The participants will include Laura Kuhn, the American musicologist, former assistant to John Cage and currently president of the John Cage Foundation in New York. Kuhn will speak about the impact of new technologies, the role of chance in creation and the generation of a new planetary music. Tamara Läi, the Belgian poet and cyber artist, will present her reflections on the transformation of poetry and cyber art as a new type of thought design. Francesco Mariotti is a Swiss sculptor whose work has been exhibited and won prizes at the Venice and São Paulo biennales, at the Documenta in Kassel and at other major events. He has been working on sculptures using new technologies (television and internet) since the sixties. William Anastasi, the American artist, belongs to the first Fluxus movement, and has worked with John Cage and many others since the nineteen fifties. Anastasi sees the working process as the design of thought, and creates his works on the basis of this principle. Roman Verostko, another American artist, one of the founders of ISEA, who uses the ephemera of the present in the process of artistic creation. Rui Trindade, a Portuguese specialist in the merging of television and internet. Formerly on the staff of the weekly paper O Expresso, Trindade was also the coordinator of Ciberfestivais in Lisbon. Joseph Brenner, the Swiss scientist and poet, is a philosopher in the transdisciplinary movement, which also includes Basarub Nicolescu and Edgar Morin. Roti Nielba Turin, the Brazilian expert in semiotics (Charles Sanders Peirce) responsible for introducing study of this subject to faculties of architecture and urban development in South America. At present she is primarily engaged in procedures for de-automating thought and creativity: she has provided training for designers in a number of companies, such as Whirlpool, as well as being busy on the academic circuit. The Brazilian composer Eduardo Reck Miranda is a leading specialist in music and artificial intelligence; he is today director of the Sony laboratories in Paris. The Israeli mathematician Daniel Schechtman, often tipped for the Nobel Prize, is a specialist in crystals and morphogenetics, and the discoverer of quasi-crystals. Roy Ascott, from the UK, is a philosopher known for his reflections on new media and mentalities.

Text by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta