ways of nurturing creative communities.
From Italy, we will welcome a true heavyweight of speculative design, and a playful one! Simone Rebaudengo is the co-founder of studio OIO, where his research focuses on exploring the implications of living with networked and somewhat smart products that change, grow, and are intelligent enough to make their own decisions and show a point of view. His works have been published internationally in Wired, Fastcompany, The Atlantic and Designboom, and he has won two 2014 IXDA Interaction Awards for “Addicted Products”, and a 2015-2016 Internet of Things Award for Best Design Fiction for his “Ethical Things” project, to name just a few.
Last but not least, Igor Simić blends fine art, cinematography, video games and music into a thought-provoking transmedia entity, developed somewhere between New York and Belgrade. He is the co-founder and creative director of Demagog Studio which, among other things, produces video games with an eco-critical angle. In 2022, his visual art was featured as part of Manifesta 14, while his video game "The Cub" was in the official selection at Tribeca Film Festival. Igor fuses lecture, cinema, art and performance into a unique format. His performative lecture Everything is Content will give us a provocative look at the impact that the ubiquity of platformized content has on our daily lives.
We hope that you like what you read, and that you are already thrilled to join us. In the meantime, you can dive into our curatorial statement, and mark your calendars to join us in Athens this October.
