Media Evolution

“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 and not just our brain. The best way of hosting a pl...

Q&A from the session Creative Assemblages – Emerging Alliances to Augment Human Creativity with Kristoffer Ørum (Artist) and Kader Bagli (RISE | Visual Effects Studio) 

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 health care system. But the more you look at it, the...

“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 storytelling landscape doesn’t celebrate cultural diversit...

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) 

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 nuances, understanding risks and avoiding unethica...

"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 is by the sin of omission or the use of inequitabl...

“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, algorithms replace the work that elite institutions...

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)

“What happens when you don’t have the words to describe the symptoms?” In the last installment of the ‘Doing Equity’ session, Dr. Nighat Arif, the resident doctor of BBC and ITV presents an uplifting talk that reiterates the importance of raising awareness and in normalizing discussions of female health within the Black and Asian communities in the UK. From menstruation to menopause as well as bre...

“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 understand empathy in a society where communicati...

“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 very quickly, the number of spoken languages is simul...

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 journalists Marie Kilg (Deutsche Welle).

“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 is generating advertisements. .  To free sto...

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 collaborators created Anic as a sort of an invest...

“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 in all parts of the world, and her views on how sto...

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) 

“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 discusses how the concept of time is unique to us and sh...

“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 agricultural revolution and the settlement of humans, the de...

“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 keynote, which is essential listening for middle-...

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 quartertones and the lyrics of tracks are ba...

Q&A from the keynote session with Michael Slaby (Avens, Harmony Labs)

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 not experienced," and connects environmental threa...

Q&A from the session Enacting Care – Putting Sustainability Into Practice with Deb Chachra (Olin College), Becky Lyon (Artist) and Ledama Masidza (Oceans Alive)

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 known as TESCREAL: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Sin...