Stuart Candy is an experiential futurist whose critical and creative practice spans education, production, and activist intervention. He is currently Director of Situation Lab in Los Angeles and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City, and was previously the inaugural Associate Professor of Social Foresight at Parsons School of Design in New York. Stuart’s work at the intersection of design and futures is recognized for changing the landscape of both fields. It includes the edited collection Design and Futures; acclaimed storytelling game The Thing From The Future; and an award-winning toolkit for public imagination, The Futures Bazaar.
He has worked with organisations around the world including the BBC, Smithsonian Institution, UNESCO, The New York Times, Niantic, Snap, Dubai’s Museum of the Future, the National Film Board of Canada, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and Cook Inlet Tribal Council. He was the first artist in residence at both Immersive Denver (Colorado) and the Museum of Tomorrow (Rio de Janeiro), as well as the first fellow of The Long Now Foundation (San Francisco).
Stuart Candy is visiting the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, through the support of the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship programme at the University of Bristol and in collaboration with the Pervasive Media Studio and the Centre for Creative Technologies. Stuart is a futures practitioner, educator, and artist dedicated to the development of social foresight; humanity’s collective capacity for thinking and feeling into times to come. Stuart is known as a leading figure in the rise of experiential futures over the past two decades, helping to seed, spread, and grow practices now variously labelled speculative design, design fiction, design futures, and discursive design.
Experiential futures (XF) practices use design, media and the arts to ground ideas about futures in everyday life. So instead of just describing or modelling possible, probable, and preferable futures, using the intellectual and scholarly approaches traditionally best represented in academia, we can also try to experience and investigate times to come using other ways of knowing; embodied, narrative, participatory, emotional, and so on.
There will be masterclasses, drop ins and most importantly, Bristol’s firstImmersive Futures Jam, a hands-on experiment in experiential futures. (31 May, 1 June, 2 June)
This is an opportunity for futures-minded makers, performers and artists from across Bristol to spend a weekend learning and collaborating around the rapid co-creation of “Time Machines” –– immersive experiences of possible futures for the city. Participants will explore how Bristol could look decades from today, working and playing in small groups over a weekend (from Friday 31/5 evening until Sunday 2/6 afternoon) to bring these futures to life as a place-based experimental activation, for each other as well as a wider pool of participants. Experiential futurist Stuart Candy will lead the process (bio below). Places are limited, but imaginations won’t be.
Immersive Embodiment: Postdigital Performances of Care
On the 16th May, the CCT invited Liam Jarvis to give a keynote lecture.
In postdigital culture, virtual body-swapping using different technologies staged by artists, has been conceived as an illusion to ‘increase empathy’ by enabling audiences to visually and proprioceptively occupy the position of an other. Eccentric perceptual illusions of othering the self is just one example of a pervasive trend towards empathy activism in the medical humanities, arts, education and healthcare contexts; from smartphone apps that offer their downloaders first-person simulations of neuroatypical experiences to ‘out-of-bodiment’ wearables that enable new visual perspectives beyond human binocular stereoscopy in the field of art-engineering. Temporary transformations of the participant in the immersive artwork are occurring in parallel to an ever-growing understanding of the plasticity of bodily selfhood in the field of neuroscientific body-ownership. This talk will explore the seductive promise that an ‘immersed’ body might be porous to a range of remote experiences and phenomena; examining the possibilities and emerging digital ethics of embodying avatars in different contexts.
Liam Jarvis is a practitioner-researcher and Reader in Theatre & Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He currently teaches on the MA/MFA in Advanced Theatre Practice and is supporting the development of the new Centre of Performance, Technology and Equity (PTEQ) at RCSSD. Previously, Liam was Director of the Centre for Theatre Research (CTR) and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS) at the University of Essex. He co-founded Analogue, an award-winning independent theatre company with whom he created devised work that toured the UK/internationally between 2007-17. Liam was co-convenor of the Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) from 2017-21. He is currently on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and the Body Space and Technology Journal.
