Chris Fussner

Chris Fussner, the founder of Tropical Futures Institute, is a multidisciplinary designer and strategist who explores the intersections of art and technology. A founding curator at Art Dubai’s first Digital section, Chris will take up a full-time position as Cultural Growth Lead at People Supported Intelligence in February 2023. 

In 2015, Chris founded TFI, drawing on his experiences growing up and working in Singapore and the Phillippines. The collective began as a critique of how the tropics are commonly excluded from dialogues about the future. Since then, TFI has evolved into a platform that celebrates tropical futurism while engaging with structural and ecological issues. It regularly hosts art exhibitions, lectures, fashion collaborations, and cultural programming.

In 2022, TFI curated the first Digital section at Art Dubai, participated in SEAFocus Singapore, and released a “cybercafe” capsule collection with the Los Angeles-based brand Goodnight. TFI is currently preparing to exhibit a range of artists from the tropics at the highly anticipated Singaporean art fair, ArtSG.

Throughout his career, Chris has been rooted in the electronic music world. He performs under the alias @dj_blockchain_algoriddims in venues around New York, the Philippines, and Singapore. At his sets, you’ll hear a range of genres and geographical influences, from Filipino electronic music and speed dembow, to East Coast club, jungle, and dubstep.

Chris made the leap from DJing to music production this year with "Mall Edits," a collaboration with @obese.dogma777 and DJ Love. Singapore Biennale exhibited the work along with an accompanying piece by Angeline Meitzler.

Jorge Juan B.

Jorge Juan B. Wieneke V is a producer, musician, artist, educator and DJ from Manila, Philippines who has founded several cultural and community platforms including BuwanBuwan (est. 2012), a collective, community and label for hybrid electronic musicians; Cosmic Sonic Arts (est. 2016), a non-traditional electronic music mentorship program and school that focuses on music as a means of self-discovery and meditation, Manila Community Radio, an independent non-profit non-commercial internet radio platform “created by the community for the community”, Club Matryoshka (est. 2019), a Philippine-based International virtual club venue hosted in Minecraft which was established to enable a diverse and experimental set of artists to perform in a decolonised space that platforms and focuses on performers with non-white, LGBTQIA+, female, and neurodivergent majority lineups. His most recent venture is Kindred Music Productions, an all-around audio post-production studio and hybrid music label.
 
Despite a good track record via his participation in Boiler Room Manila in 2017 and being one of the few selected artists to be part of the Redbull Music Academy 2018 in Berlin plus numerous releases, residencies, collaborations and releases on various labels through the years (Maltine Records, Zoom Lens, Darker Than Wax, Eastern Margins, Tropical Diskoral, Botanic Records and more),  he retired his 11-year-old "similarobjects" project in 2021, to make way for a new journey of sonic self-discovery leaning on a more primal, intuitive yet unapologetic experimental sound which he is currently cultivating under the pseudonym “ @obese.dogma777 ”. His new projects feature political, experimental and mutated recontextualizations of club music as well as the Filipino music genre/style called “budots”.