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<h1 class="entry-title single-title" itemprop="headline">Reimagining
Techno-Futures Through Creative Practice</h1>
<p class="event-when"> <b>When: </b> <span class="event-date">February
6, 2025 </span> <span class="event-time"> 16:00 - 17:30</span>
</p>
<p class="event-where"> <b>Where: </b> <span
class="event-location">Belle van Zuylenzaal (Academiegebouw
Utrecht University)</span> <span class="event-address">Domplein
29</span> <span class="event-town">Utrecht</span></p>
<p class="event-where"><span class="event-town"></span>How can we
rethink the futures of technology beyond the narrow visions shaped
by Big Tech? Join us in exploring imaginative, creative, and
situated technological practices that challenge the dominant
narratives around emerging technologies like blockchain and
artificial intelligence.</p>
<p>Powerful tech actors continuously present their visions for the
future of technology, framing them as inevitable while obfuscating
how they are aligned with their own economic and political
agendas. These visions influence infrastructure, regulation, and
societal norms while excluding the diverse perspectives and needs
of communities. But technology is not a neutral or autonomous
force—it is shaped by human decisions, and alternative imaginaries
are possible.</p>
<p>This session will spotlight artistic and creative approaches to
emerging technologies, posing questions such as: What could
artificial intelligence become if it was framed through values
like justice or fabulation rather than efficiency or logic? Or,
how can blockchain systems be reimagined to serve community needs?
Featuring contributions from artists and researchers, this session
invites you to explore creative interventions and bottom-up
approaches that redefine the boundaries of technology. Together,
we will ask how alternative imaginaries can foster more inclusive,
value-driven techno-futures.</p>
<h2><a href="https://forms.gle/G37d1z6Q6XNLCbZA6" target="_blank"
rel="noopener" moz-do-not-send="true"><strong>Please register
here. </strong></a></h2>
<p></p>
<p>Entry to the event is free and afterwards, we invite everyone to
continue the conversation at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s
New Year’s toast.</p>
<h3><strong>Speakers:</strong></h3>
<p><a href="https://n-o.ooo/">S. de Jager</a> is a PhD candidate at
the Erasmus School of Philosophy and a tutor at the Willem de
Kooning Academie and the Design Academy Eindhoven. Interests are
driven by seeking ever-novel understandings of the computation(s)
of life: from neuroendocrinology to the rhythmicality of social
organization.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Abstract of the presentation:</strong>
Technosolutionist AI promises consumers better living through
the machine, assuming we all have the same problems. What values
ground this promise? Sadly, profit-drive as the main constraint
behind this enterprise constantly clouds all possibility of an
analysis of values. However, they still lurk behind the face of
mere profit. And whatever the case, within or outside
technocapitalism: values are useful yet highly problematic
cultural scripts that tend to homogenize rather than promote
diversity. We will analyze “human sameness” as a denominator
most things we consider ‘values’ are based upon. What do we
assume about each other to be “the same” (even in sameness
through difference), so that we even begin to think about acting
collectively (in response to, with, against or for the machine)?</li>
</ul>
<p><a
href="https://www.les-nouveaux-riches.com/interview-with-penny-rafferty/"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">Penny Rafferty</a> is an
independent writer and thinker, departing from her research and
thinking she has initiated and co-founded Black Swan DAO
(2018-2022), a proto-institution for interdisciplinary research
and practice. She is also the Co-Principle Investigator at
Serpentine Galleries Blockchain R&D Lab and co-developed the
think tank series Artworld DAO’s and The Radical Friends Sumit
(2019-2022) with Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers, in coordination with
Serpentine Galleries, Furtherfield, Haus Der Kunst Munich and
Goethe Institute London. In 2022 she released the book “Radical
Friends – Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts”
with Catlow consolidating five years of research into a toolkit
for fierce thinking and connectivity that moved beyond the
established systems of centralised control in the art industry and
wider financial networks through web 3 thinking.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Abstract of the presentation: </strong>Penny argues
for the establishment of what she calls a third wave of
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations in which the needs of
communities and their situated perspectives are put first. This
approach is rooted in critical engagement with the
socio-political context in which artworld DAOs emerged, such as
the precarity and austerity that characterise cultural sectors.
