ROOMFORTHOUGHTS FOUNDATION

Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced ― John Keats

The artistic researcher Jennifer Kanary Nikolov(a) holds a Ph.D. in media arts with her psychosis simulation project Labyrinth Psychotica. Jennifer has a keen interest in understanding how art is a form of knowledge production, in particular in a scientific context in relation to the mind and how it works. She studied fashion from 1994 to 1998 before graduating from the fine arts department of the Maastricht Art Academy in 2000. She continued with the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, which she completed in 2002. From 2010 to 2012 she was an artistic researcher-in-residence at the Waag Society Institute for Art, Science, and Technology, Amsterdam. Between 2008 and 2011, she was a tutor of the Honours Programme 'Art and Research' of the University of Amsterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She has guided research minors at the Amsterdam University of Applied Arts as well as the Amsterdam School of Arts. She is an international guest teacher and mentor of creative processes and endeavors.

Tycho Hoogland obtained a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and completed post-doctoral work at Princeton University before returning to the Netherlands where he held positions as a senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam and as an assistant professor at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. His research has focused among others on the role of the cerebellum in multisensory integration, locomotion, and sleep. In the past years, he has led a team at the NIN to develop a new generation of miniaturized microscopes that can image neural activity from multiple sites in freely behaving animals. Since 2011 he has coordinated the Art of Neuroscience competition and seminar series. The competition has become a global event organized in partnership with Scientific American, that calls for artworks inspired by the field of neuroscience. Submissions have included interactive websites, art installations, digitized microscope images, sculptures, and poems. Seminars have touched upon the convergence of gaming technology and data mining, the neural correlates of aesthetics, literature as a tool to understand memory and the history of art and the brain in human civilization.

Sabine E. Wildevuur has years of experience in the transdisciplinary field of science, society, technology, and art. She is the director of DesignLab at the University of Twente. Before this, she founded the Creative Care Lab at Waag Society, Institute for Art, Science, and Technology in Amsterdam. Wildevuur studied medicine and communication science at the University of Amsterdam. She conducted research at the VU University into person-centered ICT to support the management of chronic diseases. She was, among other things, Head of Internet for the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi, Kenya. At the University of Oxford she researched the relationship between art and science, which resulted in the book Invisible Vision: Could Science Learn from the Arts? (2009, BSL). She co-authored Connect: Design for an Empathic Society (2013, BIS Publishers), a book on designing for an aging society. Wildevuur has curated the Designing Health exhibition (2014/15) in the Designhuis in Eindhoven (NL) and the Embassy of Health during the Dutch Design Week.