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Project Lead

Luisa Ji is a creative strategist and cultural technologist working at the intersection of public imagination, digital transformation, and systems of care. With over a decade of global experience, she leads participatory programs that use storytelling, worldbuilding, and culturally-specific technological adaptations to help institutions navigate cultural and ecological volatility.

As Studio Director at UKAI Projects, Luisa has delivered initiatives across Canada, South Korea, Iceland, and the UK, supporting artists and emerging arts organizations transform their practices. Her background spans civic experience design, AI literacy, and cultural infrastructure, with speaking and workshop credits at SÍM Residency (Reykjavik, Iceland), Watershed (Bristol, UK), msdm (London, UK), MUTEK Montreal (CA), Société des arts technologiques (CA), and Milieux Institute (CA). She is an alumna of Julie’s Bicycle Creative Climate Leadership program (in partnership with The CSPA) and the Emergence Magazine Seeds of Renewal Leadership program.

Project Lead

Benjamin Lappalainen is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, creative technologist, and educator creating interactive installations that blur the boundaries between digital and physical experience. His work explores how emerging technologies can foster new forms of human connection and creative expression, often incorporating audio-reactive visuals, computer vision, AI, and algorithmic processes into innovative interaction design.

As an educator, Benjamin leads workshops and mentorship programs for diverse communities that bridge technical skill-building with experimental arts practices and community engagement. His current research focuses on developing open source software for social impact, creating accessible tools for creative coding and interactive media while investigating how technology can amplify rather than replace human creativity. Through his work with organizations like InterAccess Gallery, Long Winter Music & Arts Festival, and UKAI Projects, he supports artists in developing technically sophisticated work that remains deeply human-centered.

Communications and Marketing Lead

Husna Farooqui is a diasporic interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker based in Toronto. In one of her roles as Marketing Coordinator, she works to reach and engage artists and audiences alike at the Music Gallery, an experimental institution in the city that has been a mainstay since 1976. At UKAI Projects, Husna works as a resident philosopher, where she is interested in connecting disparate conceptual threads across groups and contexts and working within the space of accumulating complexes.

With ties and placeholders in South and South East Asia, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Middle East, Husna’s sonic and visual artwork similarly reflects the invisible and innumerable lines, breaths, and crossings between worlds. As an artist, she works with sound, film, food, and installations and has been exhibited at re:assemblage collective and UKAI. She holds a BA Honours in philosophy (Acadia University, University Medal in Philosophy) and an MA in philosophy (University of Calgary) where she was twice awarded the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship for her research.

Local Lab Lead—Seoul, South Korea

SunJeong Hwang is a contemporary artist and new media composer exploring the evolving relationships between post-humanism, emergent technologies, and ecological systems. Through multidisciplinary research and artistic experimentation, Hwang synthesizes poems, manifestos, AI, generative coding, data systems, and temporal structures into a distinct transmedia practice, producing multi-sensory environments, video works, installations, performances, audiovisual works, and sound-based compositions. Recognized as a SONGEUN Art Award finalist and ISEA 2023(FR), Future Tense(HK) awardee, Hwang’s works have been exhibited and performed at SeMA(KR), DAFT C-Lab(TW), ACC(Asia Culture Center), IBS(Institute for Basic Science, KR), Sonic Acts Biennale(NL), UKAI Project(CA), Prectxe(KR), Tokyo TDSW(JP), and Mutek JP+MX, among others. Hwang continues large-scale productions and interdisciplinary collaborations with choreographers, scientists, and technology researchers. Hwang is a 2025 Transmediale Resident.

Creative Technologies Advisor

Michael F Bergmann is a neurodiverse techno-optimist who explores novel technological approaches to storytelling, performance, and play. His research and creative practice aim to apply improvisational techniques and critical discourse principles to human-robot and human-AI interactions and communication to foster empathy. Their mediums of engagement include theatre, dance, installations, mixed and augmented reality, and collaborating with digital minds. His physical being is mostly located in Toronto and is a faculty member in Performance at The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, where they teach and conduct research through their Technological Research in Performance Lab (tripl.ca).