Through years of disenfranchisement, people have lost access to
the practical and imaginative tools to define their own
realities. Penny shows that DAOs offer a way to practice
alternative organisational forms, to explore collective
practices, and to world new worlds together.</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://evelynwan.com/">Evelyn Wan</a> is Assistant
Professor in Media, Arts, and Society at the Department of Media
and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She coordinates the MA
programme MA Arts and Society, and works on interdisciplinary
curriculum innovation in the domain of Humane AI. Her
award-winning research weaves alternative genealogies between
historical technological inventions and contemporary emerging
technology through the lens of decolonial media studies and
performance studies. She also works as a dramaturg and performer
between Europe and Asia. Her performance works are situated at the
intersections of technology, colonial and inter-Asian ocean
histories, mythology, and spirituality.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Abstract of the presentation: </strong>How might we
imagine alternative futures of AI technology by excavating its
deep histories and archaeologies? Evelyn Wan’s “Archaeologies of
AI” research-creation project uses media archaeology to create
alternative imaginaries of AI. Each instalment of the series is
grounded in historical, archival, and embodied research, and
focuses on a specific technological artefact from the past. In
retelling its stories, she foregrounds the voices of
marginalised groups—such as women, people of colour, and
non-human entities—and their connections to technology. By
looking at these forgotten pasts, she hopes to empower audiences
to reimagine the paths not taken in our technological present,
and to decentre white-capitalist tech by turning to AI’s
multicultural contexts.</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://marjz.net/">Martin Zeilinger</a> (Reader in
Computational Arts & Technology at Abertay University in
Dundee/UK, and Associate Researcher at Orpheus Institute in
Gent/BE) develops critical perspectives on digital art and
emerging technologies, with a focus on intersections between
scholarship, artistic research, and curation. He is the author of
Tactical Entanglements (meson press 2021) and Structures of
Belonging (Aksioma 2023) and publishes widely on digital art in
relation to AI, decentralised computing, and distributed agency.
Martin is also the co-host of xCoAx 2025 in Scotland. <a
href="http://marjz.net">marjz.net</a></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Abstract of the presentation: </strong>Emerging
technologies such as AI and blockchain are frequently presented
as possessing powerful ‘disruptive’ and ‘revolutionary’
qualities. In such narratives, they are meant, for example, to
bring about entirely new forms of creativity, or overcome
hierarchical systems of centralised control. But in many of
their most widespread applications, such technologies perpetuate
inequality and exclusion, cater to elite economic and political
agendas, and disregard key issues they promised to address. In
this talk, I’ll explore aspects of the self-contradictory
imaginaries through which emerging technologies tend to be
rationalised, and consider how artists and activists might
develop such imaginaries as critical tactics of
‘disintermediation’ that move us towards the promised
disruptions.</li>
</ul>
<h3><strong>Host: </strong></h3>
<p><a href="https://integloerich.nl/">Inte Gloerich</a> is a
researcher and cultural organiser working on the political,
social, and cultural implications of technology imaginaries. She
is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies
at Utrecht University and connected to the Institute of Network
Cultures. Her thesis, titled <em>Reimagining the Truth Machine:
Blockchain Imaginaries between the Rational and the
More-than-Rational </em>(to be defended on 3 February 2025),
traces the entanglement of rationalism, computation, and various
forms of belief in relation to the power dynamics and potential
for radical change in blockchain culture. She is also about to
publish a book, titled <em>Artists, Activists, and Worldbuilders
on Decentralised Autonomous Organisations: Conversations about
Funding, Self-Organisation, and Reclaiming the Future </em>(Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, Feb 2025) featuring interviews with
artists and activists that engage critically with the imaginative
and practical promises of blockchain for their sector. (See more
details below).</p>
<h3><strong>Partners: </strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University</li>
<li>Faculty Digital Media & Creative Industries, Amsterdam
University of Applied Sciences</li>
<li>Institute of Network Cultures</li>
</ul>
<h3>Additionally:</h3>
<p>This event will also be the first public presentation of <em>Artists,
Activists, and Worldbuilders on Decentralised Autonomous
Organisations: Conversations about Funding, Self-Organisation,
and Reclaiming the Future. </em>Free copies will be available!</p>
<p><strong>About the book:</strong> Precarity and budget cuts plague
arts and culture while they are still recovering from the damages
of the pandemic. Meanwhile, extreme right wing politics spreads
across the world and increases censorship and repression on
artists and cultural practitioners. How can creatives come
together and build solidarity and collective power against these
threats?</p>
<p>This book contains conversations with artists and activists that
engage critically with the socioeconomic setup of their sector.
They activate communities and collectively build tools and
infrastructures to prefigure different futures. Sharing their
views on the potentials and pitfalls of Decentralised Autonomous
Organisations – an emerging technology many of them use – the
interviewees invite readers into the important and exciting space
of artistic-activist reflection on, critique of, engagement with,
and (re)imagination of these (and other) complex technologies.</p>
<p><strong>Interviewees:</strong> Erik Bordeleau, Ruth Catlow, Aude
Launay, Yazan Khalili, Penny Rafferty, and Stacco Troncoso.</p>
<p></p>
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