Johanna Koljonen closes 2023's The Conference with a recap how we as participators have tried to move away from oppositional binaries but also reflects that how these binaries also work as an aid to understand the world. Not only that, we are also able to shift and remix the the meanings of these opposites. Remembering a recent conversation at The …

Examining the creativity of generative artificial intelligence tools brings up interesting parallels with human cognition. Just as AI systems predict and fill gaps, our brains do so too, drawing from a wide range of learned behaviours, experiences and beliefs. Both entities heavily rely on their training data: AI on diverse datasets, humans on fact…

BITOI stands for Bass is the original instrument. BITOI are exploring the boundaries of the voice and the electric bass. The band is made up of one electric bass player and three vocalists from Denmark and Sweden (Cassius Lambert, Alexandra Shabo, Lise Kroner, Anja Tietze Lahrmann). They are working with an extended electric bass neck to allow quar…

Q&A from the sessions Tending To Transformation – For Creative Leaders Who Stay With The Trouble with Pernilla Glaser (Author, Educator), Lydia Slaby (Community Leader and Author) and Holley M. Kholi-Murchison (Oratory Glory)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

“Are you willing to dig deep and choose what your heart wants in the face of fear?” How can we begin to view the work that we do as a journey towards self-actualisation? Holley began in their own journey of resignation from a toxic workplace, to found Oratory Glory, and has continued to work in spreading stories and helping people find meaning in t…

“Take time to pay attention. Not everything can be solved in 15 minutes, let it take the time it takes” “Stay in the hard and uncomfortable conversations” Lydia Slaby learned the hard way that to live a life that is worthwhile, you need to find space for the heart and the brain. At the end of a long-list of achievements, and on a trajectory towards…

“We all start out as artists”, Pernilla Glaser explains. After all, most of us know how the snow eaten from a mitten tastes. We started out as open for experimentation, doing weird things, feeling and exploring the world and the relationships around us. Pernilla invites us to find ways back into this state, and to put more attention to our heart an…

Q&A from the session Creative Assemblages – Emerging Alliances to Augment Human Creativity with Kristoffer Ørum (Artist) and Kader Bagli (RISE | Visual Effects Studio)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Kristoffer Ørum finds satisfaction in taking a particular technology that is meant for something else and misusing it. In his current unfinished Instagram project that unfolds over time, the artist uses AI to create a version of history. The generated pictures combine 90s hip-hop culture, the Danish worker movement, fishermen's culture, and the hea…

“We all deserve to be seen in visual languages. We already have the tool, now it’s about taking action” Could merging VFX and AI create a fully represented world? Kader Bagli certainly thinks so. Working at the intersection of creativity, imagination and technology, she is exposed to a lack of diversity on a daily basis. Our current visual storytel…

Q&A from the session Humanity, (AI)mplified – The AI Tools We Use to Be More Human with Laura Herman (Oxford Internet Institute,)Ovetta Sampson (Google) and Charlotte Högberg (Lund University)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

How can AI be used for the common good or more precisely in healthcare? Charlotte’s work explores what futures are possible and desirable but also what we are at risk of losing. AI's role in healthcare can have harmful effects but also huge potential benefits. She emphasises the need to raise vital questions and consider consequences. Awareness of …

"Data is the love language of machine learning, but we must remember that it is not true." We all create data. And all data is created by people. Ovetta Sampson wants us to remember this, both in order to centre humanity but also to clarify the vulnerabilities of data. We are biased, so the data we create is infused with biases as well. Whether it …

“What would you make if you did not have to generate it?” Global platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok enable creatives to show their work to wider audiences. However, these platforms also operate using algorithms that determine which content appears in users' feeds and what remains unseen. This dynamic has significant implications: firstly, algorit…

Q&A from the session Doing Equity – Tools for Making Diversity, Equity and Inclusion more...Inclusive with Peter Bilak (Typotheque), Caroline Bollen (TU Delft) and Dr. Nighat Arif (BBC, NHS)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

“What happens when you don’t have the words to describe the symptoms?” In the last installmentof the ‘Doing Equity’ session, Dr. Nighat Arif, the resident doctor of BBC andITV presents an uplifting talk that reiterates the importance of raisingawareness and in normalizing discussions of female health within the Black and Asian communities in theUK.…

