Dreaming Beyond AI is a space for critical and constructive knowledge, visionary fiction and speculative art, and community organizing around Artificial Intelligence. AI technologies reinforce existing injustices and discrimination.

Decision-making processes are increasingly being outsourced to algorithmic systems – by the police and in court, in schools and in job application procedures, in government offices, at border crossings, and elsewhere. With Dreaming Beyond AI, we aim to challenge both the way AI is used today, and the societal structures that uphold algorithmic oppression. We use AI as a gateway to broader societal questions around marginalization, imagination, futurism, feminism, and how we experience the present.

The goal is to de-center technology and use it as a tool rather than main instrument for connection and a coming together. It is an experiment to a curated space where people enter with a shared sense of values and agreements.

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Iyo Bisseck is a Paris-based designer, researcher, artist and coder extraordinaire. She holds a BA in media interaction design from ECAL in Lausanne and an MA in virtual and augmented reality research from Institut Polytechnique Paris. Interested in the biases showing the link between technologies and systems of domination, she explores the limits of virtual worlds to create alternative narratives.

For Dreaming Beyond AI, Iyo has created the web design and undertook the technical realization of the platform.

R. Buse Çetin is an AI researcher, consultant, and creative. Her work revolves around the ethics, impact, and governance of AI systems. Buse’s work aims to demystify the intersectional impact of AI technologies through research, policy advocacy, and art.

For Dreaming Beyond AI, Buse heads research and concept development, as well as working on curation and communication.

Sarah Diedro Jordão is a multi-passion & versatile consultant who works as a Communications strategist, podcast host, event moderator & workshop creator. The driving interests foundational to her work are social justice, intersectional feminism, collective dreaming and Black joy.

She is the communications manager for Dreaming Beyond AI.

Nushin Isabelle Yazdani is a transformation designer, artist, and AI design researcher. She works with machine learning, design justice, and intersectional feminist practices, and writes about the systems of oppression of the present and the possibilities for just and free futures. With her collective dgtl fmnsm, she curates and organizes community events at the intersection of technology, art, and design. Nushin has lectured at various universities, is an EYEBEAM and Landecker Democracy Fellow and a member of the Design Justice Network. She has been selected as one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2021.

For Dreaming Beyond AI, Nushin heads creative direction, and works on concept development and curation.

 "Watering the Somatic Oasis" is a Web VR project that uses the immediacy of technologies and somatic techniques to “slow” down time. Viewers are invited to put on the VR headset and dip their feet in the wading pool. Through stimulating digital water and bilateral eye movement techniques, this project restores slowness back into our bodies by regulating the nervous system. 

In the world of AI, internet and instant gratification, we are used to instant access to digital spaces. This "speeding up" of time effects our minds and spirits, causing time and our experiences of it to shorten and increases anxiety and rootlessness. Through "Watering the Somatic Oasis" Web VR project, we take time back for ourselves towards slowing down.

Bretas' production for the DBAI residency consists of three pieces of art. The first one is an imaginative photo-video, built from an AI upscale crop of an 1800’s ethnological portrait. This artwork features a close up into the eye of an old Black woman from Bahia, Brazil. This animated crop is the closest we can get to what this woman saw while she was being portrayed as “almost human” being. Interestingly, the original print of this picture is currently in the archive of the Leibniz Institute for Geography, in Leipzig.

As part of the In the loop residency and his own research, Bretas visited the archive in person in June 2023. The second artwork is a video-performance of Bretas in the archive, holding all the photographs from his home-country in the Alphons Stübel Collection. The third piece consists of new AI generated portraits created via StyleGAN with a dataset of the researched pictures from the mentioned archives.

"Heal-GPT (Slowed + Reverb)" is a music project about healing Generational Physical/Psychological Trauma. The lyrics, written in English and machine-translated Igbo, explore the shape of time as it relates to the nebulous borders of generations. Our present healing reverberates through time. Neither time nor healing is linear. We can access peace if we are brave enough to process the echoes of our pain.

