Counter-Imaging the City-to-Come
18 June
Edinburgh & The Lothians Workshop
Event Summary
A collaborative futuring workshop exploring the potential of generative AI tools to imagine alternative visions of the city-to-come in resistance to techno-utopianism.
Book hereTime
10:00 - 16:00
Date(s)
18 June
Location
Edinburgh Futures Institute (Room 2.35), 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9EF
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Additional Location Info
The workshop will be held in Room 2.35, and is accessed through through the main entrance to EFI
Organiser
Image|Imaging|Interior research cluster (Edinburgh College of Art)
“Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” – Cedric Price (1966)
Generative AI image-making processes, such as Dall-e, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, have rapidly become embedded in contemporary postdigital and image-saturated experience. While AI pioneers champion the novelty and accessibility to creativity the image-based tools can deliver, they face opposition on the grounds of privacy, copyright and bias. Moreover, with the image and its consumption an essential means by which we engage with the world, the artificial image has the potential to destabilise authenticity and propagate false realities. Under such terms, when the image is used to communicate specific visions of the world, and AI processes are embraced as tools in the making of new futures, we must critically and ethically reflect on the realities that are being produced. This can be most emblematically exposed by examining how image-based bias leans heavily into techno-utopian visions of the future, where technology is the solution to contemporary issues such as climate crisis, resource scarcity and the decline of globalisation.
In this one-day workshop, participants will collaboratively explore, hack and develop creative approaches to generative AI image-making tools in the context of the city and its imaginaries. Through experimentation, the workshop will seek to claim and appropriate image-making tools to propose speculative domestic and urban conditions that critically reflect upon and offer alternative to established spatial imaginaries of the city.
