Dreaming Beyond AI is a space for critical and constructive knowledge, visionary fiction and speculative art, and community organizing around Artificial Intelligence.
AI technologies reinforce existing injustices and discrimination. Decision-making processes are increasingly being outsourced to algorithmic systems – by the police and in court, in schools and in job application procedures, in government offices, at border crossings, and elsewhere. With Dreaming Beyond AI, we aim to challenge both the way AI is used today, and the societal structures that uphold algorithmic oppression.
We use AI as a gateway to broader societal questions around marginalization, imagination, futurism, feminism, and how we experience the present. The goal is to de-center technology and create an experimental curated space for connection and coming together.
We aim to enable :
an understanding of how AI technologies can exacerbate oppressing power structures in our society
a questioning of dominant narratives about AI, imposed visions of future, and oppressive structures that are amplified by the widespread and uncritical use of AI technologies
a redefinition of how AI technologies might/should serve us, improve representation, equity and connection – create visions of the future from the margins
The website itself and the process through which it is created reflect our intentions and challenge deeply rooted ways of thinking, knowing and being in the digital realm. For instance, we intend to challenge the expectation of seamless design interfaces and fast, frictionless digital experience, as well as consumerist attitudes towards online information and media. As such, Dreaming Beyond AI is a collectively shaped and deeply relational experiment that draws inspiration from Ursula Le Guin's text ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, adrienne maree brown's ‘emergent strategy’ framework, Arturo Escobar's ‘pluriverse’, the Design Justice Network, and the work of many others.
Nushin Isabelle Yazdani is a transformation designer, artist, and AI design researcher. She works with machine learning, design justice, and intersectional feminist practices, and writes about the systems of oppression of the present and the possibilities for just and free futures. At Superrr Lab, Nushin works as a project manager on creating feminist tech policies. With her collective dgtl fmnsm, she curates and organizes community events at the intersection of technology, art, and design. Nushin has lectured at various universities, is a Landecker Democracy Fellow and a member of the Design Justice Network. She has been selected as one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2021.
For Dreaming Beyond AI, Nushin heads creative direction, and works on concept development and curation.
Sarah Diedro Jordão is a communications strategist, a social justice activist, and a podcast producer. She was formerly a UN Women and Youth Ambassador, has served as a strategic advisor to the North-South Center of the Council of Europe on intersectionality in policymaking. Sarah currently works as a freelance consultant in storytelling, communications strategy, event moderation, and educational workshop creation.
For Dreaming Beyond AI, Sarah has led the communications strategy and implementation.
Iyo Bisseck is a designer, programmer, and artist. Her work explores biases that show the link between technologies and systems of domination, with a specific focus on racial bias in the realization of virtual agents.Through her work as a website designer, she also supports many initiatives to have a digital archive. As an artist, she is interested in creating alternative and collaborative narratives using virtual tools.
For Dreaming Beyond AI, Iyo has created the web design and undertook the technical realization of the platform.
Dreaming Beyond AI's concept was birthed by Nushin Yazdani and Buse Çetin, but influenced and inspired by the works, thoughts, tireless love, care, and tenacity of many incredible feminist voices.
The web platform is designed and coded by Iyo Bisseck, and the communication strategy has been created by Sarah Diedro. We received consistently incredible support from Ulla Heinrich as Creative Production Exhibition Lead. Special advisors for Dreaming Beyond AI were Sarah Chander, Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer and Maya Indira Ganesh. Meera Ghani supported with the overall flow of the project, Zain Assaad helped with uploading, and Victoria Kure-Wu has worked on the UX quality assessment. Tadleeh provided the music for the Pluriverse.
We would like to thank our past partners for their support:
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If you want to chat with us or are interested in contributing to
Dreaming Beyond AI, please let us know:
hello@dreamingbeyond.ai
Since we each work various jobs,
forgive us if we take a bit of time to get back to you.
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Dreaming Beyond AI is a space for critical and constructive knowledge, visionary fiction & speculative art and community-organising. This website project uses AI as a gateway to broader societal questions around marginalisation, imagination, futurism, feminism and how we experience the present. The goal of the project is to de-center technology and use it as a tool rather than main instrument for connection and a coming together. It is an experiment to a curated space where people enter with a shared sense of values and agreements.
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AI Violence
Violence and trauma open psychic wounds that harden us and limit our vitality. It is the heavy knot entangled with unacknowledged pain that we feel in our bodies and it disconnects us from the true self. Technological change and automation have been a cause for trauma across geographies and times, particularly for the most marginalised. As essential processes and functions such as hiring, medicine, and care are automated and the public space is increasingly curated by algorithms, how does this interact with individual and collective trauma? Does it create new psychic wounds that go unacknowledged and unhealed?
How do the addictive patterns on apps and platforms create violence and reinforce trauma? How are some people and communities denied their humanity, existence, identity and so on through technologically-mediated ways? Can we envision trauma-informed technologies? What are the technologies of healing?
