BIO·FICTION Panel
with Riitta Hari, Pia Tikka, Markus Schmidt and Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka (moderator)
Thursday, April 8, 19–21h (Finnish time, UTC+2)
via Zoom | in English

Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies is the underlying question of the BIO·FICTION Science Art Film Festival. For the kickoff of the Helsinki edition, where we will show a selection of nine films, all of which have been awarded or screened at the festival, we invite you to join the BIO·FICTION online panel. During it, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka will discuss together with festival director Markus Schmidt, neuroscientist Riitta Hari and artist Pia Tikka neurotechnology and its current and potential impact on society.

Join the panel via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83861833745  

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Riitta Hari MD PhD is Professor Emerita of Systems Neuroscience and Human Brain Imaging at Aalto University, Finland. She has been developing magnetoencephalography (MEG) for tracking millisecond-scale activation sequences in the human brain, providing fundamental insights into human sensory, motor, cognitive, and social functions in both healthy and diseased individuals. Hari is Academician of Science in Finland since 2010 and member of the National Academy of Sciences USA since 2004. She currently attempts to bridge art and neuroscience without privileging either.

Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka is a Helsinki-based media artist, art educator and researcher working with technological notions of sense. As part of interdisciplinary Brains on Art collective his practice is informed by collaboration with scientists and researchers and the friction between art and science. Mäki-Reinikka is a board member of the Bioart Society, a foil fencer and a teacher of Art and Artificial Intelligence in Aalto University. Mäki-Reinikka is writing an artistic dissertation on interdisciplinary art and its possibilities to discuss changes in human-machine relation. Since August 2020, Mäki-Reinikka has been teaching art in Kallio Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts.

Dr Markus Schmidt founded Biofaction, a technology assessment, science communication and art-science company in Vienna, Austria. With a background in electronic engineering, biology and risk assessment, he carried out environmental risk assessment and public perception studies in various fields, such as GM-crops, nanotechnology, converging technologies, and synthetic biology. He has published over 35 peer-reviewed papers and three edited books about the future of life. In 2010, he helped to chart the field of xenobiology. Schmidt was part of the FUTUREBODY project. 

Dr Pia Tikka is a filmmaker and EU Mobilitas Research Professor at the Baltic Film, Media, and Arts School, Tallinn University. She is a founder of NeuroCine research group that studies the neural basis of storytelling. She has published widely on the topics of enactive media, narrative complex systems, and neurocinematics. A Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and a member of European Film Academy, her filmography includes international productions as well as fiction films, interactive films and VR films she has directed. Currently, she leads Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University.

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BIO·FICTION is part of the ERA-NET project FUTUREBODY and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: I 3752-B27). The BIO·FICTION programme at Bioart Society is funded via the Biofriction European collaboration project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European.