Restructuring Futures

In partnership with Ukai Projects and Hypha, we have been exploring how technology to help us reimagine how we value artistic methods, work inclusively, and embody collaboration across time, distance, and abilities. Our aim has been to dream and build out frameworks with which to restructure our futures. Today, we want our tools to offer more privacy and to work well for colleagues with limited Internet access. Tomorrow, we will need our tools to be climate- and apocalypse-resilient.

What are the challenges of working with artists and cultural producers experiencing ecological disasters and/or political authoritarianism? How do these challenges prefigure the kinds of barriers we will more broadly experience in the coming years?

The Restructuring Futures project is an ambitious undertaking, melding complex questions about tactility, presence, and spatiality with queries about alternative structures of artistic life-making. By seeking to confront the capitalistic assumptions underpinning our day-to-day digital communication tools, on behalf of artists, creatives, and collaborators, Restructuring Futures has opened multiple lines of inquiry, posed wicked questions, and drawn inspiration from myriad sources.

Ad hoc, imperfect, but working solutions was the goal — much like the way artists ‘hack’ together vibrant, alternative art spaces and communities in overlooked spaces offline.

Over 2 years, supported by the Digital Strategy Fund at Canada Council for the Arts, the project developed a digital, asynchronous workspace that can be used to cross-boundary cultural production and planning. The project integrates research and prototype tools, processes, and systems to envision and operate a virtual collaborative environment embedded in alternative digital economies and emergent cooperative frameworks.

The digital workspace is purpose-built to be resilient to the anticipated ecological and political disturbances such as failures of centralized systems, rising authoritarianism, and climate-related disasters. Many external colleagues are already experiencing these dislocations in Iran, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, China, and elsewhere. We anticipate that volatility and disruption will increasingly define social and cultural systems and this project is designed and developed with those conditions in mind.