Mid February, we were so thrilled to have artist and designer Mushon Zer-Aviv running his Future Screenshots workshop on the theme of Building Anti-Fascist Futures, here in Berlin along with 40 participants.
Future Screenshots is a workshop format and methodology that Mushon has iterated upon many times in the past, and it creates the conditions for participants to both engage their political imaginations, while also getting concrete about the interventions that they can themselves do.
The workshop started broad – helping us think about futures in all senses, and what they might look like as delivered on our phones. (See the screenshot templates here, shared in Mushon’s workshop methodology notes.) Anything from a social media post, to a chat – what might people be talking about? What questions might people have for a future AI? One particular screenshot that he shared from a past workshop was that of an AI query, “How was Palestine liberated?”
We were encouraged to remember that times of transition (such as political crises, for example) open up space for new ideas and futures to take root; and that one of the most important things we can do is to keep alternative political ideas alive, build momentum for them, so that when a transition comes, these ideas are ready to go. This is something that we see the political right being very good at in lots of ways – introducing formerly wild and unthinkable ideas, and making those ideas a reality.
By using the futures cone, we were able to place our screenshots on various alternative timelines, ranging from projected to preposterous – and we were encouraged to only use ‘preposterous’ if it was truly against the laws of physics, or impossible in the most literal sense (instead of merely unthinkable, or hard-to-imagine.) Futures that we developed were desired, or to be prevented – some hit a little too close to home (mass deportations, for example) and others brought joy – global reparations, Arabic being introduced in Berlin school curricula, for example.
Of particular relevance to our work here at SUPERRR was Mushon’s emphasis on how AI can only move us forward along the ‘projected’ timeline – it doesn’t hold the capacity to imagine new futures, nor to diverge from the status quo. A status quo which, arguably, doesn’t work for anyone.
"As we look at it now, AI - the supposed 'technology of the future' – is in fact the technology of the past"
– Mushon Zer-Aviv
I feel like this framing or understanding of AI as simply by design replicating what has come before, is crucial if we are to dream and design just digital futures. We need a new understanding of what AI can be used for, and what it absolutely cannot be used for – for example, creative tasks.
We ended the workshop by working in smaller, thematic groups, on issues that had arisen earlier on – geopolitics, digital technologies, borders and migration, the climate and more. We were asked to plot out interventions that would work towards the desirable futures we had come up with earlier, then to plot them on a matrix in terms of time and energy. Then, to think about what kinds of conditions would make those interventions happen – were they up to us, up to people that we knew, or out of our reach? I liked this exercise in particular for making visible the various ways in which we do in fact have agency – not just actions that we can take directly, but thinking also about how we can influence those close to us to make something happen.
It was a hard task to make a room full of 40 people feel simultaneously creative, full of hope and yet realistic about the challenges ahead – but that’s exactly what this workshop did, and indeed, what I think we all need more of during these times of turbulence and chaos. We’re looking forward to exploring further on the theme of political imagination, and we hope to see many of you at future events and workshops.
