Artificial Futures

Drop in to visit:

The Horizon, Installation by Wesley Goatley (Critical Artist and Researcher)

The Horizon represents a glimpse into a possible near-future of post-abundance computation that also shows us how to better use the tools we have today.

It is a device from a future where resource scarcity, climate change, and the related political fallouts have highly limited data center and cloud computing resources to industrial, governmental, and military sectors, and everyday people must make do without some of ‘magic’ technologies they used to take for granted. In this world, a lone former engineer is trying to build their own DIY AI assistant cobbled together from artefacts of the era of computational abundance: a hacked Kindle, a disassembled Amazon Echo, an old Raspberry Pi computer, and solar panels all jury-rigged together to make a recycled, low-power version of the AI consumer tech of today. This DIY system runs a locally-hosted voice assistant designed to reduce its power consumption as much as possible, with most of its old features disabled so that it now functions as a cooking assistant: suggesting recipes, playing music, and helping to maintain a simple vegetable garden nearby. Through interactions with the voice assistant, audiences can stumble upon voice diaries from the mysterious former engineer and snippets of news from this postabundance world, and get a sense of what daily life may look like for those living in it.

This future is a likely one, but this warning can teach us something about what we can do today. For example, restricting the LLM to be custom, single-purpose, and locally hosted reduces its carbon footprint, secures the personal data of the user, and presents an alternative to the mainstream AI tools of today that often have features that nobody asked for, and address non-existent problems. It presents a paradigm for AI devices that, through disaster, might show us how to live better with the tools we have today to help potentially mitigate or avoid this future.

What is Research Now? Reading Room: A space to sit, read, reflect, talk

Tickets for this event must be booked separately through this link. Max. 20 people. Ideally, you will have attended Khan's talk on 3rd July.

Workshop description
How do we speak, write, and think about art, especially AI generated art that we might not have the full background story of? How do we form temporary publics around images, specifically generative images? What do we learn by writing associatively across a group of artworks that resist easy categorization? And what collective language can we form in a group together, looking at art together?

In this workshop, we'll be practicing collective criticism—a style of thinking and writing together that argues that meaning emerges not from individual expertise, but from the beautiful convergence of multiple perspectives in real time. We will form a shared language between us, a form of collective art criticism that is responsive, egalitarian, and shared.

To commemorate the session, participants - asked to share their writings at the end - will receive a small zine later in the summer of 2025, designed and printed by Nora.

This workshop owes a great debt to the ambulatory poetics practice of poet Marlene Creates, a Newfoundland writer whose ‘semantic mapping and writing’ workshops have inspired countless writers and artists

Abstract
Asian American writer, Cathy Park Hong, names a class of psychic and affective states as “minor feelings” which accompany the experience of racialisation. Minor feelings are neither cathartic nor do they kindle change, or resistance, as do anger or hope. Minor feelings manifest as boredom, petulance, feeling stuck or dysphoria. Media scholars write that digital and social media inspire similar feelings of distraction (Paasonen) and lethargy (Hu). The internet and tech companies are suspect, untrustworthy and inspire helplessness: we are subject to the sociopolitical, interpersonal and professional formats for life that these companies provide, and feel unable to influence either the platforms or companies. This talk identifies the minor feelings of AI such as doom, uncertainty and the social and existential glitches in adjusting to new technological systems, and proposes that to resist such assumedly unproductive feelings is to give up on being human. How can we persist despite troubling, failed and dehumanising technology projects?

Abstract
In this session, critical digital artist and researcher Wesley Goatley will discuss the emerging intersections of AI, technocapitalism, and climate collapse, as well as how art can respond to these impending crises. Using his new project "The Harbinger, The Horizon and The Hope" as an example, he will explore how concepts such as permacomputing, local hosting, and digital recycling can be employed to utilise AI tools within an anti-capitalist art practice, and how they can provide new creative possibilities for worldbuilding and speculative storytelling.

Abstract
In this work, Nora employs various AI techniques to place unlikely words in the mouths of three European museum directors while also reanimating ancient-inspired masks. Her deepfakes represent the museums themselves through the leaders of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Berlin), the Louvre (Paris), and the British Museum (London). In this post-truth situation, Nora’s talking heads admit “the truth about imperial plunder – confessing their crimes, speaking about healing, restitution, shame or art as critical knowledge”. The deepfake directors are interspersed with reanimated objects in the form of talking masks, along with synthetic moving images of speculative future museum sites that blur nature and the built environment. The Post-Truth Museum presents a world in which institutional complicity with imperialism is recognised, and the untapped potential of the museum is realised. The script for this video also includes statements by engaged thinkers, with tones ranging from sensitive to furious.

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