1. Stuart Brisley is a British artist who frequently uses extended duration in his performances, a concept he also explores in his sculptures and installations.

2. Jem Finer is a British musician, composer, and artist. He has a background in mathematics and computer science, and an enduring fascination with deep time and space, self-organising systems, and long-durational processes. He was one of the founding members of The Pogues.

3. Maya Balcioglu was born in Istanbul, where she studied philosophy and history of art, followed by fine art, which she continued at the Slade. She now works and lives between London and Dungeness. She is married to Stuart Brisley, to whose work she regularly contributes.

4. Francesca Hughes is a British architectural theorist and educator who teaches at the Architectural Association, London. She is the editor of The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (MIT Press, 1996) and author of The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision (MIT Press, 2014).

1. Richard Wentworth is a British artist and sculptor born in the South Pacific island of Samoa. His work, often articulated through language and cultural correlations, is conversational. As an educator at Goldsmith’s College, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and Royal College of Art, he has had a great influence on many young artists.

2. Donatien Grau is a member of New College, University of Oxford. He is a columnist for AnOther Magazine and an editor of Purple Fashion and Flash Art International; amongst his publications: The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, 2013).

3. The sculptures and images by London-based artist Helen Marten proliferate with models and motifs which define the physical and linguistic limits of everyday life. Her work is invested with a strong sense of materiality, and recent exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, Sadie Coles HQ and Museum Fridericianum.

4. Will Holder is a British writer and graphic designer currently living in London. His publishing work explores the interchangeability of the designer’s role as an editor, a publisher, a writer or a performer and the translation of the spoken word into the printed form. He is the founding editor of FR David, a critical art journal published by De Appel in Amsterdam.

5. The American artist Tom Sachs lives and works in New York City. As an artist-inventor, engineering and industrial processes play an important part in his practice. His sculptures, based on cultural icons and incongruous branded goods, are produced in his Lower Manhattan workshop.

1. Alexandre da Cunha is a Brazilian artist who grew up in Rio de Janeiro and now lives and works in London. At the center of his work is a genuine interest in techniques and materiality to produce what he calls “the readymade with a twist”.

2. Dries Van Noten is a Belgian fashion designer known for his signature use of prints, colours and original fabrics. He lives and works in Antwerp.

3. Nick Collett is a British director and writer who specialises in comedy.

4. Rivane Neuenschwander is a Brazilian conceptual artist based in London who works with painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation and participatory actions. Her work tends to explore language, nature, the passing of time and the role of chance, control and collaboration.

1. Bruce McLean is a Scottish artist from Glasgow who lives and works in London since moving there in 1963 to study at St Martin’s School of Art. In 1965, he abandoned conventional studio practice in favour of impermanent, sometimes invisible, sculptures, films and performances.

2. David Greene is an English architect and educator who, in 1961, was one of the founder members of Archigram, once described as “the poet of the group”. Devoted to architecture’s pedagogical potential, he lectures at several schools in the United Kingdom, including the Architectural Association and Oxford Brookes University.

3. Will McLean is the son of Bruce McLean and a practicing architect. For over a decade, he has organised public lectures on the technological development of architecture. He lectures at Westminster University.

4. John Hilliard is an English artist. As a sculpture student at St Martin’s School of Art, he was exposed to a new pedagogy that favoured the idea over the object. He lives and works in London, where he is Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art.

1. Sarah Lucas is a British sculptor living near Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Emerging in the early 1990s, she quickly became a prominent figure in British and international art. Her sculptures and installations are informed by a performative post-punk ethic, vocabulary, and humour; low-tech DIY strategies inherited from British conceptual art; and strongly political — in particular, feminist — content.

2. Olu Michael Odukoya is a London-based designer and artistic director and the founder of Kilimanjaro, a large-format art publication. His studio, OMO Creates, designed Sarah Lucas: After 2005, Before 2012, published by Walther König. He is also a visiting lecturer at Barking & Dagenham University.

3. Penelope Curtis is a British art historian, writer, and curator. The author of Sculpture 1900–1945: After Rodin (OUP, 1999) and Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture (Ridinghouse, 2007), she became Director of Tate Britain in 2010.

4. Julian Assange is known as the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks. Since November 2010, Assange has been subject to a European arrest warrant in response to a request by the Swedish police. In June 2012, he was granted diplomatic asylum by the Ecuadorean government and has been living inside the Embassy of Ecuador in London ever since.

5. Florence Peake is a British dancer, choreographer and artist based in London. Her performances combine drawing, painting, and sculpture elements with found, appropriated, and fabricated objects in relation to the moving body.

1. Luis Camnitzer is a Uruguayan artist who believes that art is a way of knowing, not making. Consequently, all he does is art (no matter what other people might say). He is past 75 and doesn’t care.

2. Nora Battelle and Ana Ribadeneira were both students at The Brearley School in New York City when they agreed to play this game of conversation. Nora is now a freshman at Swarthmore College, and Ana is in her final year of high school. Nora is interested in literature and history; she edited the school literary magazine at Brearley, and has interned with both a literary magazine and a literary agency. But she is still unsure what she will choose as a major, and is open to exploring new disciplines at college. Ana's interests are in Latin and History, which she hopes to pursue further in college. This past year she acted as co-head of Brearley's Math Team and Model United Nations. She is also an avid tennis player and is preparing for a senior piano recital in the spring of 2014.

3. David Lamelas is an artist born in Argentina. He lives in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and London.

4. Antanas Mockus is a mathematician, philosopher, educator, and politician. A former president of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (1991–1993), two-term mayor of Bogotá (1995–1997; 2000–2003), and three-time candidate in the Colombian presidential elections (1998; 2006; 2010), he currently presides over a non-profit organization called Corpovisionarios, which “investigates, advises, designs and implements actions to achieve voluntary changes in collective behaviour”.

1. Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-born artist based in Liverpool. She makes 16mm films and other things. She often works collaboratively with artist Lucy Skaer, and teaches part time at Liverpool John Moores University.

2. Raimundas Malašauskas was born in Vilnius, curates world-wide, and writes occasionally.

3. Laure Prouvost is an artist born in France, now living and working in London, who creates multi-media environments that often invoke loose narratives centred around a single event. Her work has been shown at Tate Britain, ICA (London), Serpentine Gallery, and the Sculpture Centre (New York). She is the recipient of the 2011 Max Mara Art Prize for Women.

4. Emma Davie is a documentary filmmaker and Programme Director of Film & Television at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

1. Benoît Maire is a Paris-based artist who produces sculptures, collages, ready-mades, films, paintings and performances. His work often challenges the precarious equilibrium between objects and concepts by drawing on a large field of references (philosophy, literature, mythology and so on). In 2009, he started research on what he calls ‘The Aesthetics of Differends’, a conceptual borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘differend’, which has enabled him to exhaust two notions that structure his work – relativism and linguistic form – and to create his own restructured aesthetics.

2. Clémentine Autain is a feminist politician affiliated with far-left and anti-capitalist movements. She took an active part in the 2012 French presidential elections.

3. Dutch artist Falke Pisano is a long-time collaborator of Benoît Maire. Her work, based on immersive research, fluctuates between concrete and abstract, object-based and performative, often centered on a deconstruction of linguistic structures.

4. Mark Geffriaud is a French artist who has exhibited regularly with Benoît Maire and who briefly shared a studio with him. Questions of disappearance and emptiness inform his work, which plays repeatedly with key elements such as books or light.

1. David Lamelas is an artist born in Buenos Aires. He lives in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires and London.

2. David Gothard started his career as the artistic director of Riverside Studios in the ’80s, where his work with artists, playwrights and performers culminated in the centre’s nomination for the Turner Prize and the birth of New Music and Dance Umbrella. As a theatre director he works between the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Derry Playhouse in Northern Ireland, Peak Performances in New Jersey, and the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, as well as guest teaching at the Slade, Chelsea College of Art, and the National Film School.

3. Robrecht Vanderbeeken is a philosopher currently doing post-doctoral research at University College Ghent on performance, fine art and the cultural-philosophical implications of technological evolutions. He has published widely on subjects ranging from metaphysics to aesthetics, and is a visiting lecturer at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Sint-Lucas Art Academy, Ghent University, Transmedia, and Brunel University London.

4. Céline Condorelli is an artist who trained as an architect and whose practice is concerned with architecture as an interface for combinations of spatial, urban, political and social structures. She is one half of Support Structures, an evolving collaborative project with artist-curator Gavin Wade, and the author of a book of the same name.

5. Gerard Hemsworth is an artist living in Hastings, East Sussex.

1. Miriam Cahn was born in Basel in 1949. She is most widely known for her vividly coloured paintings, although she only really turned to colour and oils in the early ’90s. Before this, she was creating large-scale installations of chalk drawings, some of them ephemeral in-situ interventions in urban environments. In a constant state of experimentation with artistic forms, she also works with performance, sound, film, photography and sculpture.

2. René Pulfer is an artist, a curator and the head of Art Institute of Basel, Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland FHNW.

3. Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Leeds, England. Her main research interests are gender, race and class in the formations of modernism in late nineteenth-century Europe and America; the history of women in the visual arts, with a current project focusing on femininity, representation and modernity 1928-1968; and contemporary visual arts by women.

4. Andreas Osterwalder is a Professor in Physical Chemistry who is interested in the most fundamental aspects of chemical reactions. One particular question is how the dynamics of chemical reactions change if the temperature is reduced as close as possible to absolute zero. He teaches at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

1. Jason Dodge is an American artist based in Berlin. His sculptures and in-situ installations have been exhibited in Hannover (Kunstverein), Paris (Yvon Lambert), London (David Roberts Art Foundation), Turin (Castello di Rivoli), New York (Casey Kaplan) and Minneapolis (Walker Art Center), among other international venues.

2. Michael Dickman is an American poet and author of The End of the West and Flies, both published by Copper Canyon Press. His work regularly appears in the American Poetry Review, Field and The New Yorker.

3. Juan Lucas Aisemberg is a viola player with the Deutsche Opera Berlin and various chamber music ensembles. He is also dedicated to tango, jazz and other forms of popular music as a performer and as the founder of several groups.

4. Michael Dean is a British artist based in London whose works have featured in exhibitions such as Our Daily Permanence at Nomas Foundation in Rome, Face at Supportico Lopez in Berlin, Symmetry of Intimacy at Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle Upon Tyne and Blindsides (with Becky Beasley) at Laura Bartlett Gallery in London.

5. Matthew Dickman is an American poet and author of All American Poem published by American Poetry Review and Mayakovsky’s Revolver, published by W. W. Norton & Company. His poems have appeared in McSweeny’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, The London Review of Books, Narrative Magazine, Esquire Magazine and The New Yorker, among others.

1. Charles Avery is a British artist born in Scotland in 1973. He grew up on the Isle of Mull and now lives and works in London. Since 2005 Avery has worked on the ‘perpetual description’ of a fictional island through drawings, installations, sculptures, objects and text.

2. Robin Mackay is a philosopher, the initiator of the interdisciplinary organization Urbanomic and the editor of Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development.

3. Evelyn Fishburn is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literary Studies at London Metropolitan University and holds an honorary senior research position at University College London. She has worked extensively on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

4. Angus Cameron has a diverse intellectual and professional background in journalism, international relations, geography, art history, and political economy. He lectures at the University of Leicester.