Dr Francesco Bentivegna and Katy Dadacz have been awarded the Proof of Concept Impact Acceleration Fund to develop their project in collaboration with Pervasive Media Studio and Harriet Horobin-Worley (Queer Tech Bristol). The project responds to the marginalisation of trans and queer folx in conversations and speculations surrounding the future of creative technology and in particular AI. The aim of the project is to create a network for queer researchers, creative technologists and artists to collaborate together, share skills and re-imagine AI. This will culminate in a Queer AI manifesto.
This IAA application is the third part of a longer project on technologies for queer resilience (see Queer Practices and Creative Technologies and Queer Methodologies in Creative Technologies). Katy and Fran have also received the Ideas Exchange Fund from Brigstow Institute to share further expertise and knowledge on workshop practices for queer people and workshops around creative technology with MELT and Chloe Meineck.
The project will run from April-December 2024 and consist of:
4 Queer Artist Workshops (April, June, September and December)- for ten participants who will be the same throughout the aim is for the participants to share their own practice and exchange ideas via the workshop.
Queer Strategies with Chloe Meineck: Saturday 4th May 11-3.30pm, Department of Theatre, UoB
Queer Utop_AI with us: Saturday 15th June Pervasive Media Studio
Queer Voices with Amina Abbas-Nazari : Saturday 28th September, Department of Theatre, UoB
Queer Tech Magic with Batool Desouky: Saturday 30th November, Department of Theatre UoB
There will also be talks at the Pervasive Media Studio by Zach Blas, Feminist Internet and more!
To follow this project, please go to the machine streams website – designed and created by Harriet Horobin-Worley and Katy Dadacz
Lecturer in Digital Theatre and Performance-Making in the Theatre department at the University of Bristol and co-programme director of the MA Immersive Arts
Harry introduced and reflected on three projects at the intersection of immersive technologies and performance practice. The projects all share a series of concerns around the ways that performances made with immersive technologies can facilitate intimate encounters between physical and virtual spaces, imagination and affective memory, and draw attention to the user’s embodied participation in the work.
Harry discussed a VR performance for 8 people based on John Berger’s book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, developed during a residency at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2019; Placing Spaces (2023) a geo-located augmented reality installation of his 7-year-old daughter’s favourite places in Dundee; and a forthcoming research project on the ‘expanded dramaturgies’ of virtual reality performance. You can watch the talk below;
Dr Francesco Bentivegna (Theatre UoB) and Katy Dadacz (Comp Lit PhD)- Queering AI
This talk launches the Queering AI project, an exploration of artistic responses to the marginalisation of trans and queer folx in speculations surrounding the future of AI. Through six months of workshops and talks, they hope to shift boundaries and destabilise AI through the trans* and queer experience of the world.
The talk will first introduce the context from which the project has arisen. AI obscures multiplicity, yet errors are produced in the process- how then can queer theory and practice think with AI? They mapped out some key contemporary artistic interventions on AI and reflect on the processes and speculations that appear from these practices.
In the second half of the talk, they shared past collaborations with Bristol-based artists, researchers, and PM Studio residents. These collaborations have focused on sharing queer methodologies for creative technologies in workshop settings, asking how can we create a community-based practices centered around queer values when working with technology?
You can watch the talk below;
Dr Camilla Morelli (Anthropology, UoB): Ethnographic Animation
This talk explored Dr. Camilla Morelli’s work on ethnographic animation, i.e. films that blend people’s lived experiences with fictional storytelling and imaginative scenarios. Camilla has coproduced these animations with children and young people around the world, from urban Bristol to the Amazon rainforest, to explore how they imagine the future amidst radical challenges they face in the present, and to amplify young voices that remain unheard.
Camilla Morelli is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at The University of Bristol. She has been conducting ethnographic research with forest-dwelling children and young people for over 15 years, exploring how their imagination and desires for the futures drive large-scale processes of socioeconomic change and shape the future of their societies and natural environments. Her book, Children of the Rainforest, is published by Rutgers University Press and was awarded the ACYIG – American Anthropological Association 2024 Book Prize.
Katy Dadacz and Francesco Bentivegna, partnered with Control Shift , ran a two-day weekender (25-26th November) exploring queer practices and creative technologies. The event took place at Wickham Theatre, and was generously funded by UoB (IAA Seedcorn Fund) and the Centre for Creative Technologies.
After a sunny and fresh (but cold) morning at Trans Pride South West, we headed up to Wickham Theatre to have lunch and begin our workshops. Participants ranged from PhD students, early career researchers, lecturers from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, Innovation and Engineerng, creative practioners, game designers, artists and Pervasive Media Studio residents.
Harriet Horobin-Worley ran the first workshop ‘Sound and Vision- Building Our Own Networks’. We began asking ‘how are networks built’ and ‘what alternative forms of networks could exist?’ We drew out the networks that brought us here; the people who shared the event, the app which we got a ticket with, the places, institutions and communities that connected us with creative technology. We thought about the online/offline networks that we are in; Whatsapp groups, Slack, telegram channels, hiking groups, activist circles and queer book clubs. What do these structures allow for in terms of communication, desire, accessibility, social relations? Do we feel constrained or restricted, or do we feel connected? What alternative forms of networks could exist?
Harriet guided us through the ways we can use radio to imagine a future network; a radio built, owned, operated and used by queer people. Over time, radio has been used less and less as new technologies have appeared on the scene. Radio waves exist all around us, and we can use them to communicate, even more so than traditional FM radio stations. In pairs, participants audio-recorded their conversations answering the questions Harriet posed to the group.
Harriet Horobin-Worley (they/them) wearing dark clothes, short brown hair with glasses, in front of a powerpoint with the questions below in pink and white blocks.
What part has the radio played in your life What are your memories of listening to the radio? Where did you listen to it, and who with? If you could broadcast anything on the radio, what would you like to broadcast? What would the perfect communications network look like to you? Who would build it, what would it look like? Would it be global or local? What senses would it make use of? What message would you like to leave for people who are entering this imagined network for the first time? How would you welcome them?
Harriet is working on an art project in which these queer recordings will be used for a ‘radio hotline’; people can call in and listen, if they feel lonely, or want to feel closer to a queer community. We didn’t listen back to the recordings, but we will follow the project as it develops and keep sharing.
After a short break, MELT (Ren and Iz) led an exploration on queering the methods of workshops when thinking with digital practice. They began with a performance piece; bad workshop practices. Nobody but myself, Fran and MELT knew that this was a performance. The performance consisted of a chaotic introduction with loud music, reading quickly from a lot of text projected onto the wall, no introductions and lights switching on and off. Participants became ‘in on the joke’ slowly. This itself reminded me of how important humour is in building queer spaces. We see queer humour not only as a social tool to deconstruct binaries, but as a political tool for mobilisation and critique. Laughter allowed us to build connections and solidarity. The performance also allowed us to begin thinking through what happens when access needs are thrown out the door, when there is no time to settle in, or time to understand how we will be together in a space that tries to de-centre paradigms of privilege. Creating a context matters.
We began to deconstruct what methods are. We don’t often think about what it means for us though we use methods everyday- how do we set up a value based method or practice? We experimented with some of the ways MELT develops their own methods; collective conditions (how do we set up spaces intentionally together), practices of description and access, how we can write an access rider.
What makes collective conditions different from a code of conduct? When have we felt space in spaces? How can we embody the verbs of the collective conditions? What material agencies do the objects around us in the space have?
This was a reflective piece created by a group that assembled all of the materials from their bags in the middle of the table. There were cables, a radio, id badges, t-shirts, scarves, medication, old train tickets, lip balm, nail vanish etc. We began to group the objects by similarity and difference, then in trios where the objects were the most different from each other. We paired radios with birthday cards, pens and oranges. Then, we considered each material in its most ‘raw’ form, fabric, copper, metal, plastic, tracing the connections through stories imagining new material ways for their use.
