Opening Remarks (Teemu Arina, Vesa Kivinen, Maximilian Gotzler)
Teemu Arina (FIN)
Biohacker & Technology Entrepreneur, Founder @ Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland, Author @Biohacker’s Handbook
Teemu Arina has a professional career of over 15 years as a technology entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is one of the forefront thinkers on the intersection of the human and the machine, social media, digital work and online learning. He is a Leonardo Award laureate under the patronage of European Parliament for "Humanity in Digitization". Mr. Arina is the founder of three award winning technology companies, ambassador for Rockstart Digital Health accelerator, co-founder of Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook for optimizing health and wellbeing with technological and biological tools. Mr. Arina is a popular keynote speaker who has presented internationally in countries such as USA, UK, Japan, Hongkong, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany.
This talk introduces biohacking as the art and science of optimizing human
Biohacking is the art and science of optimizing your physical and mental performance through systems thinking. It is about looking at yourself as a complex system and applying science at its best to your health and fitness.
Summary
- Biohacking is the art and science of optimizing physical and mental performance by using systems thinking and applying scientific insights to the complex human system. - Healthcare is shifting from periodic snapshots to real-time biometric monitoring through biosensors and wearables, enabling a continuous understanding of health and fitness. - Technology functions as an extension of human capability, creating faster feedback loops that allow for better regulation of physiological and mental states. - Optimizing human performance involves systemic interventions across core pillars of life, specifically sleep, nutrition, exercise, work, and the mind. - Biohacking incorporates interdisciplinary tools, ranging from neuro-linguistic programming to nutritional engineering and art, to achieve holistic self-optimization.
Article
Opening Remarks: Supercharging Your Health With Body, Mind And Tech
At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Teemu Arina Cast Biohacking As A New Social Contract Between Biology And Technology
On a spring Saturday in London, Biohacker Summit 2016 opened not with the language of gadgets, but with a proposition about being human. Standing before a room filled with attendees from more than 20 countries, Teemu Arina, the Finnish technology entrepreneur, biohacker and co-author of *Biohacker’s Handbook*, framed the day’s mission in stark, expansive terms: to “supercharge your health with body, mind and tech.”
The event, held on 21 May 2016 in London, marked the summit’s first UK edition after earlier gatherings in Helsinki. Its opening remarks, delivered by Arina and joined by artist Vesa Kivinen and entrepreneur Maximilian Gotzler, offered more than a welcome. They sketched a worldview in which health ceased to be an occasional clinical measurement and became a continuous stream of data, interpretation and self-directed change.
Information As The New Raw Material Of Health
For Arina, the central resource of the age was not oil, land or labour, but information.
“Information is primary,” he said. “It is in our genetics, our biochemical messengers, and our behavior. This information is the oil of the twenty-first century, and it can be mined for new insight and understanding.”
It was a line that captured the summit’s philosophy with unusual clarity. Biohacking, in Arina’s telling, was neither fad nor mere lifestyle branding. It was “the art and science” of improving physical and mental performance through systems thinking, using scientific insight to understand the body not as a set of isolated symptoms, but as a living, dynamic whole.
That approach drew on the ethos of the Quantified Self movement, which sought “self-knowledge through numbers,” but Arina widened the frame. Biohacking, he argued, belonged to a broader shift in how people understood themselves: as biological systems shaped by sleep, food, movement, work, stress, cognition and environment, all interacting at once.
From Static Snapshots To Continuous Monitoring
One of the most striking ideas in the Opening Remarks at Biohacker Summit 2016 London was Arina’s insistence that healthcare had long been organised around fragments.
“Healthcare currently relies on snapshots of people when they are born or get sick,” he said. “The moment we move into a real-time understanding of your health and fitness, it is going to change the whole healthcare system.”
In his description of that future, biosensors, wearable devices, smart fabrics and infrared technologies were not novelties. They were instruments in a broader transition from periodic diagnosis to continuous physiological awareness. Arina referenced biometric shirts, EEG monitoring and the possibility of household technologies feeding biological measurements into the cloud. The implication was radical, even if delivered matter-of-factly: the body was becoming readable in real time.
For the enthusiasts in the room, many of them self-quantifiers, nutrition advocates and performance seekers, this was not dystopian language. It was emancipatory. If the body could speak more often, perhaps people could learn to listen earlier.
The Human Machine, Reimagined
Arina’s argument was not that technology should replace human judgment. It was that the divide between person and device had always been overstated.