Intelligence
Intelligence is the main conceptual and philosophical underpinning of AI technologies and ideologies. What is considered intelligent has been influential in shaping the trajectory of AI technologies. The mainstream conception of intelligence, which favours abstract thinking, emerged out of oppressive structures and has been weaponized to justify domination and colonization. These radicalized and gendered understandings of intelligence prevail in popular AI discourse today.
If intelligence is a foundational concept of AI, how can we understand, question, and redefine it? Are there other forms of intelligence that AI should reflect? Or are there some that AI already reflects but that are not yet acknowledged?
Machine Vision & Feeling
How do algorithms and machines see? How do we understand and imagine the machine vision? How does it feel to be seen by a machine? From CAPTCHAs that test our humanity to facial recognition algorithms at airports that verify our identity – how do these experiences make us feel? Who do the machines see? Who do they exclude? What politics of visibility does machine vision create?
Patterns
AI techniques such as machine learning and deep learning help find patterns, features, and correlations in large amounts of data. Pattern recognition systems for classification, prediction and optimization are highly marketed upon and are paving the way to a new knowledge regime – some argue that they are partly replacing theory as a means of knowledge production.
However, AI pattern recognition can also be understood as marking the boundaries of ‘normalcy’ – leaving out noise and outliers that are usually those who can't fit in. Whose patterns are we looking at? What purpose does this pattern-finding serve? Are we talking about freeing patterns, or about patterns that extend the coloniality of power?
Patterns in nature and our existence are portals to interconnectivity and signs of nature's wisdom. How can we think of nature’s patterns and AI patterns together, rather than seeing them as opposed to each other? Is there any way, any examples, demonstrations, or strategies, through which we can find where AI patterns act as portals and markers of interconnectivity in the universe?
Refusal
Most of the time, our technological futures seem and feel quite inevitable. ‘Technological progress’ is a core characteristic of the discourse of modernity, and AI hype is deeply entangled with this. The idea of inevitable technological progress undermines the agency and decision-making power of collectives and erases moments of collective refusal. What are examples of technological refusal when it comes to AI technologies? How can we amplify these narratives? How can refusal be comprehended as not only a reactionary but also a generative response? What if refusal is the only way for some communities to claim agency?
Planet Earth & Outrastructure
What is the impact of AI systems on the earth? Why are AI's high energy consumption, carbon footprint, and dependance on rare earth minerals so unfamiliar to and absent from the collective conscious? How does AI rely on the same inequitable power structures that extract labour and creativity from people? How can we think of AI within a climate justice framework? What are the stories of the earth? What policymaking proposals could address the environmental cost of computation beyond monetization?
Future-Present Vibrations
Our future seems defined by data colonialism, extractivism, competitiveness, and all-destroying growth desire. It seems so much easier to dream up dystopian visions of the future than to create concrete ideas of worlds that are plural and worth living in for everyone. Yet these are all the more important. We can only live in a more just world if we dare to imagine it first.
What are the visions, fractals, practices, sounds, and vibrations of future, present, and past – beyond linear thinking? Future/present/past, as all exists at the same time. How do we practice upwards?
AI & Relationality
The modern/Western world is structured and ruled by metaphysical assumptions embedded in binary thinking, naturalized universals, liberal humanism, social rationalization, economism, and entrenched ideas of progress, order, freedom, and agency. AI technologies are imagined, created, and designed to respond to the needs of racial capitalism, binary thinking, and atomized individualism. Solutions for mitigating AI harm that use the same logics are not enough.
How would a radical ontological and epistemological shift feel? Can AI ever be relational?
Pluriverse
The website itself and the process through which it is created reflect our intentions and challenge deeply rooted ways of thinking, knowing and being in the digital realm. For instance, we intend to challenge the expectation of seamless design interfaces and fast, frictionless digital experience, as well as consumerist attitudes towards online information and media. As such, Dreaming Beyond AI is a collectively shaped and deeply relational experiment that draws inspiration from Ursula Le Guin's text ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, adrienne maree brown's ‘emergent strategy’ framework, Arturo Escobar's ‘pluriverse’, the Design Justice Network, and the work of many others.
In the loop
This project is a digital garden to explore Dreaming Beyond AI’s very first Residency. Residents presentations, highlights and behind the scenes of the journey.
Coalition Building in Times of AI: Intersecting Struggles residency
Dreaming Beyond AI invites you to apply to its 2025 artist-activist residency that aims to explore coalition building in times of AI. We are looking for four artist-activists in residence who will work individually and together to interrogate this topic in a creative way from April to June 2025.
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People
Dreaming Beyond AI is a collective, changing body of work that has been shaped by various artists, researchers, writers, activists, designers, scientists, community organizers, dreamers, and thinkers.
These are the people who have contributed to Dreaming Beyond AI, in order of first name.