Restructuring Futures
Between 2021–2023, I led the design research for a speculative worldbuilding process that questions the entrenched assumption that technology must always serve efficiency, speed, and scale for the partnered project Restructuring Futures. In response to the uncertainties—the pandemic, political unrest, financial instability, and more— impacting how artists and cultural producers cooperate in developing works, I explored how asynchronous creative networks—distributed, nonlinear, and deeply contextual—can be structured to sustain artistic practice outside of extractive systems.
This project examined how arts and cultural practices might reposition themselves in an era of rising volatility. If instability is the condition, how do we orient ourselves? What kinds of infrastructures, rhythms, and tools enable artists and cultural workers to build the capabilities needed to sit with uncertainty, rather than defaulting to reactive solutions? These questions guided the research and shaped the narrative architectures embedded within Restructuring Futures.
Core Areas of Impact:
Speculative Worldbuilding as Strategy for Resilient Arts Practices – Building conceptual and narrative frameworks that expand the ways we inhabit artistic and socio-technical ecosystems.
Storytelling as Infrastructure – Developing methods to use narrative as a tool for collective sense-making, countering dominant techno-solutionist myths.
Asynchronous Creative Networks – Rethinking collaboration beyond immediacy and productivity, designing systems where meaning can emerge across different temporalities and scales.
Cultural Practice as Orientation – Positioning the arts not as an aesthetic afterthought or purely as self-expression of creativity but as a way to build embodied capacities for navigating instability.
Strategic Insights for Arts Organizations – Mapping out what cultural institutions need to adapt to an era of increasing ecological, economic, and political uncertainty.
Forecasting New Models for Artistic Production – Anticipating the decline of traditional funding and resourcing in the arts while developing new ways for cultural production to actively shape how people engage with the systems they inhabit and seek to transform.
Through this work, I engaged with artists, technologists, and cultural practitioners to explore how creative labour can move beyond prescriptive futures and become a site for engaging with ambiguity. I also worked with creative communities online and offline in Toronto and London, UK, to deepen the impact of cultural responses to an increasingly volatile future. Throughout this process, three distinct narrative arcs have developed and intersected, each contributing to prototyping a decentralized collaborative digital platform developed in partnership with Hypha Worker’s Co-operative. Restructuring Futures doesn’t just imagine alternatives—it traces the contours of what cultural work must become to remain vital in an age of continuous upheaval.
Read more: archive.ukaiprojects.com/projects/restructuring-futures/
funding:
Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund
in partnership with:
UKAI Projects
The Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence
Hypha Worker Cooperative
collaborators and artists-in-residence:
200+ global contributors through 9 workshops
