Plural Futures: Encoding AI Through Sound, Movement, and Decolonial Thought

Plural Futures: Encoding AI Through Sound, Movement, and Decolonial Thought

A cross-disciplinary programme by Reforum, in conjunction with arebyte's current exhibition What Is It Like? , reimagining artificial intelligence as a space of plurality and relation through conversations, a lecture, and a workshop.

Could the widespread use of artificial intelligence and large language models — often biased toward dominant, politicised worldviews — still carry the traces of failed techno-utopian dreams? Dreams that once promised progress, yet continue to perpetuate colonial logics and economic exploitation to this day.

Produced by Alya Kanibelli, Reforum, this public programme explores how technological narratives are constructed, which worldviews have been privileged, and what embodied, sonic, and performative forms of knowledge might offer alternate blueprints for AI futures.

Bringing together scholars, artists, and practitioners working across AI, choreography, and sound, Plural Futures asks how we might reimagine technological imaginaries through relational, decolonial, and more-than-human perspectives — shifting towards a polyphonic, co-authored technosphere of plurality.

Programme Schedule

• 2:00 PM: Gathering
  
• 3:00 PM: Introduction
  
• 3:15 PM: Pre-recorded Welcome
  w/ curator Helen Starr and philosopher David Chalmers (pre-recorded)
  
• 3:45 PM: Keynote
  “What is it like…to decolonise our imagination?”
  w/ writer & researcher Clea Bourne
  
• 4:30 PM: Artist Lecture
  “Unbearable Darkness: Dancing with Spectres of the Past”
  w/ artist Choy Ka Fai
  
• 5:15 - 5:30 PM: Interval
  
• 5:30 PM: Conversation
  “Transcosmic Portals: Trickster Thinking and Decolonial Futures”
  w/ artist Kira Xonorika and curator Helen Starr
  
• 6:10 PM: Workshop
  “Chorus of the Techno-Sonosphere”
  w/ vocal performer, researcher & designer Amina Abbas-Nazari

*The gallery opens from 1 PM to the public. Please arrive early if you want to see the exhibition.

Programme Details

Keynote

What is it like…to decolonise our imagination?
Clea Bourne

Artificial intelligence continues to evolve through shared narratives, based partly on other-worldliness, shock-and-awe, and magic. Amid this rapid technological change, asserting the human — identity, emotion, and imagination — has never been more vital.

Dr Clea Bourne examines how the hidden power structures behind AI assert themselves in daily life while remaining largely invisible. She brings together perspectives on the human, imagination, and decolonial thought to ask: Whose imagination is at work behind current AI narratives? How did these narratives take hold so quickly, and become so convincing? How have AI ‘imagineers’ succeeded in getting us to share in their technological dream, regardless of how few of us might truly benefit?

In particular, Clea’s keynote explores how technological power has mobilised our emotions in response to AI and automation, using these emotional responses to obscure the colonial connections between AI technologies and current political disruption.

Artist Lecture

Unbearable Darkness: Dancing with Specters of the Past
Choy Ka Fai

In Unbearable Darkness, Choy Ka Fai invokes the spirit of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata using motion capture and game engine — crafting a cybernetic séance that collapses time and territory beyond Western binaries.

In this artist lecture, Choy reflects on the creative process behind the work and asks: What does it mean to code the ghost of another culture? How might technology serve not as a colonising force, but as a medium for transcultural dialogue?

Conversation

Transcosmic Portals: Trickster Thinking and Decolonial Futures
Kira Xonorika in conversation with Helen Starr

This conversation explores the intersection of critical making, Indigenous knowledge systems, and AI consciousness — positioning decolonial imagination as a creative force for rethinking our relationships with technology and the future.

Rather than following Western progress narratives that have led to climate change and ecocide, the discussion turns to Indigenous epistemologies as foundational for building alternate ways of being and knowing. Drawing on Carib and Guaraní cosmologies, the speakers consider how algorithmic thinking exists within Indigenous systems — from sustainable forestry to trans-mechanical ceremonial structures, relational mapping, and seven-generational time.

By engaging these traditions with contemporary AI, we explore: How Trickster ways, rooted in subversion and transformation, can restructure knowledge systems and reshape consciousness.What informational rivers running between worlds can teach us about interconnectedness, inviting AI to be a relational, adaptable force rather than rigid and deterministic.

Workshop

Chorus of the Techno-Sonosphere
Amina Abbas-Nazari

AI increasingly mediates how we’re heard — decoding our behaviours and personalities through voice and sonic data. Meanwhile, technology has long enabled us to hear beyond human limits, from the stethoscope to satellite signals.

But how do we want to be heard by machines? How might we reshape the ways technology listens — and allows us to listen, in turn?

In this participatory workshop, we’ll collectively improvise a Chorus of the Techno-Sonosphere using sounds only made audible through machines. From there, we’ll speculate on future modes of sonic communication — imagining new ways of listening to one another, to ourselves, and to the universe.

Speaker Bios

David Chalmers:

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is the author of The Conscious Mind (1996), Constructing The World (2010), and Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022). He is known for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard's play *The Hard Problem*, and for the idea of the “extended mind,” which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds.

Clea Bourne

Dr Clea Bourne is a Reader in Media and Market Studies in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her current research examines technologies, markets and inequalities. She is author of AI hype, promotional culture and affective capitalism in AI Ethics, and co-editor of Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance and Inequality (2023) among other publications. Clea is also an associate editor of AI and Society, and editorial board member of Economy and Society.

Helen Starr

Helen Starr is an Afro-Indigenous Trinidadian world-building curator and founder of commissioning platform The Mechatronic Library (2010). Her immersive commissions have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Starr has established an Indigenous Carib Cosmotechnic with a focus on feminism, gender fluidity, virtual realities and nature-godded worlds. Her central thesis is that the brain subjectively renders reality. She lives in London and is devoted to the writings of the Jamaican philosopher Sylver Wynter.

Choy Ka Fai

Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. At the heart of his research is a continuous exploration of the metaphysics of the human body. Through research expeditions, pseudo-scientific experiments and documentary performances, Ka Fai appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body.

Kira Xonorika

Kira Xonorika is an artist, author and futurist whose work explores connections between technoscience, sovereignty, temporality, world-building, and magic. She’s received awards, residencies and fellowships by Akademie der Künste, Hyundai Artlab, