November 14, 2024 | Most Popular

Now Is the Time To Uplift Art That Imagines New Futures

A theme we often return to on Creativity Squared is art’s critical role in shaping our future. By showing us where the decisions facing us today may lead us tomorrow, for better or worse, art can caution us against our worst tendencies and inspire us to our best.

Art and storytelling’s impacts on our imagination have repeatedly come up in interviews with guests like “the mother of cognitive design,” Joanna Pena Bickley, artist Karen Palmer (aka “The Storyteller From The Future”), Afrofuturist scholar Dr. Walter Greason, and many others.

But art isn’t created in a vacuum; it’s subject to the perception and demands of audiences, which determines what art gets made and how that art affects the dominant narratives about our future.

Inspired by a recent encounter with a young person, Helen got us thinking deeper about how cynical many of our pop culture references are toward the future, especially regarding technology. As a result, this week’s blog post is an essential reminder that the stories we tell about the future impact what it becomes.

On Friday, Helen presented to an audience of primarily Black men pursuing their bachelor’s degrees at Kent State University while serving prison sentences. While discussing the power of storytelling and imagination during the A.I. paradigm shift, one student suggested that we already know what the future will look like thanks to sci-fi narratives about authoritarian dystopias, mass surveillance, restricted freedom, corporatocracy, and corruption.

Sadly, the student is right; we don’t have enough stories in mainstream pop culture that give us hope about the future or make us think critically about how our actions can prevent artificial intelligence’s worst outcomes.

So this week we’re resurfacing the A.I. Dilemma, the eye-opening work by Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, which goes over the many ways that A.I. can go very, very wrong if we don’t handle its development with care. They share a powerful history lesson about how art changed the world’s fate by showing us the consequences of our decisions.

We share some thoughts from guests on the importance of art that shows us not only the potential consequences, but also the benefits of the decisions we face today. We also highlight some of the institutions we’ve featured on the show that do the vital work of building audiences for new narratives.

The A.I. Dilemma and “The Day After”: How Art Averted Catastrophe

Created and presented by the Center for Humane Technology co-founders Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, “The A.I. Dilemma” is a sobering look at artificial intelligence’s most significant risks to society. The entire presentation (embedded above) is a must-watch, particularly where they discuss the movie that helped de-escalate nuclear tensions during the Cold War.

Screened on television in both the U.S. and Russia in the early 1980s, “The Day After” was a made-for-TV movie that may have helped avert nuclear annihilation by showing the public what it would look like. Watched by over 100 million people around the world (it still holds the record for the highest-rated TV movie in history), the film helped influence both public opinion and official U.S. policy against nuclear conflict.

After an advance screening on Columbus Day 1983, President Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that the film changed his mind on the prevailing policy regarding nuclear war.

Connecting back to the A.I. Dilemma and the student in Helen’s audience, we’re living through another moment in history where art can shake us out of complacency.

Tristan and Aza say that’s why they talk to audiences of creatives, leaders, and entrepreneurs. They like to conclude their presentations with a simple request for artists:

“The world needs your help.”

We’d like to add a line directed toward audiences: “The world needs your interest in alternative narratives about our future,” because those narratives are out there, but as the saying goes, “where attention goes, energy flows.”

Supporting Artworks and Artists that Envision New Futures

Just like “The Day After” played a valuable role in our social discourse by showing how nuclear aggression could destroy us all, we need similar stories for the age of artificial intelligence.

Last year, Creativity Squared interviewed “The Storyteller From the Future,” Karen Palmer, who builds interactive and immersive digital art experiences with A.I. and other technology.

“The future is not something that happens to us, but it’s something that we create together.” – Karen Palmer

One of her projects, “Consensus Gentium,” imagines a near-future world where cameras and smart devices track a person’s every move, like the modern version of 1984. It’s an interactive film that “watches you back” through a camera connected to an A.I. model trained on body and facial language. To complete the mission, participants have to keep their physical composure through stressful situations so they’re not labeled non-compliant and stopped in their tracks.

“The Day After” wouldn’t have been as effective at shifting public opinion if it hadn’t been distributed so widely through television, the broadest medium of the time. Karen also told us how important it is that access to critical art is democratized. “Consensus Gentium” is now available for free download as an iPhone app here.

Imagining Futures We Can Aspire To

At Creativity Squared, we believe it’s just as essential to uplift narratives that imagine the futures we want to inhabit.

In one of our earliest episodes, Joanna Peña-Bickley told us how she’s directly funding the creation of new stories about artificial intelligence. She says she wants to shift the narrative from the cold, often malicious, and sometimes genocidal depictions of the technology in Hollywood and other pop culture.

“If we continue to tell dystopian stories, we will not get to solve for the important things around climate, our health, our society.” – Joanna Peña-Bickley

Dr. Walter Greason recently joined us on Episode 71 to discuss how narratives rise to dominance when multiple mediums, like digital, experiential, broadcast, and others, converge around the same theme. As a believer in comic books’ power to push the imagination of what’s possible, he seized the opportunity to co-create the blueprint for Wakanda, the fictional home city of Marvel’s Black Panther superhero.

As Dr. Greason points out, there was a time when Black people were absent from sci-fi stories of the future. Yet in the narrative of Black Panther, the most advanced civilization on Earth lies in the heart of Africa. The revival and success of the Black Panther franchise shows how much demand there is for visions of futures we can aspire to.

We’ve also heard from people inside the institutions that uplift and support new narratives, who are working to build audiences for the stories that don’t get the same attention as comic books.

Vice President of Equitable Arts Advancement at ArtsWave, Janice Liebenberg, told us on Episode 9 how her organization expands audiences for bold new stories from the BIPOC artists it supports in Cincinnati.

As the Artistic Director for Europe’s largest art tech, and culture festival, Gerfried Stocker shared how gatherings like Ars Electronica help us navigate the complex relationships between technology and society. He said in Episode 11 that art is how we see through the ambiguity of the great changes happening around us.

“The quality of art is not just in the beautiful result. It’s in the way we get to this moment of beauty. And the moment of beauty always goes through an experience of ambiguity.” – Gerfried Stocker

Seek The Future You Want To See

At this critical point in human history, with A.I. and other transformative technologies reshaping our world, the stories we tell about our future have never been more important. Just as “The Day After” helped humanity grasp the existential stakes of nuclear proliferation, we need potent narratives that help us understand the risks and opportunities of our technological future. These stories must do more than simply warn us of potential dangers – they must inspire us to imagine and work toward better outcomes.

The artists, creators, and institutions featured in this piece are already leading the way, crafting narratives that challenge the dominant dystopian view of our future. From Karen Palmer’s immersive surveillance state to the Afrofuturist vision of Wakanda that inspired millions, to Joanna Peña-Bickley funding new AI narratives – art can be a strong catalyst for positive change. Their work demonstrates that we expand our collective imagination of what’s possible when we make space for diverse voices and perspectives.

The challenge lies with all of us as audiences and consumers of culture. We must seek out and support work that dares to imagine hopeful futures while acknowledging the serious challenges we face.

By directing our attention and resources toward these alternative narratives, we can help shift the cultural conversation from inevitable decline to possibility and agency in shaping our future.

Now Is the Time To Uplift Art That Imagines New Futures

The A.I. Dilemma and “The Day After”: How Art Averted Catastrophe

Supporting Artworks and Artists that Envision New Futures

Imagining Futures We Can Aspire To

Seek The Future You Want To See

Links in this episode: