What will our future look like? Will it have to be digital? What role will biotech, screen media and AI play in it? Can we imagine better futures with and around digital technology? Can we design those futures in a collaborative way?

Hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for Attention Studies (part of the Digital Futures Institute) at King’s College London, the symposium will discuss these questions while celebrating the launch of our new online Digital Futures MA.

The symposium will be followed by a reception.

Free and open to all, booking required.

Programme

16.00-16.10 Opening: Joanna Zylinska: What Future? Whose Future?

16.10-16.40 Btihaj Ajana: Beyond (?) Biometric Extractivi$m

16.40-17.10 Bo Reimer: Imaginative Futures and Lively Technologies: Tracing An Unruly Relationship

17.10-17.40 Giota Alevizou and Rob Gallagher: A Speculative Syllabus about Futures: From Futuristic Histories of the Digital to Designing Sustainable Digital Futures’.

17.40-18.00 Asker Bryld Staunæs: A Techno-Social Sculpture of Algorithmic Democracy: Reflections on the Work of Synthetic Parties and Virtual Politicians

18.00-18.45 Discussion

18.45-20.00 Reception

Speakers’ bios

Btihaj Ajana is Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her academic research is interdisciplinary in nature and focuses on the ethical, political and ontological aspects of digital developments and their intersection with everyday cultures and modes of governance. She is the author of Governing through Biometrics: The Biopolitics of Identity (2013) and editor of Self-Tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations (2018), Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices (2018) and The Quantification of Bodies in Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2021). Ajana also uses the medium of film as a way of exploring social issues while bringing scholarly ideas to wider audiences. Her films include Quantified Life (2017); Surveillance Culture (2017); Fem's Way (2020) and Borderscapes (2022).

Giota Alevizou is a lecturer in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities At King’s College London. Her research focuses on paradigms and methods that incentivise participation in public knowledge, education and urban spaces. She has published on collective intelligence, the educational commons, platformisation and data ethics, civic media and digital cities. She’s a co-author in The Creative Citizen Unbound and the author in the forthcoming monograph, The Web of Knowledge. Giota is a joint director for the Digital Futures MA programme.

Rob Gallagher is a lecturer in Digital Media Industries in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. His work explores the terms on which videogames, memes and other digital cultural forms articulate understandings of subjectivity, selfhood and belonging. He is the author of Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity, and the forthcoming Artgames after Gamergate. Rob is a joint director for the Digital Futures MA programme.

Bo Reimer is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden. He is the founding director of the university’s Medea Lab, a transdisciplinary collective of researchers and artists who address cultural and societal challenges through experiments, installations and interventions. His recent works include editing a special issue on the topic of Artificial Creativity for the journal Transformations (with Bojana Romic), and together with his Medea Lab colleagues, developing the multi-media installation “Tender Time”, presented at the Time Space Existence exhibition in Venice. His latest article is “Bothering the Binaries: Unruly AI Futures of Hauntings and Hope at the Limit”, written with Amanda Lagerkvist. He is currently writing a book provisionally titled Imaginative Futures.

Asker Bryld Staunæs is a practice-based PhD student and a philosopher affiliated with Aarhus University and Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark. He works with an expanded concept of politics, often at the intersection between AI, democracy, and art. Asker mostly becomes operative through diverse extra-disciplinary collectives such as “Computer Lars,” “Center for Aesthetics of AI Images”, “The Synthetic Party” and “The Organ of Autonomous Sciences”.

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London and Director (interim) of the Centre for Attention Studies. She is also a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King's and Serpentine Galleries. Zylinska is an author of a number of books – including The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023, open access), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020, open access) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to map out scenarios for alternative futures.