Media Evolution

“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 itself from impacts of overfishing, coral bleaching...

“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 wealth not because it's desirable on i...

“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 rational, the evidence-based and the narrow. It caused u...

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 strategy based on subtractions, not additions....

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, can robots actually maintain themselves? And...

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 affect me or my loved ones. But it actually does: When...

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 navigate ourselves in the midst of all these life-cha...

“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. Liselott Stenfeldt is the head of research and developm...

“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 some of the questions that Ling Tan works with on a d...

“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 data visualisation to analyse patterns and potentia...

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) 

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 power to harm, to limit, but also to create. So, in...

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 a scene, drawn from her real-life research to exe...

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 humankind — and one we’ve put on to ourselves as a su...

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 tumble into the abyss of abuse, manipulation...

Q&A from the session Entangled Economies - C reating Value with Generosity and Interdependence with  Jenny Grettve (Anon, When! When!), Timothee Parrique (Lund University), Eduardo Castello Ferrer (MIT).

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). 

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 works have been performed at the Swedish R...

Moderator Johanna Koljonen opens The Conference 2022.

“Why not create a dish from the smell of old book?” “The most beautiful idea is to be able to eat a song.” Senses can evoke memories. Jordi Roca explores the connection and interaction between senses, childhood memories, smell and taste. Inspired by Marcel Proust and his ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Jordi shares about his work evoking memories through smell, taste and texture: how he created desserts...

“Fiction is an extraordinary shared language.” Fiction is a product of culture but it also produces culture: it impacts how we see the world. The line between fiction and reality is a thin one, and the urban space is one where our imaginaries are often played out. Through his piece ‘The Planet City’, Liam Young takes us on a cinematic drift through imaginary worlds: one fictional, one we are curre...

“Search is not a query. It’s always a conversation. You’re not building a search engine - you’re building a tool for users to embark on a knowledge quest.” Matt Webb explores how different types of common search mechanisms online work and the type of results they return. He goes through a history of more analogue search systems to give context to the search algorithms we all use today. Matt frames...

“How will we garden the future of our abilities to speak with computers?” Hillary Juma spoke about how each of us has a different experience interacting with voice recognition systems. The challenges we face in our interactions with voice recognition software differ significantly, for example some accents aren’t understood by systems as well as others because they were not included in training dat...

“My entire life my sense of self has been mediated by a computer screen.” Growing up, Maya Man has always been fascinated with the presentation of self and the meaning of true authenticity in different contexts. Her sense of self has always been mediated by a computer screen, leading her to experiment with the possibilities this presented but also feel that everything she was doing was some form o...

Q&A for the session How to use a computer featuring Matt Webb, Hilary Juma and Maya Man