The second day began with Yudi Wu’s workshop on VTubing and queerness. How can VTubers ‘touch grass’ and help local communities, especially local queer communities? How can we create connections between the material and virtual with queer sociality in mind?
We split into pairs and did a quick design of what our online avatar would be based on a one minute description of each other. The beauty of the virtual is you are not limited to your human body. Yudi gave us a crash course in avatar and environment-creation in Unity. We spent some time thinking about what is missing in our own queer communities, and what a queer virtual activist could do to help. We thought about the importance of inclusivity, less age discrimination, low sensory spaces, DIY events, lack of space and safety, out of city centre events, a space to share stories, laws that protect queer people, awareness teams, genuine connection and hybrid meetings. We then turned to what a VTuber could do to help this by creating an avator and environment. Yudi proposed questions such as what would the avatar be? What would it look like? What’s the lore? What does the world look like? What type of content could they make? How would they engage and contribute to Bristol’s queer scene?
We imagined a queer alien elder living in a world technologically improved for queer needs. From this, one group began to create the avatar, which they named Genuine, whilst the other group began designing and creating the environment. The environment group mapped out some design features they would love to see such as a cat cafe, a soft play area, hills and hiking trails, talking animals, free translation AI, a terrace for collective dreaming and a social introducing robot, which you can see below along with the final avator and scenes from the environment.
Genuine, the avatar created, as purple hair, green skin, glasses, wrinkles, a purple fluffy tail. Genuine is wearing a jumper and shorts that are blue and have patterns of a melting ice cream, and wears sneakers. They are standing in the middle of a virtual environment, with an apocalyptic red sky, plants, trees, a blue and yellow umbrella, and birds.
After a thoughtful morning of speculative imagining, we ran an open forum where we reflected on the questions that drove us to create the workshops themselves.
What participatory pedagogies allow knowledge-exchanges centered around queerness? What agency is afforded to queer people when imagining future technological development? How can we develop creative practices that bring queerness to the forefront of re-inventing approaches to technology?
We reflected on the importance of framing, and connecting workshop spaces to community organising- which is why going to the trans pride march was so important. What will serve queer people, and what will exploit us? How can we hold the space for implicit knowledge for technology practices? How can we uphold consent based practice? We explored the importance of giving agency to queer people to make things together, and to build a capacity for imaging and doing. One way to do this is to emphasise that learning goes both ways; the workshops should not be hierarchal. The final point was the important of defining the values of our community. In January, we will begin to create a value statement from this, using queer pedagogical practices.
During the Sunday, we had a live illustrator illustrate the workshops and some of our imaginings. Harriet Horobin-Worley and Katy Dadacz have made a zine archiving the event, which you can see below!
Professor Edward King is the Project Lead and a cultural theorist in Latin American Studies, in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. His work spans contemporary digital, visual and literary cultures, with a particular focus on the use of speculative fiction and multi-media texts, from comics to artists’ books, to expose and contest the shifting power dynamics of the digital age. Works Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (UCL Press, 2017; co-authored with Joanna Page), Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture (Palgrave: 2013) and Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture (Palgrave: 2015), an examination of techno-orientalist discourses in Brazilian culture, Entwined Being: Twins in Digital, Visual and Literary Cultures (2022).
Dr Victoria Adams is the Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project ‘Contesting Algorithmic Racism through Digital Cultures in Brazil’ and has recently completed a PhD in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics of the University of Cambridge, entitled ‘Material Virtuality: Remaking Rio de Janeiro’s Past and Present through Digital Media’.
Jennifer Goldsworthy is the Research Administrator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Contesting Algorithmic Racism through Digital Cultures in Brazil.’ She is currently an MA Anthropology student at the University of Bristol. Her research intersects the disciplines of autoethnography, decolonisation, the tarot and other forms of text-based oracular divination. She also works as a Faculty Engagement Officer in Widening Participation at the University.
Rafael Coutinho(Project Partner) is a comic artist, visual artist, screenwriter and teacher. Cachalote Produções is a São Paulo-based digital arts studio. Aoca Game Lab (Project Partner) is a creative team of Bahia-based video game developers that design IPs that start from games to reach other areas of the entertainment industry, blending the potential of humanities and technologies. Global Innovation Gathering is an international network and NGO that harnesses the power of grassroots innovation for societal change. The network is made up of hackerspaces and other grassroots innovation communities alongside individual innovators, makers, technologists and changemakers.
Project lead Professor Edward King has previously worked on game-design projects with Cachalote Produções and Aoca Games Lab.
The demo for the game is based on research carried out by Ed King and Felipe Fonseca in consultation with a range of non-profit organisations based in Brazil, including Instituto Procomum (Santos), Coletivo Digital (São Paulo) and Casa de Cultura Tainã (Campinas).
Futurecall is a narrative-driven video game made with Unity that aims to raise awareness about misinformation on social media particularly in the context of social upheaval, particularly the the political crisis in Brazil. In the early 2000s, during the first administration of the left-wing Worker’s Party President Lula da Silva, the Brazilian government invested heavily in ‘digital inclusion’ initiatives as a way of reducing social inequalities in the country. The ‘Pontos de Cultura’ project, for example, which funded media centres based in community spaces across the country, including in favelas and socially deprived neighbourhoods, became a model for approaches to free software among policy makers in Europe and North America.
Now that there are extremely high levels of smartphone ownership and social media usage in Brazil, it has become clear that access to digital networks is not a guarantee of social inclusion but can entail exposure to manipulation and data surveillance. As a result, the focus among governmental and non-profit organisations working in this area has shifted from increasing digital inclusion to supporting digital literacies across the social spectrum.
The aim was to create an accessible, engaging, free and enjoyable educational resource which will encourage young people to think critically about these issues through the medium of digital play. The game’s target audience are children and teenagers and it is playable in English and Portuguese.
‘Future calls’ by Rafael Coutinho, Cachalote Produções
This AHRC-funded project at the University of Bristol runs from September 2023 to January 2025. The project team is led by Professor Edward King.
This project explores cultural responses to ‘algorithmic racism,’ or the embedding of racial biases within software systems, in Brazil, a country with a long history of media activism and high levels of smartphone ownership.
It interrogates how cultural products, from literature to digital art, and practices, from video game design to digital archiving, can be used to expose and challenge the ways in which digital technologies are far from neutral.
Examining the intersection between the creative industries and activism, the research asks:
What does an analysis of cultures of resistance to algorithmic racism in Brazil contribute to our understandings of the relationships between race and digital technologies, between art and media mobilisation?
How do cultural objects and practices shape public understanding of the forms of bias specific to the digital age?
The project is underpinned by a multidisciplinary cultural studies approach and has coproduction and impact at its heart. Working closely with external partners in the creative industries and third sector, the project will result in an educational videogame, digital inclusion toolkit and policy advisory document.
Ricardo Ruiz and Felipe Fonseca, from our partner Global Innovation Gathering, have written blog posts detailing the project in their own words, which you can read here.
Contestar o racismo algorítmico através das culturas digitais no Brasil é uma pesquisa da Universidade de Bristol financiada pela Comissão de Pesquisa de Letras e Humanidades do Reino Unido.
A pesquisa examina respostas culturais ao ‘racismo algorítmico’, ou o estabelecimento de formas de viés raciais em sistemas informáticos, no Brasil, um país que tem uma longa história de ativismo mediático e altos níveis da posse de smartphones.
Interroga como produtos culturais, da literatura à arte digital, e práticas, do desenho de vídeo games ao arquivamento digital, podem ser usados para expor e contestar as maneiras em que as tecnologias digitais não são nada neutras.
Por examinar a intersecção entre as indústrias criativas e o ativismo, a pesquisa pergunta:
O que a análise das culturas de resistência ao racismo algorítmico no Brasil contribui para nosso entendimento das relações entre questões raciais e as tecnologias digitais, entre a arte e a mobilização mediática?