Resident / Contributor

Dora Morgacheva is a Toronto-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her breakbeat-driven project, Garden of Magic, is a sonic world where bass music, techno, jazz, ambient, and improvisational piano converge, was presented at MUTEK Montreal 2025. She will present her new project—Dorraa—in Taiwan. Rooted in classical music—from Bach and Mozart to Debussy, Medtner, Stravinsky, and Scriabin—Dora is drawn to the grandeur, beauty, and emotional depth of these works. These feelings of wonder, dreaminess, and curiosity about the world remain central as she moves into club culture, which she sees as reflecting the spirit of our time. Traditional music and Eastern European folklore also inspire her, and she often incorporates folk songs into her sets, blending strong beats with intricate, artful arrangements. In her live performances, Dora creates a kaleidoscopic experience, breaking her tracks into thousands of fragments and reassembling them in unique ways—never the same twice—feeling the room and feeding off its energy. Across her live sets and sound work, she seeks to tune into subtle matter—the invisible underside of the universe—and bring it to the surface, guided by the energy of the dancefloor or listening space. She is one of the minds behind Borscht Radio (with Ilyse Krivel / Xicada), curates events, and performs with bikebike, a live trio, alongside with Corey Cosman and Stefan Hegerat. Drawing from her background in physics and biology, her work often explores nature and technology, posthuman bodies, and altered states. Dora welcomes collaborations across disciplines—sonic, visual, theoretical, or embodied.

Resident / Contributor, Sound Design

Koohyar Habibi is a toronto-based producer, composer, and co-founder of record label Secret Contact. In his compositional practice, he finds new approaches to infuse the Iranian micro-tonal music system with western techniques and modern principles. With formal musical training as a Classical Oud performer, and being self taught in electronic music, his own unique production style roots in industrial Techno, Dub, EBM, no wave, dnb, and middle eastern folk music.

Resident / Contributor

Xicada crafts immersive electronic compositions that merge the sacred and the synthetic. Drawing on spectral vocals, unstable rhythms, and warped textures, she conjures sonic environments where altered states and liminal worlds unfold. Her sound emerges as a kind of interdimensional alien folk music, rooted in ritual, rupture, and the surreal. Her 2025 album ENGAGING ANIMAL EARTH is out now, guiding listeners through spaces where spirituality endures amid the digitalization of everything—where elemental forces, whispered mantras, and alien frequencies coalesce into a kind of witchy, earth-bound futurism.

Part of Canada’s experimental underground, Xicada has shared the stage with E-Saggila, Pessimist, Spike Hellis, Dis Fig, Black Ox Orkestar, Jessica Moss, and Hesaitix. Her work has been released on Halocline Trance, Foxy Digitalis, Borscht Records, and Aural Tethers. She is co-founder of Borscht, a label and internet radio station, and an active member of Degeneral Strike, a non-profit collective promoting experimental sound and community-based music. In 2025, she brings her live show to MUTEK.

Local Lab Lead—Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Waheeda Hasbullah leads AI KE US, a speculative Collective Intelligence that demystifies artificial intelligence through participatory design and systems thinking. She explores the intersections of art, community, and systems through speculative design with a decade spent in community-building. Working freelance and co-building with Cultural Technologies Lab (UKAI Projects), she creates participatory experiences that challenge fixed narratives and embrace uncertainty.

A 2025 Harvard Business Review study shifted her trajectory entirely: most people seek AI for companionship, not productivity. This left a mark on her deeply and moved her into designing AI KE US that cultivates genuine intimacy rather than simulated connection.

Guided by Donella Meadows' insight, "No paradigm is true, only useful"; Waheeda designs ephemeral encounters that ask us to reflect: What happens when we make the invisible visible? Who gets to redefine the paradigms that shape us?

She is not an AI expert. “Relevant qualifications”: A Biotech graduate with forgotten C++ coding skills from once upon a time.