Some technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications.
In response, I have started to take the uncertainties and ambiguity of new technologies as a starting point and imagines possible outcomes. It includes non-human agents and anticipates a world in which humans might play a less central role.
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My research are not only a tool to create, but also to speculate about how things could be, in order to imagine possible futures.
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Different genres of computation-smart grids of a planetary scale, such as cloud platforms, smart cities, and automation, can form a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture.
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In addition to known ways of thinking about and forecasting the future, I deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities of technologies in practice in order to anticipate the future.
I think in two new ways about the world.
First, with the new materialism of our world. Before, industrial material allowed for the inexpensive mass distribution of standardized designs: new matter provided a new materialism. Today, we are confronted with a new kind of materialism that is potentially just as transformative, Klaus Schwab writes in The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016). Biotechnology, IoT, AI, and robotics form the new materialism that restructures the world. Our minds can grasp the initial applications of these technologies, but the second or third order effects are hard to foresee. I try to probe the contours of the possible transformations. This differs from predicting because I base my reflection on academic reseach and techniques of fiction in order to explore the implications and consequences of emerging technologies. I place new technologies within imaginary but everyday situations in order to start a debate on the implications of different technological futures. I pose “what if” questions to open my imagination about the kind of future wanted and anticipate at the future to make it more drawable.
Second, in times of IoT, AI, etc., I seek to overturn the way of thinking which has been the privilege of the human being. In After Finitude (2008), French philosopher Meillassoux is looking for objective knowledge that is unconditional upon human cognition. I thus geared toward viewers who may or may not be human. How will computational assemblages define our sight and change our territories? When we will “see” through the eyes of a machine, can we program these to share our aesthetics and interpretations?
I deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty generated by the new materialism through creating a framework for discussion with the viewer: artworks for the post-Anthropocene.
These research help me shape my intuition of our future world.