People


Shinpei Takeda is a visual artist and filmmaker(www.shinpeitakeda.com). His works involve a wide range of themes regarding memories and history. He uses multi-media installations, sound interventions, documentary films, large-scale photography installations, and collaborative community projects in various public contexts.
Shinpei is a co-founder and former creative director of The AJA Project, a nonprofit creating a compassionate space for educators, artists and activists in San Diego, USA. As a filmmaker he works on documentary-fiction hybrid films with titles such as “Hiroshima Nagasaki Download” (2010, 73 mins).  He also co-founded Ghost Magnet Roach Motel, a noise performance unit from Tijuana, Mexico. He is the author of “Alpha Decay: How can a contemporary art express the memory of atomic bomb” (2014, Gendai Shokan) among other publications（photo credit: Hartmut Bühler)

Kathrin Maurer (Dr. Phil. PhD) is Professor of Humanities and Technology, leader of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). She is also the leader for the research cluster Drone Imaginaries and Communities. She has a PhD in German Literature from Columbia University and Dr. Phil from SDU. Her research interests are surveillance technology, drones, German literature, visual culture, and aesthetic theory. She has published, “Visualizing History: The Power of the Image in German Historicism”(Walter de Gruyter, 2013) and the “Visualizing War: Images, Emotions, Communities” (Routledge, 2018).

Nana Tazuke-Steiniger is an art historian and PhD student living in Cologne. She curated the exhibition “HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig: together for and against it”, which focused on historical and contemporary artistic interventions in and from Japan to question restricted freedom of expression, social and political issues and diversity in Japan. She works as a coordinator for the “Forschungsvolontariat Kunstmuseen NRW” at the University of Düsseldorf, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

J​ens Herder is a professor of the Faculty of Media at the HS Duesseldorf, University of Applied Sciences. Formerly the head of the Media faculty, he is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting. At the Virtual Sets and Virtual Environments Laboratory, he experiments with interaction processes for new media applications. He is the co-author of various publications such as “Immersive access to collective memories” and “Distributed Metaverse: Creating decentralized blockchain-based model for peer to peer sharing of virtual spaces for Mixed Reality Applications”

Naoko Tamura-Förster is a linguistic faculty member at University of Bonn’s Japanese and Korean studies. She heads the University of Bonn’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Project and is part of NET-GTAS, a group based in Japan dedicated to translating to the testimonies of atomic bomb survivors.