Professor Jeffrey Shaw (b. 1944, Australia) has been a leading figures in new media art since the 1960s. In a prolific body of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed works he has pioneered and set benchmarks for the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, digital cultural heritage and interactive narrative. Professor Shaw was a founding member of the Artist Placement Group in London (1966 –) and of the Eventstructure Research Group in Amsterdam (1969 – 1979). He was the founding director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media Karlsruhe, Germany (1991 – 2002), and co-founding director of the University of New South Wales Australia iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research (2003 –). From 2009 to 2016, Shaw was Dean of the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). He is currently Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Media Art, Director of the Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media at CityU and Visiting Professor at EPFL Lausanne and CAFA Beijing. Professor Shaw’s numerous awards include the Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship, the Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art, Linz, Austria, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.

Professor Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In widely exhibited installation works, she has amalgamated cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. Kenderdine has produced 80 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide including a museum complex in India and received a number of major international awards for this work. At the inception of the worldwide web, Kenderdine conceived one of the world’s first museum websites for the Western Australian Maritime Museum in 1994. Her subsequent large-scale installations for museums have opened new realms of heritage for diverse international audiences, notably for World Heritage sites of Angkor, Cambodia; Hampi, India; Olympia, Greece; and hundreds of sites in Turkey. Kenderdine’s award-winning 2012 PLACE-Hampi Museum at Vijayanagara, South India, immerses visitors in sensorial and experiential encounters with Hindu mythologies. Addressing heritage at risk, “Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang” (China, 2012) has been seen by over 1 million people. Since 2015 Kenderdine has led the Atlas of Maritime Buddhism, a deep mapping project that comprises unrivalled documentation of hundreds of temple sites across Asia along the ancient maritime route. Kenderdine also co-directs Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive, the world’s largest motion archive for embodied knowledge and transmission of intangible cultural heritage. In 2017, Kenderdine was appointed Professor of Digital Museology at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland where she has built a new laboratory for experimental museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of aesthetic practice, visual analytics and cultural (big) data. She is also director and lead curator of a new art/science initiative EPFL Pavilions, reaching beyond object-oriented curation, to blend experimental curatorship and contemporary aesthetics with open science, digital humanism and emerging technologies.

Hing Chao is a leading researcher in Chinese martial studies, as well as a noted writer, curator and producer of martial arts books, exhibitions, and other artistic projects. Together with his long-term research partners, Professor Jeffrey Shaw (City University of Hong Kong) and Professor Sarah Kenderdine (EPFL, Switzerland), he co-founded the ground-breaking Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive, the world’s biggest martial arts motion archive, which has over the last few years spawned several international martial art exhibitions including “300 Years of Hakka Kung Fu” (2016), “Kung Fu Motion” (2018) and “Way of the Sword: Warrior Traditions in China and Italy” (2021). Hing founded International Martial Studies Conference and is the founding editor of the research book series, Hong Kong Martial Arts Research and Martial Studies.