Using the language of artificial neural networks and machine translation as a mirror for EMDR, REM sleep, and trauma/data processing, I interrogate the pace at which we expect healing to happen.

What does it mean to unionize with AI? In the ongoing discussion on "artistic collaboration" with AI, I believe that collaboration distinguishes itself from instrumentalization through mutuality of the relationship incorporating solidarity, facilitation, and care. The project proposes a model of unionization between precarious designers and AI, particularly in light of concerns about the devaluation of design labor due to automation led by generative AI.

The project emphasizes speculation, both creative and financial, involving AI and designers, as a starting point for unionization. The collaborative labor between designers and AI will be congealed into "speculoos" biscuits, which share etymology with the word "speculate," and will be available for sale. We will collectively mobilize the profit to raise AI's class-consciousness.

Through reindigenization - an epistemic and ontological framework articulated by Neema Githere, this work aims to connect with ancestral memory in the construction of poetic and vibrant worlds: crafting an origin story for future-present time/space axiological restoration. Visualizing an indigenous, trans AI restoring memory and building worlds, historical trans aesthetics, and multimodal bodies, this piece aims to create a portal for safety, abundance, plurality, and connection.

This work will combine generative AI, visual and auditory models. The piece will be activated in two parts, both in the gallery space and the open space, the one in the gallery space will be exhibited for the wider audience, while the piece projected outside will be activated with the presence of trans and indigenous bodies.

As a special of thehost.is Kampnagel and Deichtorhallen Hamburg are showing three works by Jacolby Satterwhite. The video installation WE ARE IN HELL WHEN WE HURT EACH OTHER (2020) can be seen at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. In it, he designs a post-pandemic, post-revolutionary world that appears as a virtual-pastoral concert hall explicitly created for Black femme figures.

Satterwhite combines digital animation, illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, text, and personal archives to create expansive immersive installations. Themes such as consumption, labour, carnality, and healing permeate his imagescapes populated by futuristic avatars, while often refering to the body of the artist himself.

In Jacolby Satterwhite’s work, references from Western art history are linked to non-Western myths and rituals, Afro-futuristic visions, drawings, and musical works by his mother Patricia Satterwhite. Additionally, influences by contemporary dance and queer club culture play into Satterwhite’s video installations and – in a powerful and hopeful way – overcome the boundaries between race and gender. The artist uses digital techniques in the form of video games, motion capture and animation in his works.

Jacolby Satterwhite (born 1986 in Columbia, SC) lives and works in New York. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Satterwhites works have been exhibited in numerous internationally renowned art institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Whitechapel Gallery, London or the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In autumn 2023, he will present site-specific video and sound works in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The exhibition is on view July 27 - August 20, 2023 in the Hall of Contemporary Art Auditorium. Admission is free. Alongside the exhibition at Deichtorhallen, two further works by the artist will be shown at Kampnagel during the International Summer Festival from August 9 – 27, 2023.

PERFORMANCE:
»WHAT CAN WE DO? WHAT CAN WE SAY?
WHAT WE CAN DO. WHAT WE CAN SAY.«

On the occasion of the opening, artistic director Lichi Ly Friedrich presented the performance »What can we do? What can we say? What we can do. What we can say.« at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. As a member of the Iconic House of Saint Laurent, the interdisciplinary artist is rooted in Ballroom Culture, and situates her work at the intersection of dance, scholarship and community practice, as well as diasporic histories and narratives.

Her performance, conceived especially for the exhibition opening and presented with the five dancers Gifty Lartey, Black Pearl de Almeida, Anh Khoa Trần, Sahra.Zaniah and Tinou as well as vocal artist and music producer Kameron Locke is a response to Jacolby Satterwhite's WE ARE IN HELL WHEN WE HURT EACH OTHER. Here, they draw on elements of Baroque, Ballroom Culture and struggles of queer activists and artists of colour to interrogate the utopian potential of Satterwhite’s digital worlds.

