We entered this year strengthening our communities for what was, and still is, a year of bravery, revolutionary change, togetherness, and solidarity. Art is charging communities towards our collective awakening. For our first MozFest House of 2024, the MozFest community was called to see how art might inform how we highlight the impact of AI and technology in our communities, on our planet, and for our futures.

Artists explored togetherness and solidarity through mushrooms, sound, games, mapping and more, scattered across different pockets of the venue. Below is a summary of pieces that came to the festival, starting with a wild question: what can mushroom and mycelium networks teach us about technology?

MI: Mycelium Intelligence by Jessica Jabr invited participants to interact with generative visuals projected on sinewave panels and bricks made from myco-foam, a material grown from mycelium. To interact with the projections you had to wave your hands across a sensor and watch the bricks connect. The piece reveals parallels between mycelium networks and AI, emphasizing connectivity, adaptability and collaboration.

Similarly, Krzysztof Wronski's Protestpilze (Protest Mushrooms), elements of a sound installation, played sounds of resistance as you walked past them.

Typically, the mushrooms are placed in and around areas where neglectful land management practices are taking place, drawing attention to the ubiquity, scale, and permanence of soil sealing. The sounds they play are selected to highlight specific land-use issues relevant to the area in which they are placed. It’s nature’s own protest.

Next, artist Anne Lee Steele explored the use of creativity to convey complexity and what it means to engage with our senses to think more critically about the issues around us through Trace: Navigating through digital and physical supply chains. The installation is a multisensory experience and exhibit about physical and digital supply chains, and the difficulty of understanding their expansive scale both conceptually and literally.

The physical installation is a collection of soundscapes from the manufacturing process, triggered on a world globe through touch. Its digital counterpart is a website indexing resources, projects, and conceptualisations of the 'supply chain' that are sonically-rendered by the interactive globe.

Bird Signs and Cycles is a data visualization project that explores the winter routines of its creator, Logan’s William’s, avian neighbors through human and computer-augmented observation. The project has two pathways of exploration, beginning with Jackals or choosing your own adventure. In the former, Logan Williams takes the listener through a day of birds, their daily routines, and songs.

Hot Air Generator By Luka Jacke is an AI-driven, interactive media installation that exposes the tendency of generative AI models to hallucinate believable, yet non-factual data when prompted with information they have not been explicitly trained on. Exploring the inner workings of these models by deliberately misusing them, a chain of AI models processed sound from a steaming water kettle. The installation starts by passing sound from a bubbling kettle through a speech-audio enhancement model, then a speech-text model, and finally through an LLM prompted to write a news article based on the transcript produced in the speech-text model and inspired by a random New York Times article headline. What comes out in the end is the LLM trying to derive meaning from the kettle’s transcript and producing a newspaper article that is thematically aligned.

Complementing the multisensorial experiences of the projects above, artists James Curtis, Amber Devereux, and Oliver Morris, and Conrad Miszuk invited listeners to disappear into a soundscape, exploring the use of audio as a means of fostering solidarity and how sound can create cohesion even in moments of apartment disorder. How do we build solidarity when all we have is sound? prompted the MozFest community to listen to the piece and reflect on what was brought up for them by drawing, writing, sketching, or anything else on a piece of paper and sticking their musings to a community table.

A number of artists approached this festival’s thematic areas through sound, while others did so through video and game. The Future Loves Us Back by Mo Futures is a video installation about growing up in the Netherlands, experiencing Diasporic Discomfort and finding Joy through Imagination. The artwork showcases the importance of Queer Afrofuturism and how it can be used to Heal from this white supremacist World. The piece was split across two screens, showing two videos in parallel, and surrounded by images from Mo’s life. The film acknowledges and plays with the huge impact technology has and will have on our lives by displaying Archived Pasts, Presents and Futures.

Experimental Worldbuilding: for large Image Data Sets and the question of Interpretability, a Roblox Installation by Eleanor Dare is a Roblox game exploring our responses, as if we were generative AI, to a collection of images and their underlying ecologies. Players are asked to reflect on whether companies formulate technological benchmarks for Generative AI depending on what they are for and who they serve, while moving through the game space to collectively and separately anticipate new modes of existence for ourselves and our technologies.

In Algorithms of Late-Capitalism by Adriaan Odendaal and Karla Zavala Barreda, the objective is slightly different. Players become part of a community of cyborgs, trying to survive and thrive in a world ruled by the first Cult of Sentient Machines; and discover how to create a better technological future by banding together and subverting the very rules of the game. The board game was made through a co-design process in which diverse groups of participants grappled with the complex realities of living in an algorithmic age, and imagined pathways towards more desirable alternative futures.

fabricated: Anti-Misinformation Games to Unravel Fact from Fiction in Your Digital World is an interactive, traveling research exhibition promoting digital literacy in the EU. Creators Andy Sanchez and Susannah Montgomery brought “The Personal Press”, “Who Targets Me?”, and “Moderator Mayhem”, a sample version of the full “fabricated” installation. The installation invited participants to interact and explore how AI is changing the news and how challenging content moderation can be.

Biased AI (a mirror that looks back) by Jessie McCorsky showed participants an image of themselves from a computer’s webcam, along with a dialogue with an LLM showing how the LLM makes biased assessments of that person from their image. The LLM presents as a security guard robot assessing if the participant is trustworthy-looking or not. An external monitor then shows all pictures taken and whether they were assessed as trustworthy or not.

In the Ethical Dilemma Cafe, Julia Janssen exhibited Mapping the Oblivion, a series of work researching the relationship between living frictionless and the right to be forgotten. In the first installation of the series, Julia Janssen illustrates how we increasingly live within the margins of algorithms by portraying herself, her father and her grandmother through the lens of Netflix recommendation models. The piece plots 3 maps showing the same background but different recommendation algorithms. In accompanying videos, we peek into Janssen’s family’s personal space - questioning how data, AI, and recommendation models will affect their lives now and over time.

Hyper(in)visibility of Blackness Timeline by Savena Surana and Arda Awais from Identity 2.0 is a timeline examining how technology perpetuates the paradox of existing as both hypervisible and hyperinvisible. Black people and their bodies exist in a paradox. They are hypervisible - profiled, ridiculed and pushed to the front of conversations they have no control over. It’s the story of slavery records to overpolicing. The hyper documentation of race to suit the interests of those in power. Yet they are also hyper invisible - undervalued, left out of the room and data sets, or ignored. It’s the story of successes being minimized, to shutting them out of the room. It’s a systemic downplaying and ignoring of issues that this community faces.

This sickening paradox should be incompatible, but in a racist society it is not. It leads to the erasure of a real person - instead it results in a fictional person, constructed to suit the needs of the institution. This timeline was printed and stuck across walls at the festival, capturing this reality.

Calling All Artists!

Artists play a vital role in co-designing trustworthy AI and technologies. If you're an artist—or know one—who’s passionate about using creativity to shape the future, we’d love to connect with you! Reach out to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Mozilla Festival.

Our next chance to experience the power of art and media in fostering solidarity and community will be in Zambia this November. Let’s collaborate to inspire change together!