The AI Cosmologies Experience’s week-long programme is truly a mini-festival within MozFest offering 20+ Interactive Discussions, Workshops, and Art & Media installations from global contributors who were moved to cosmic companionship by our call for proposals. Also unfolding over the week is our Cosmos team-designed and curated experiential journey which we will highlight in this article.
The experience is interested in transcultural, interspecies, ecological, and spiritual forays that support us in both speculative and diagnostic thinking and conversing. In this sense, it begins from the position that building Trustworthy AI–and the notion of AI ethics more broadly– is fundamentally relational: a responsive and emergent entity that requires a multitude of wisdoms, id/entities, histories, and both existing and not-yet-imagined connections to being.
This cosmic constellation of session responds to MozFest 2023’s commitment to harnessing the “Collective Power of the People” through the exploration of “human intelligence that weaves in ancestral, ecological, technical, and spiritual knowledge, to move the needle in shaping Artificial Intelligence”.
Experiencing AI Cosmologies
The Cosmos Experience is an experimental space interested in the reciprocal relationship between artificial intelligence and planetary beings and the kinds of imagined and imposed relationships–to ourselves, eachOther, and our environments–that it amplifies, disrupts, or inhibits.
Over the course of 5 experiential sessions, through guided artistic and embodied practices, we seek to explore how we might disrupt our notions of “intelligence”, so that we can gather, receive, and share “data'' differently. These ways of encountering, engaging, and relating with/to ambiguity, discomfort, curiosity,and complexity might help us generate new forms of sensemaking in order to reimagine, re-member, and more accountably respond to our relationships to eachOther, and the world, individually and collectively.
Explore Cosmos Experience Sessions
Day 1: Monday March 20, 2023
10:30-12:00 PST | 13:30-15:00 EST | 18:30-20:00 CET
We begin with an invitation to expand our capacities to think, feel, sense, and relate to the wicked problems and paradoxes of this algorithmic era in ways that are perhaps counterintuitive, yet deeply important to the transformation and ethical development of technologies.
In essence, we seek to explore how we can learn to love and care for, and be loved and cared for by our technologies. This session might gesture towards what we need to work through, transform, or let go of in order to catalyze this relational shift and the potentiation of trustworthy artificial intelligences.
Day 2: Tuesday March 21, 2023
10:30-12:00 PST | 13:30-15:00 EST | 18:30-20:00 CET
If we take the imagination as both a communal and gestational space, one of both speculative and kinetic convergence, we can begin to see how things like science fiction and narratives come to ‘word the world’ by shaping and reproducing certain forms of relationships, thinking, or presence. In this sense, the imagination has a materially distributed force—it beckons forth certain kinds of collective and individual politics.
In this extended workshop, we will explore depictions of artificial intelligences and technologies across global and cultural futurisms. The format will be a guided discussion followed by a reflective exercise with time for sharing reflections and questions.
Day 2: Tuesday March 21, 2023
12:00-13:00 EST | 15:00-16:00 EST | 20:00-21:00 CET
Given the ways AI is reshaping our understanding of the world, eachOther, ourselves, ie notions of truth or reality more fundamentally, thinking these technologies with and through art, aesthetic, and creative practice becomes essential. As art, anchored in the experiential, the sensuous, the tactile and visceral, introduces different notions of truth and sensemaking.
Art begets us to not only envision the world differently but also allows for nuanced and novel modes of engagement, questioning, and experiencing.
How does thinking AI and art together re/orient us towards communal, embodied, or concerted presence, performance, or relationships with technologies?
Day 3: Wednesday March 22, 2023
10:30-12:00 PST | 13:30-15:00 EST | 18:30-20:00 CET
What do our relationships to change look like in the algorithmic age? How do we witness or experience different kinds of social, ecological, historical, or technological changes, at present—and how might we in the near and far futures?
In its current configurations, AI is a reflection of hegemonic worldviews and systems of knowledge production. Within these conditions, imposed binaries encode systemic and generalized social habits that flatten and short circuit the multitudes of histories, cultures, languages, values, wisdoms, and experiences we each bear individually, as well as collectively.
Understanding that we perceive, gather, receive, and transmit “data” across times, cultures, histories, bodies, and ideologies, Rituals for Liminality is a curated space for exploring how we can begin to recognize ourselves as interface for change in a time of algorithmically-induced transition.
It is an invitation to experience alternative modes of ritualizing and weaving personal histories, ancestries, and wisdoms into collective fabrics, summoning forth new rites of passage hospitable to our shapeshifting algorithmic id/entities and spaces.
Day 4: Thursday March 23, 2023
10:30-12:00 PST | 13:30-15:00 EST | 18:30-20:00 CET
What might it look like to draw upon, from, and with AI, not so we can accept the futures and outputs they project, but so we can re-member and reimagine them?
Perhaps it is in a concerted divergence from the typical “unknown unknowns” about AI, towards the mysteries of other unknown unknowns, that we might reimagine our relationships with technologies, ourselves, eachOther and the world–relational dispositions not based on extraction and control, but on choreographed coordination and collaboration among human, non-human, and the other-than.
This experiential session seeks to explore the pluriversal possibilities of weaving wider ecologies in reclaiming our enmeshment with AI as a cosmological entity. This guided discussion followed by a foray into the realms of collective dreaming invites us to reflect on our notions of making kin and re-enchant with the potentialities of otherwise relating.
A Collective Wayfinding Experiment
We are approaching this Experience like life and like the Cosmos themselves - as a perpetual introspective yet collective wayfinding experiment - that is emergent, adaptive, responsive, and shapeshifting with/in us and around us. The engagements in the Cosmos - both in the team-designed experiential journeys as well as the contributions from our cosmic companions - invite us to think, sense, feel, and relate radically differently to how we even consider and approach conversations about AI and technologies as (cosmological) entities.
MozFest is part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world. To learn more, visit www.mozillafestival.org.
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Sophia Bazile
2023 Cosmos Experience Wrangler | Futures Thinking & Foresight | Experiential Learning Design | Facilitator | Curator | Convener | Sometimes Speaker | Perpetual Seeker Learner, Companion, Guide — on journeys of individual & collective inquiry. Perpetually curious, I have curated, convened, shared and helped broaden perspectives in a range of contexts, around many different topics - and now AI Cosmologies is the latest adventure!
Hannah Holtzclaw
Hannah holtzclaw is a Ph.D. student in the School of Communications, as well as a Data Fluencies Fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute, at Simon Fraser University. They study how embodied learning and machine learning can be thought alongside and through one another to arraign designed cultural associations and habits and turn us towards different modalities of (un)learning, inhabiting and relationality.