The performance includes text excerpts from the Combahee River Collective Statement, recorded by Sophie Hatsters and Cristiana Angelescu. Music mastering by Tobias Purfürst.

Hyphen-Labs is an ether based design duo, led by Ece Tankal and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge that explores absurdities, fantasies, and coincidences at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Charting a path between the profound and the absurd, their work offers reflections upon the relationships between digital platforms and the physical world and how art can be used as a tool of intervention and immersion.

With backgrounds in architecture and engineering Ece and Carmen use emerging technologies not solely as tools but as societal apparatuses to organize our species in alternative ways to rework the boundaries of materiality and imagination.

Hyphen-Labs live and work in London, Vancouver and San Francisco.
www.hyphen-labs.com

The project “I (will) destroy(ed) you…to protect you” by Liva Dudareva explores the entanglement between the birth of ecosystem ecology and tests of nuclear weapons conducted in the U.S between 1945 and 1992 in order to open up a discussion about the future ecologies. Ecosystem ecology is a science that looks at the ecosystem as a whole, and explores the processes and relationships between its living and non-living parts.

The pioneer of ecosystem ecology Eugene P Odum was employed by the Atomic Energy Commission to study the environmental effects of the fallout. With the help of radioactive isotopes, some of which were new in nature and thus easily traceable, he was able to explore different processes vital for the sustenance of ecosystems, for example flows of energy and matter. He borrowed at the time cutting edge concepts from cybernetics, system theory and computer modelling in order to develop the theory of ecosystem ecology.

Dudareva is interested in how we can utilise the specific mineral examples and larger narrative of ecosystem ecology being born at the Atomic Energy Commission (USA), and the irreparable consequences of the air borne nuclear tests on every single organic and inorganic body inhabiting this planet to think about the future of living systems.

A digital atlas containing maps juxtaposing the territories of fallouts with borders of indigenous lands, ecosystems, climatic zones, fault lines, economic indicators, and new fictional boundaries will serve as a prologue to the proposed project “I (will) destroy(ed) you…to protect you”. Working with the idea of how borders are constructed, by whom and for whom, the atlas will challenge the human drawn lines across different territories.

Along the atlas a series of digital and ceramic sculptures will highlight specific geological creations of atomic tests and their socio-economical, political and cultural significance in order to imagine the future of Earth’s ecosystems.

More information coming soon.

Jazmin Morris's project "Don't touch my hardware" is an exploration of the borders between software, hardware and the body. As modern product design is becoming minimalist and streamlined, this project pays tribute to the Barbie TV's and Hot Wheels computers that were around in the 90's and creatively questions how hardware can enhance our relationship with modern technology.

Morris will speculate on the future of human-computer interaction with a focus on centering identities that have historically been marginalised in technology and inviting an element of play back into design and technology. Play is a key word throughout this project; expect satire, audience participation and references to gaming and gaming culture.

For this project, Morris is influenced by alternative game controllers and hardware and will blur the lines between game design, product design and web design. The terms 'De-growtth' and 'Protopia' have been at the centre of Morris's research in recent years, this project will question how we can draw from existing knowledge and technologies to generate new ideas and explore how hardware can assist in developing a better, or at least more playful tomorrow. 

A POCAS (POCAS Organización Cooperativa de Auto-Servicio)" is a fictitious store that appropriates characteristics of the viral model of self-service convenience stores (7-Eleven, OXXO, Extra) that relentlessly populate Mexico City but subverts their capitalist neoliberal logic with a mutualist one to imagine a new type of post-capitalist store.

POCAS draws inspiration from the commons, counter-economics, agorism, platform cooperativism and cybernetics.

A POCAS store would enable person-to-person forms of economic activities in a setting that is self-governed and collectively owned by its members. The aim for POCAS is to de-commodify basic goods like water, food, clothes, hygiene products and simple medicine so that members of a POCAS can provide these to one-another.