Como é que objetos e práticas culturais afetam a compreensão pública de formas de viés particulares da era digital?
O projeto é fundamentado nos métodos multidisciplinares dos estudos culturais e tem coprodução e impacto no seu cerne. Colaborando com parceiros nas indústrias criativas e o terceiro setor, o projeto vai resultar num vídeo game educacional, um toolkit de ferramentas de inclusão social e um documento político.
Ricardo Ruiz e Felipe Fonseca, de nosso parceiro Global Innovation Gathering, escreveram postes de blog que detalham o projeto em suas próprias palavras e podem ser lidos aqui.
See below to follow project’s progress, and to find out more.
Sponsored by MyWorld, the Bristol Digital Games Lab in collaboration with us, the Centre for Creative Technologies, are hosting a concept game jam. This is a fun and creative way of thinking through complex ideas, harnessing collective creative thinking via game design. This will be led by Edward King and Richard Cole.
Our theme for this jam is Exposing Algorithmic Bias
From education and health to financial services and facial recognition, algorithms have become key components in scaling decision making. The danger, of course, is they can embed and augment existing biases, or even generate new types of bias within complex systems. This danger is only amplified by the application of machine learning and AI. The aim of this condensed game jam is to think about how the mechanisms of gaming and play can expose these processes.
On Thursday 5th October 2023, the Centre for Creative Technologies invited Christer Lundahl to share his work at the Pervasive Media Studio, for those interested in virtual reality, environmental and social justice, and performance art. This included a fruitful informal chat with artists, researchers and creative technologists, to begin to draw connections between our experiences.
Christer Lundahl is part of artist duo Lundahl and Seitl, predominately based in Stockholm. Their immersive performances stage complex processes of choreography, connection, matter and time.
We were lucky enough to hear about the project Lundahl and Seitl have been working on since 2022; River Biographies. We found out about the inspiration between this project, the challenges and the possible ways the project can develop.
‘River Biographies is an odyssey into the geology of the body as well as of the land, emphasizing that which is not human but of which you are a part. Taking the form of an hour-long session where an audience of 30 people explore embodiments of natural elements of stone and water to form a river collectively, the artwork exists somewhere between performance and a space for healing and repair. Like the life of a river is a measure of the health of a local ecosystem, River Biographies are living artworks where the shifting collective ability of the group passes through the artworks score. Each half of the group embodies the qualities of water and stone, respectively, to physically explore their relationship; the way in which stone affects the flow of the water and how water forms the topography of rock and stone, directing the water’s flow, and how both affect each other’s temporalities.’
We had an informal conversation inspired by our own thoughts and experiences.
One interesting conversation was around the experience of kinship through immersive reality. Questions were raised such as ‘what might it mean to occupy the body of a river?’
Becoming something else, human or nonhuman, may fall into the problems that arise with the promise of virtual reality being an ‘ultimate empathy machine’ (See Nakamura, 2020). Becoming water or stone may engineer the ‘right kind of feeling’ for a toxic empathy that molds the participant into an immersion of something they will never really experience. To be able to ‘walk a mile in the shoes’ of a stone or water in a river (an abstract concept in itself) may not capture the long duree and slow time of climate change. What may be the differences between ‘becoming’ stone or water vs ‘being with’ stone or water (immersion into the environment rather than the entity)?
The discussion then turned to possibilities of synchronisation and connection, thinking about trust and touch between participants, imagining possible choreographies between the ‘stones’ and ‘water’, and drawing from other artists staging of the connection between the environment, the self and the collective.
We thought about the role of sound during the performance; what sounds can we hear at different points of the River Thames? or the River Avon? How does our experience of immersion change when we sit by the water next to the Watershed, or the docks of the Thames in Deptford, or the Thames estuary running into the sea. What possibilities are there to use AI voice and a dataset from these sounds to create a sound piece alongside this?
The conversations were reflective, thoughtful and got us exciting about the connections between Sundahl’s work and our own.
Below you can watch more of Lundahl and Seitl’s work:
