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Jury

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Roger Malina

Roger Malina serves as an international advisor to ShararaTech Art Festival, a member of the Jury of ShararaTech Challenge and the editorial coordinator of Leonardo related publication. He is an astronomer, editor and art science researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has served as the Executive Editor of the Leonardo publications at MIT press for over 30 years and has promoted art-science collaboration in an international context. He is former Principal Investigator of the NASA EUVE astronomy satellite and Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Marseille Provence. His latest project is CreativeDististurnance.org, a collaboration platform for art-science-technology using professional podcasts to connect professionals internationally.
Patrick Gyger
Patrick Gyger is a Swiss historian, writer and curator. From 1999 to 2010, he was the director of Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, a museum housing one of the world’s largest collections of Utopia and Science Fiction. As such, he has organised dozens of exhibitions and events on the main topics or artists of the field and published extensively. One of his recent researches has resulted in a book on flyings cars in factand fiction (Haynes, 2011).
Since January 2011, he serves as director of the lieu unique, national center for contemporary arts in Nantes (www.lelieuunique.com), a leading pluridisciplinary venue for theater, dance, visuals arts, music and literature. As well as featuring major artists in the field of contemporary practices (Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Robert Lepage, Thomas Ostermeier, Ryoji Ikeda, Boris Charmatz...), his programme gives an important place to outsider practices, media artists and interdisciplinary approaches. In recent years le lieu unique created for instance festivals like locus solus (rare instruments and machinic music), Assis Debout Couché (Sit, Stand, Lie Down; a three­day music event), Un weekend singulier (The Odd Weekend; music and art in the margins), eLU (ten days of contemporary art from Estonia), a conference on geopolitics and a literary event (Atlantide, curated by Alberto Manguel).
Danae Stratou

Danae Straou is a Greek artist whose work consists of large-scale outdoor and indoor installations. In her work she uses various media from natural elements, to digital technologies such as video, photography and sound as well as text, architectural components or metal constructions thus creating tactile audiovisual environments & installations. She is one of the three-member D.A.ST Arteam, who created Desert Breath; one of the largest Land Art projects worldwide, covering 100,000m2, located in the eastern Egyptian Sahara desert, bordering the Red Sea, Egypt (1997). In 2010 she co-founded Vital Space, a non profit interdisciplinary and cross-media art platform addressing pressing issues. Among her recent solo exhibitions are:

  • The Globalizing Wall: Focusing on the US|Mexico Border. Austin, Texas (2014).
  • Vital Space – Istanbul. Sydney, Australia (2012).
  • It’s Time to Open the Black Boxes! Athens, Greece (2012)
  • The River of Life. Athens (2011).
  • ICESONGS. Brussels, Belgium  (2010).
Amal Alayan

ShararaTech Art & Science Mediterranean festival is the brain child of Alayan, Ibtikar’s co-founder and managing director and she is the executive director and co-producer of ShararaTech. Alayan is an MIT Alumna and comes from digital image processing and technology business management academic backgrounds. In 2002, Alayan was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Arab Leader. Besides business entrepreneurship, Alayan is equally engaged in cultural and social initiatives in parts of the Middle East and in Arab Spring countries. Amal Alayan is a systems-thinking nonfiction writer. Alayan sums up her vision and highlights of Ibtikar’s MENA acquired entrepreneurial experience in a publication which appeared in print in the May-June 2013 Issue # 46/3 of MIT Press Leonardo Journal with the title of Small Molecules Count Too: Creativity and Change Post Arab Spring. A free copy of this publication is downloadable through a personal blog titled entrepoet
David Lightman

David Lightman is a scientist, software designer and community builder who enjoys creating and exploring new paradigms in this radically empowered era.   He has worked in diverse fields such as sustainable energy, experimental architecture, alternative currencies, software design, computer graphics, deep emotional healing techniques, intentional community and metabolic therapy. He studied applied physics and psychology at Cornell University.  He went on to create the computer graphics for the film “War Games” and worked on numerous artificial intelligence and real-time projects, specializing in software speedup and optimization.Lightman founded an intentional community called “Tribal Oasis” on a beautiful 13 acre property in the mountains above Los Angeles, now becoming a healing and retreat center.   He has written numerous essays how the revolution in networking and the sharing economy are enabling people    He moderates several Facebook groups including “Radical Decentralization” and “Bitcoin”. His latest projects include a solar and wind farm, design of a new crypto-currency and the construction of an expert system which incorporates the knowledge of numerous researchers in the groundbreaking field of metabolic medicine – allowing an interactive protocol to heal chronic disease and optimize our performance.

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