“Empathy is the balance between identification and differentiation” In this session ‘Doing Equity’, we dive into the aspects and practices that can be adopted in order to materialize equity in different settings. An interdisciplinary researcher at Delft University of Technology, Caroline Bollen whose research focus revolves around how to best under…

“I wish there were governments who paid for this” Peter Bil'ak is a well-known name within the narrow field of typography and type design. Having worked for many years digiitising handwritten scripts from South Asian regions, he shares some of the implications of digitally missing and incomplete alphabets. While the global population is growing ver…

Q&A from the session Setting Stories Free – How We Tell The Tales That Move Us with Priyanka Borpujari (Award-winning journalist), Bjarke Calvin, Sophia Jörgensen, Iben Völund (Duckling), Building a legacy for 21st-century journalistsMarie Kilg (Deutsche Welle).Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

“Our world is connected by stories” says Bjarke Calvin. For him stories are not just a way to share information but a way of nurturing human connection. So what to do with the fact that news stories we interact with are more and more defined by social media? Tech-giants that dominate the media space, do not foster storytelling as their primary goal…

Anic is not like any other writer. Anic is the first non-human columnist and while Anic is not a human they still have parents. “We saw ourselves comfortable in the role of parents, as we wanted to grant Anic as much independence as possible but we still had to create certain rules that had to be maintained.” Marie Kilg is one these parents and her…

“In every conflict the first thing to go is truth, and the first killed victim is the messenger.” “Editors are not interested in mundane stories because we have stopped listening entirely” Who decides which stories get to be told? Who defines what an important story actually is? Priyanka Borjupari shares stories of her experiences as a journalist i…

Q&A from the session Memory in The Machine – The Tools We Use to Archive Us with Carl Öhman (Uppsala University) and Neef Rehman (Creative technologist, Isometric)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

“The anthropomorphisation of AI is not the way to go. It is more interesting to look at how that impacts our interaction and perception of time.” What does time look like for machines? Do machines understand time the way humans perceive it? And what happens when we rely on machines that have their own view of the world and on us? Neef Rehman discus…

“The data of the dead is more than individual user history, it is the heritage of the 21st century.” By the end of this century, Facebook will host 5 billion profiles of deceased people - and therefore have access to data of more people who are dead than alive. That poses an urgent question: What do we do with the digital dead? Since the agricultur…

“Injustice it’s not rooted in computing. It’s been happening for hundreds of years and it’s still being imposed through centuries in violence through colonialism.” “Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level”. This is one of the 10 principles for design justice that Costanza-Chock presents in her…

BITOI stands for Bass is the original instrument. BITOI are exploring the boundaries of the voice and the electric bass. The band is made up of one electric bass player and three vocalists from Denmark and Sweden (Cassius Lambert, Alexandra Shabo, Lise Kroner, Anja Tietze Lahrmann). They are working with an extended electric bass neck to allow quar…

Q&A from the keynote session with Michael Slaby (Avens, Harmony Labs)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Returning moderator extraordinaire, Johanna Koljonen, opens The Conference 2023 and extends a warm welcome to the participants. She begins with a reflection on the personal financial situation that many of us have faced due to last year's economic turmoil. She states, "Working in this economy, we're facing a lot of pressure that we previously have …

Q&A from the session Enacting Care – Putting Sustainability Into Practice with Deb Chachra (Olin College), Becky Lyon (Artist) and Ledama Masidza (Oceans Alive)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

In what kind of future would you like to live? Blade Runner or Black Panther? For too long, our futures have been determined by immature science fiction imaginaries still stuck in the mid to late 20th century. Their utopian and dystopian binaries now provide fertile inspiration for police-state-aesthetic VC pitch decks and a cluster of ideologies k…

“We can only manage what we know.” Ubuntu is a concept that embraces the interconnectedness between all living things. No one is independent of the fact that our existence is directly dependent on the care between human and nonhuman communities. Ledama shared a story of hope, the case of Kuruwitu, a fishing community in Kenya that managed to heal i…

“Energy is general purpose freedom.” “The earth is in a void, every atom has to come from some place, and go somewhere.“ Infrastructure might not be the first thing we think of when we hear the word “care”, but these systems are manifestations of how we ensure quality of life as a society. Debbie Chachra refers to a quote of Amartya Sen - “We want …

