New media technologies change the ways in which knowledge is produced and communicated. Having arrived in the technological future we are facing the responsibility to redefine its social and cultural application. How this could be done will not only be discussed by Conrad Wolfram in his keynote lecture but moreover during the panel that follows.

If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The second conference session will be introduced with Bruce Sterling's Keynote on Atemporality, followed by a  discussion of how the structure of the future and our sense of time have changed. How does this impact the way we do or are to act in the world?