Where visionaries, inventors and trailblazers get their start.

Touch Symposium is an international and interdisciplinary event / creative network, that brings together ethical hackers, philosophers, computer scientists, social scientists, and artists.
Together we share thought provoking knowledge and cutting-edge practices to: discuss technological issues that impact our societies + design and implement pragmatic solutions.

We train leaders from government, industry and civil society to look across disciplines and around corners to solve the world’s increasingly complex challenges.

Our intellectual, highly-technical and creative work has directly informed public policy (US Senate, Berlin Senate, the White House, the private office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the United Nations specialized agencies and organizations), and industry practice, and we closely work with communities. Our team members helped to launch the #BLM digital campaign, joined March for Our Lives, and Free Tibet.

Paris-based headquarters: connecting 13 countries across the world and 13 U.S. states
Connected to 42 Paris Coding School/Street Art Museum connecting +15,000 students in 26 countries around the world

Countries represented: France, USA (New York, Texas, Oregon, California, South Carolina, Washington State, New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Colorado, Ohio, Michigan), Canada, Germany, UK, Australia, Mauritius, South Africa, Switzerland, Argentina, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan

2018. Touch Symposium started as a curriculum designed by Caroline Murgue at the IAS Princeton, to teach AI ethics: 3FT (French Touch, French Theory, French Tech). It was deployed at Microsoft AI School, the MIT, 42 Coding School, Google. 

It evolved online with the Hacker Academy. The innovative method taught critical inquiry and creative thinking, with the use of OSINT on the platform Twitter. The students were American, Canadian and French ethical hackers (Boomers, GenX, Millennials). 

2020. Touch Symposium is an event and a creative network, developed through our new means of communication built on the internet.

Touch Symposium is launched by Peiter Zatko, Dave Aitel, Caroline Murgue at Hack-A-Sat in August 2020. They were inspired by the artist Nam Jun Paik: “The satellite’s amplification of the freedom of the strong must be accompanied by the protection of the culture of the weak or by the creation of a diverse software skillfully bringing to life the qualitative differences in various cultures.” Art & Satellite (1984)

In 1949, George Orwell published a dystopian novel 1984 depicting a dark future in which surveillance and control by tele-communication become a routine, and made a pessimistic prediction that humans will be controlled by mass media in 1984.

As a refutation of Orwell’s prediction, Nam Jun Paik said, “You were only half right” and directed the satellite TV show Good Morning, Mr. Orwell to show the positive utilization of mass media by means of art. On January 1, 1984, Paik linked New York and Paris live via satellite in collaboration with around 30 teams, 100 artists and 4 broadcasters and aired music, fine arts, performance, fashion show and comedy that cross the borderline between popular and avant-garde art in real time. Above all, these various genres of arts were edited and displayed on one TV screen. This show was broadcast live in New York, Paris, Berlin, Seoul, etc. and is estimated to have been watched by over 25 million TV viewers.

Now is the time to look into the eyes of ourselves seeing this positive initiative in commemoration of Good Morning, Mr. Orwell. Today’s global networking system using the internet beyond satellite makes both stronger controls and broadened freedom possible. Touch Symposium is intended to ask about the possibility of making a new node and link to change this network as well as to pose a question of control/freedom that becomes more complicated and secret day by day.