“Man and technology are not separate,” he said. “They are interconnected. Technology has no purpose without us as humans giving it its purpose. It is an extension of us that extends our human capabilities and merges with us.”
This was biohacking as philosophy as much as practice. The device on the wrist, the sensor in the fabric, the signal on the screen, all were described as mirrors rather than masters. Their value lay in feedback.
“It is all about feedback loops and learning,” Arina said. “The faster the feedback loops, the faster you learn. Technology is a mirror to ourselves and enables faster feedback loops so we can learn more about our bodies and minds.”
That emphasis on feedback loops gave the summit’s ambitions a distinctly modern cadence. Faster data promised faster adaptation. Faster adaptation, in turn, promised greater control over stress, energy, sleep and mental state. In this account, optimisation was not abstract. It was intimate.
A Holistic Program For Self-Experimenters
Arina returned repeatedly to the idea that meaningful health improvement did not come from one miracle intervention. It came from systems. Drawing on the framework of *Biohacker’s Handbook*, he pointed to five core domains: sleep, nutrition, exercise, work and mind.
The purpose of measurement, he suggested, was not measurement itself. It was intervention. The body could be studied, adjusted and refined by self-experimenters willing to test methods on themselves and learn from the result.
There was a democratic edge to this message. The summit gathered not only experts on stage, but participants who had come, in Arina’s words, to learn something for themselves. He urged networking, conversation and exchange, implying that the frontier of health was increasingly collective, built from formal science, fringe experimentation and lived experience alike.
Vesa Kivinen And The Art Of Interdisciplinary Biohacking
The opening session broadened further when Arina welcomed Vesa Kivinen to the stage. Kivinen, a contemporary artist, described his work as a fusion of oil painting, body painting, nature photography, high-end printing and an unconventional commercial model. His point was not simply aesthetic. Innovation, he suggested, happened when disciplines stopped obeying their own borders.
Like Arina, Kivinen spoke the language of holistic systems. He described drawing influence from outside the art world, from philosophy, health and neuro-linguistic programming. Those influences shaped not only how he made art, but how he worked with people.
“We are moving into an era where we look at holistic systems,” Kivinen said. “It is about being open to new things, inquiring what the cutting edge is, and opening yourself up to a different perspective where co-creations happen.”
It was a revealing intervention. Biohacking, as presented here, was not confined to biomarkers and nutrition protocols. It was also a cultural posture, one that valued permeability between fields, ancient traditions alongside modern tools, and transformation as both physiological and psychological.
Maximilian Gotzler And The Performance Economy Of Coffee
If Kivinen supplied the summit’s artistic vocabulary, Maximilian Gotzler brought its consumer pragmatism into view. Introduced by Arina as the force behind Flowgrade, Gotzler used his brief appearance to connect performance culture with something almost everyone in the room already consumed: coffee.
He described Flowgrade’s mission as collecting effective biohacks and making them usable in everyday life. Its coffee, he said, had been developed from high-altitude Brazilian beans, roasted lightly to preserve antioxidants and subjected to laboratory testing for acids, toxins and other qualities often ignored by mass-market sellers.
The pitch was part science, part aspiration, part ritual. Here was biohacking translated into a cup: engineered, measured, branded and folded neatly into the routines of fasting, cognition and productivity.
Yet even this moment underscored the summit’s larger themes. Nutrition was not merely sustenance. It was a system input. What mattered was not only what people consumed, but how transparently it had been tested and how deliberately it had been chosen.
A Movement In Search Of A New Health Culture
As opening remarks go, this was less housekeeping than manifesto. There were practical announcements about workshops, exhibitor rooms and social media hashtags, but the heart of the session lay elsewhere. Biohacker Summit 2016 London presented health not as a matter of compliance with static advice, but as an active, ongoing collaboration between body, data, environment and intention.
Arina, a Leonardo Award laureate under the patronage of the European Parliament and one of Finland’s most visible voices on digital health and human performance, used the event to articulate a future in which the boundaries between medicine, lifestyle, art and technology were steadily dissolving.
What emerged in London was not merely an argument for better wearables or smarter nutrition. It was a case for a new health culture, one in which self-knowledge was increasingly measurable, self-optimisation increasingly systematic, and the relationship between human beings and their tools less adversarial than fused.
In that sense, the Opening Remarks by Teemu Arina, with contributions from Vesa Kivinen and Maximilian Gotzler at Biohacker Summit 2016 London, did what the best openings do. They named the mood of the room before the day had fully begun. The future, they suggested, would belong to those willing to read themselves more closely and redesign their lives accordingly.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London