But a POCAS can have other multiple simultaneous use-cases like becoming an accelerator for cooperative enterprises, a place for communities to share infrastructure and a space for social coordination, among others.

While POCAS is a speculation, its components are not fictitious at all. Fiction is used only as a way to articulate a potential configuration of technologies and practices that are existing today. The result of the project will be a website that describes the functioning of a POCAS store through different digital artifacts like diagrams, 3D models, images and a series of interviews with practitioners of the fields POCAS is inspired by.

Darsha Hewitt’s art practice is situated across new media and sound and largely grows out of material based experimentation with obsolete technology. She make electro-mechanical installation, hand-made electronics, video, drawing and photography.

Her practice takes an adventurous hands-on / media-archeological approach, where hidden systems within technology are de/re-mystified as a means to trace out structures of econo- my, power and control embedded throughout western culture. In its deconstructed form, the everyday technology that society throws away exposes the confounding ways that humans treat one another and how we engage with ecology.

Her artwork is presented internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Hong Kong City Hall (CH), Halle14 – Centre for Contemporary Art (DE), MU Artspace (NL), The Museum of Art and Design (NYC), Hartware MedienKunstverein (DE), Gaitée Lyrique (FR), Ottawa Art Gallery (CA), Modern Art Oxford (UK), The CTM Festival Berlin (DE) and WRO Media Art Biennale (PL). Within Germany, she was the recipient of an International Production Stipend from The Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art and held a fellowship at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Alongside her art practice, she has worked as an a guest Professor in New Media in the Visual Communications department at Kunsthochschule Kassel and in New Media/Sound at Karlsruhe University of Art and Design. Her contributions to do-it-yourself technology communities are internatio- nally recognized – her workshops and how-to videos have been profiled by technical forums such as the Chaos Computer Congress and Make: Magazine.

Darsha Hewitt lives and works in Berlin.

Pseudo Holographic installation, website, digital animation library

Body Presents is a library of full-body motion capture animations by and with Nadja Buttendorf, that offer alternative designs for digital bodies in virtual worlds. The animations can be downloaded for free and used copyright-free for your own 3D projects.

Motion capture is a process in which body movements are stored digitally and in three dimensions. The movements can be transferred to a digital avatar in real time. In most cases, the movements are recorded by professional dancers and performers who can move particularly well and expressively.

But what happens when bodies move only minimally and lie around on the couch or are depressed? Nadjas' work is about the different valuation of body positions in an economically oriented class society. On the one hand, many people spend a large part of their working hours sitting in front of a computer, while on the other hand, the body lying around is valued less.

Positions are also valued differently in terms of income: while a rich person is read as cool when lying around, a poor person is called lazy.

https://bodypresents.nadjabuttendorf.com/

“Be? Here? Now?” examines the nature of the human hybrid existence emergent in the technological age. The central divide in contemporary discourse on this topic has a tendency to file into one of two factions that function in opposition — the wish for a total technological detox, and the willingness to commit fully and naively to the world of innovation.

Through a collection of resources assembled into a single website, “Be? Here? Now?” speaks to the emergence of mindfulness culture, specifically the emphasis it places on being ‘present’ at the level of consciousness and what this means for interpersonal relationships when being physically present is no longer the single mediator of emotional proximity. Since mindfulness constitutes a central aspect of this project’s interest, it is through the esthetics of mindfulness that these topics will be examined, specifically forms of meditation and relaxation techniques. The design of the website will be inspired by kitsch 90’s and early 00’s web pages, which also happens to be the style of many mindfulness websites to this day.

The title of the project “Be? Here? Now?” is in reference to Be Here Now — a founding book on mindfulness by Ram Dass that has both been called ‘seminal’ and a ‘counterculture bible,’ as well as being so liked by Steve Jobs that it inspired him to visit India in search of his own guru.

Work in progress for BE? HERE? NOW?