What if?

A collaboration between Civa x transmediale festival Berlin, hosted by Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL) and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

Is there a difference between speculative prototyping and AI forecasting? What temporalities and modes of relation open up when we engage these technologies as collaborators rather than instruments? This session invites us to reflect on how we can engage with the tools and narratives we work with, and how we might still use them to generate counter-speculations.
Everything is Computer - The Planned Obsolescence of the Future is an artistic-research project in the form of a playable video game that interrogates how dominant narratives, AI models, and game engines encode the future we are conditioned to imagine. Third Impact is a short film created in collaboration with AI systems, that explores counter-futures of coexistence between humans and non-humans.

The artists Laura Cugusi and S()fia Braga will be presenting their works and share insights into their general practice, followed by a roundtable conversation. Nada Zanhour will be joining online for the practice sharing part.

Laura Cugusi’s work has been nomadic across languages, disciplines and media. Her research focuses on mapping media ecologies, tech literacies, governance infrastructures and institutional world-building strategies that shape and consolidate the imagination (or lack thereof) about the future.

machine yearning aka Nada Zanhour works across sound, video, 3D and interactive media. Her research focuses on online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, meme culture and digital militarism.

S()fia Braga is a New Media artist and pioneer in AI-driven cinematic storytelling based in Vienna. Her artistic practice explores emerging technologies to create speculative fabulations about counter-futures, engaging with themes such as human–machine collaboration, non-human agency, and transhumanism. In parallel, Braga’s research examines the concepts of Interveillance and Platform Workshipping, uncovering the hidden power dynamics embedded in the operational structures of centralized social media platforms and their sociological implications.