“The master's house cannot be rebuilt with master's tools.“ “A physical shift with our bodies can shift how we think about a problem.” In her talk, Becky Lyon reminded us that we need to get back to our bodies, in order to create a world where we can thrive. In the dominant European American system the body has been estranged in favor of the ration…

When everyone else calls for economic growth, innovation, and addition, Timothée Parrique demands demolition, sabotage, and removal. Our strive towards infinite growth is not sustainable on a finite planet. So far, no economy in the world has managed to grow its economy without overshooting the planetary boundaries. That’s why we need an economic s…

Have you ever met a self-employed autonomous robot artist? Introducing Gaka-chu ("painter" in Japanese), a 6-axis robot arm that creates artistic paintings of Japanese characters. While robots have historically been treated as labour, Gaka-chu explores the concept of claiming agency and economic autonomy using blockchain-based smart contracts. So, …

With severe catastrophes happening around us constantly - ecologically, economically, as well as socially - we tend to feel hopeless. But hopelessness is for the privileged. Our fear makes us hold on to things we already know instead of pursuing new things. We feel lost and want to think that crisis happens elsewhere - climate change does not affec…

Cassie Robinson Associate Director of Emerging Future at Joseph Rowntree Foundation “There’s always something growing and declining at the same time. I am ending and beginning at the same time.” From external events such as the pandemic to the hyper speed development of AI and tech to the increasingly urgent climate crisis discourses, how do we nav…

“People don’t change behaviour just because you tell them too. People need innovation in a public space to change” “Space and life goes together, and it's important to work with them together.” “Wise cities are making the invisible visible” and the ways we can make it visible means listening and looking at a variety of different data sources. Lisel…

“Work with people who disagree with you and with each other and still work together. This is where participation can begin.“ “Reflection to time and place is important to make people participate.” How do we get people to participate in creating the cities that they want? And once we do, how do we get them to act towards a common goal? These are som…

“The goal is to share knowledge through open-sourced tools, and for people to use them as much as possible” In his presentation, Arnaud Grignard shared some of the work he does with his team at the City Science group at the MIT Lab, specifically a tool called City Scope. The common thread for all examples was how this tool made it possible to use d…

Q&A from the session Imagining Institutions – (Re)making the Pillars of a Liquid Society with Dan Lockton (TU Eindhoven) and Anne Kaun (Södertörn University)Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

How can we think about institutions differently? In a world of competing fictions, imaginaries are one our most potent resources. Dan Lockton wants to get imaginaries out of people's heads and into a shared space - to do things differently as a result. He has a few ideas about how to do so. Metaphors are central to our imagination. They have the po…

Reimagining public infrastructures and systems has the potential to enhance accessibility and usefulness for diverse groups within society. Instead of taking a starting point in creating digital tools (which is often the case), Anne Kaun suggests looking into the frictions that emerge in the use of digital platforms and infrastructures. Anne stages…

What if the cracks in our social and civic institutions are not signs of collapse but the first signs of transformation? Let’s face it: We’ve been living in an overly masculine society focused on dominion, growth, labour as a source of dignity, achievement as our basis of meaning and productivity as our key to purpose. But it’s a tale as old as hum…

With the nuclear bombs detonating in 1945, Pandora’s box was unlocked. For Audrey Tang, Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan, Artificial Intelligence represents another box of Pandora that challenges us to think about how we can avoid the pitfalls for society and achieve collective global action. We as a society have a choice: Are we going to tumb…

Q&A from the session Entangled Economies - Creating Value with Generosity and Interdependence with Jenny Grettve (Anon, When!When!), Timothee Parrique (Lund University), Eduardo Castello Ferrer (MIT).Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Q&A from the session Wise Cities – Architecting Vibrant Connectivity with Liselott Stenfeldt (Gehl), Ling Tan (Kakilang,Umbrellium), Arnaud Grignard (Université de Lyon / MIT Media Lab).Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Artist and composer Ann Rosén performs a short concert. Ann Rosén (born 1956) is the composer, musician and artist who began her career in the visual arts in the 1980s with interactive, intelligent, and intriguing works. Since the 1990s, the artistic focus has been on music and sound art and Rosén has more than one hundred works behind her. The wor…

Moderator Johanna Koljonen opens The Conference 2022.Kirjoittanut Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution