Kamal Sinclair, Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects

Inaugural Future Imagination Summit Kicks off With Co-Creation

By Katerina Cizek

Conventional futurists sell the inevitability of new tech solutions and how they will improve our lives. Yet these futurists reproduce current systems that benefit only a privileged few. Rather than “predicting” the future, corporate-aligned forecasters write the future in the very act of telling it. It is not magic. It’s a design to trick the eye.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future,” noted Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Message.

But there are also radical futurists, grounded with deep critiques of the current world, calling into action a collective future for all, based on compassion, justice, and harmony. By imagining radical futures, people’s movements can conjure these visions into actions in the present day. The newly minted Guild of Future Architects, led by Executive Director Kamal Sinclair, seeks to network these radical futurists across many fields and practices. The Guild convened for the first time in New York City in November 2019.

The key to much of this future imagination work is co-creation: collective practices that function outside the limits of single authorship, and the hierarchies of current domains of expertise and media industries, as described in the Collective Wisdom field study, which I co-authored.

At the Guild’s recent Future Imagination Summit, we kicked off the gathering by hosting a conversation between four artists who co-create blueprints and projects for just visions. The discussions were grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and antecedent technologies, critical design justice practices, Black-centered collective media and community creation, and art performances that showcase the entangled relationships between humans and artificial intelligence. All of the projects highlighted the role of co-creation in re-imagining a future built on justice.

Here are a few photo highlights from the event. For more, see the full story on the Co-Creation Studio site.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin points out that the first draft of the American Constitution was The Great Law of Peace, a document that unified the legal, social, and cultural aspects of Iroquois society, woven into a wampum belt. Winger-Bearskin went on to discuss her Wampum.codes project, adding, “I like using the construct of wampum as an analogue for a new type of ethics-based dependency.”

Elissa Blount Moorhead explores the immutable elements of Black culture and the impermanence of its tangible manifestations in visual culture, sound, and dwellings.

Her latest co-created art installation is BACK AND SONG, a 4-channel art and video installation that was exhibited in the chapel of Girard College in Philadelphia. She explained, “I think of the project itself as a form of healing as opposed to just a representation of it. It is a healing thing unto itself.”

Sasha Costanza-Chock, a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network, says, “Everybody designs… it’s a human activity. [But] only some of us get recognized as designers and get paid large sums of money to do this work.”

Artist Lauren McCarthy explores co-creation with non-human systems such as Artificial Intelligence. Her projects provoke visitors to drift in the in-between space between humans and machines and entangle with the mythologies constructed around these systems of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. “I am interested in this concept of home and what it means to have this space that feels private, intimate and feels like a safe place, to have that invaded by technology. Or to have a place where your social, cultural, and ethical values are shaped and formed from by AI trained on data and created by developers that may not represent or share your values,” she said.

This article was originally published on Immerse. It is a result of a collaboration between the Guild of Future Architects, Sundance Institute, NYU Future Imagination Fund and MIT Open Doc Lab’s Co-Creation Studio. Immerse’s Collective Wisdom series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.