Conference Venue
The Boardwalk Casino and Entertainment World,
Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Keynote Speakers
Pieter Geldenhuys
Pieter is an Internationally renowned futurist and expert in the field of Innovation and Technology Strategy. He is the Vice-Chair of the Innovation Focus Group at the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, Switzerland, and assists numerous post-doctorial students in Europe with their research on technology’s impact on the future.
Pieter is a fractal individual with multiple roles in the industry. He is widely used as an impact speaker, futurist and strategy consultant by the majority of South Africa’s Top100 companies. He has addressed audiences in the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Mauritius, New Zealand and China. He also has more than 800 National radio appearances under his belt.
He believes the only way to effectively predict the future is to create it.
Prof Bert Olivier
Bert Olivier is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He holds an M.A. and D.Phil in Philosophy, has held Postdoctoral Fellowships in Philosophy at Yale University in the USA on more than one occasion, and has held a Research Fellowship at The University of Wales, Cardiff.
At NMMU he teaches various sub-disciplines of philosophy, as well as film studies, media and architectural theory, and psychoanalytic theory. He has published widely in the philosophy of culture, of art and architecture, of cinema, music and literature, as well as the philosophy of science, epistemology, psychoanalytic, social, media and discourse-theory. Science fiction, which typically deals with the pharmakon- (from the Greek for ‘poison’ and ‘cure’, simultaneously) character of science and technology, is one of his favourite genres, and he has published a variety of papers on this, as well as on the philosophy of technology, which, in his view, those people uncritically enamoured with technology (‘technophiles’) hardly ever consider.