AI Temple - 2040
In a silent sanctuary a gentle whisper wakes me up. “Zero Emissions... one breath at a time” is repeated endlessly as a mantra. The whisper insists that I partake in The AI Temple’s sacred rituals to rediscover my personal agency over the future. The whisper continues: “Be brave enough to open Pandora's box of pre-emptive algorithmic safety and absolute surveillance.” I close my eyes and allow my imagination to travel beyond the dystopia-utopia binary. A foggy, dusky smell blows into the temple and washes over my body and mind. It feels like a radical deep cleanse, and out of the fog, I emerge reborn. My hands feel tingly. A warm light grows within me, the veil of darkness is lifted. I open my eyes again, and realize I can see clearly now. “Thank you…” I whisper back into the ether. “You have illuminated the path before me...” Rejuvenated, I walk out of the temple into the light of infinite future possibilities.
Liminal Vision
Zhōuwéi Network: Embodied Ambitopias
Liminal Vision
How does it feel to live in 2041?
Enter three near-future worlds driven by different value paradigms: Dolphin Waves (New York City), a corporate playbour & wellness hub; Dragonfly (Netherlands), a technocratic state focusing on safety and harmony; and Project Gecko (multiple locations), a network of decentralised liquid democracies founded on inner healing through dance and movement. Who has power in these worlds? How is technology shaped by ideology? What does it mean to our relationships with and through our bodies?
Zhōuwéi Network is a worldbuilding research umbrella that explores the design of affective undertones in different speculative future societies, in dialogue with currently emerging technocultural developments. The fiction series ‘Embodied ambitopias’ (2021) zooms in on hypothetical mind-body exercises, combined with speculative interfaces and contrasting rhetorics to shed light on the differences, as well as the occasional similarities, between the three worlds.
Liminal Vision is a creative collaboration between Victor Evink (s x m b r a) and Emilia Tapprest (nvisible.studio).
