Hybrid Futures was an event series and symposium curated by Dr Betti Marenko as part of the Digital Innovation Season. It gathered together a constellation of voices and perspectives on the contested relationship between humans and machines. Here, Marenko – Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures – shares her reflections on the series and wider season.
The Digital Innovation Season – enabled through Central Saint Martins’ partnership with Three – was conceived as an extracurricular, interdisciplinary series of events and workshops. Across 23 events for students and six public Hybrid Futures talks, it successfully built a community across different disciplines and courses.
The concept of “hybrid” was a leitmotif throughout. Not only did it illuminate the human-machine encounter; it also underscored the great variety of formats offered, each with its own mode of producing knowledge: technical skill-building workshops, hands-on demonstrations, artists’ talks, theoretical lectures, brainstorming sessions, facilitated peer-to-peer events, mentorship opportunities, informal crits and social networking.
This variety perfectly embodied the season’s rationale: to create a platform where critical thinking and creative expression around human-machine encounters is woven with the application of emerging skills and software. The season therefore tried to both provide practical and technical instruction in areas such as machine learning and data visualisation, while exploring the theory around how they interact with, and change, the human condition.
Central to this ethos was the intention to trouble conventional distinctions between theories and practices, speculation and practice, discourses and experiments, as well as, more broadly, between the human and the artificial. Instead, the Digital Innovation Season proposed a bold vision that questioned the received notion of “technology” as a rationalist instrumental enterprise, and instead emphasised the interdisciplinary (and messy) plurality of practices, thoughts and responses.
Hybrid Futures Symposium: Re-Imagining Human-Machine Encounters
The concluding Hybrid Futures symposium experimented with a less hierarchical format, with brief interventions and provocations by Tobias Rees, Maggie Roberts, Memo Akten, Adam Nocek, and Nye Thompson built around a central showcase of students’ work.
The Hackathon, facilitated by BA Product Design alum Kaye Toland and Joana Chicau, called on students to imagine human-machine encounters in 2050. Not only did it mobilise their creativity in response to the season’s themes but it offered cross-disciplinary community-building in a time of dislocation enforced by the global pandemic.
The four shortlisted works, shared below, provided yet more remarkable proof of the communal creativity, fierce intelligence, tremendous ingenuity and resilience of our students.
What's in that drawer?
First Prize
A video snippet from 2050 where an algorithm (A.I. Designed Avatar) presents speculative student work from 2021 as three real historical objects to a young child. Much to the annoyance of their father.
Team: Vincenzo Ottino (BA Fine Art), Aditi Sahoo (BA Fashion Design), David McCulloch (MA Art and Science), Jiangyue Wu (BA Product and Industrial Design).
Aurelia
Second Prize
Thinking about the future we learnt that dementia cases will triple by 2050. Dementia is not only terrible for the patient, but for everyone around them. It is a horrible way to fade away. Hence we propose a solution- ‘Aurelia’.
Team: Neeti Kumar (BA Fine Art), Iveta Brazdeikyte, (BA Product and Industrial Design), Sophia Cakova (MA Art and Science), Jann Choy (BA Graphic Communication Design)
AI Moral Investigation
Joint Third Prize
Will AI have autonomy and emotion eventually? In the film, based in 2050, a virtual jury meeting starts in a secret trial room. Three human and three self will AI against each other and stand on different positions and judgments to discuss a case. It is a debate about Pelas, AI-Courier, leaked and spread personal information about a human female and caused serious social harm.
Team: Luyao Li (MA Material Futures), Zequan Lin (MA Design: Furniture), Junhao Wu (MA Contemporary Photography; Practice and Philosophy).
"Are you a robot?"
Joint Third Prize
‘Are you a robot?’ is a speculative short film that takes place in a world, where AI has learned all informational knowledge and all that is left for them to reach singularity is to learn how human feel emotion.
Team: Scarlett Wang (BA Performance: Design and Practice), Yu Leng (MA Contemporary Photography; Practice and Philosophy), Jinhye Park (BA Graphic Communication Design), Eunah Lee (BA Product and Industrial Design).
The Digital Innovation Season presented a promising model for how staff, students and a wider network can explore technology and its meanings. This work is now being synthesised through a programme evaluation and further research by myself, Dr Betti Marenko, and the DIS team through a KE Impact Fund grant.
To find out more about that project please email: dis@csm.arts.ac.uk.
Explore our Hybrid Futures playlist and if you missed any of the broader season catch up on the Digital Innovation Season website