When it comes to thinking about the future, I am a self-confessed techno-optimist, or to be more academically precise, a strong believer in what Jennifer Gildley (2017) called “integral futures” the incorporate “mixed methods, transcisciplinarity, complex bricolage” (95). As the seminar presenters Sonja Rebecca Rattay and Irina Shklovski noted when speaking about the…

  A group of people dressed in beige costumes that distort them in many ways and make it almost impossible for them to move, share the same real but also virtual space. Immersed in the same virtual world, each participant has their own character and symbiotic role in the overall world and to each other….

    As Dan Hassler-Forest exposed in the seminar “Janelle Monáe’s Black Utopias and the Afrofuturist Imagination”, science fiction and thinking about the human future has predominantly been a Eurocentric practice. In the seminar, through specifically focusing on Jane Monáe, Hassler-Forest illustrates how Afrofuturism focusses not just on the future but also the past and…

    The most interesting part for me in Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest’s lecture is the concept of Afrofuturism and racial capitalism. The term Afrofuturism is often used to talk about speculative fictions that express the experience and concern of African diaspora. But Afrofuturism, according to Dan, also exists as an important conceptual framework that challenges…

    The seminar on ‘Social Imaginaries of Ethics and AI’ made us think through how Artificial Intelligence is imagined by its makers, its social implications and ethics. Through discussions on various aspects of AI, one that came up was the use of AI in art. This was a very interesting discussion considering the recent…

  In this seminar, Sonja Rebecca Rattay proposes a way to categorize positions towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) using two axes: utopian-dystopian and pragmatic-speculative. The utopian-dystopian axis measures the judgement of AI: is it more focused on opportunities or harms? The pragmatic-speculative axis measures the foresight in thinking about AI: is it more focused on existent…

  by Chris van der Vegt   On January 16, 2023, dr. Dan Hassler-Forest presented a guest lecture for the Transmission in Motion seminars on the work of musician, actress and activist Janelle Monáe. The structure of the seminar was based on the structure of Hassler-Forest’s book Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label. The…

  by Jingzhe Zhang Basic Information of the Session Title: Robotic Imaginaries Date: 23 November, 2022 Location: De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (Nes 45, 1012 KD) Format of the session: the official part of the session lasts two hours and consists of four presentations. Q&A are left to accompany drinks afterwards. Content of the Session Irene…

    Trine Friis Sørensen was a curator before she became an academic researcher, so the decision to work practice-based, first in her PhD project and later as a postdoc fellow, was an easy one. In this session, she will introduce how she conducts research with and through curatorial projects with particular focus on the…

    In the seminar “Social Imaginaries of Ethics and AI” we discussed and explored the ethics around AI, focusing on four positions that tend to be taken when it comes to imagining future possibilities for AI. The four positions were constructed around two axes: the axis of dystopian-utopian and the axis of pragmatic and…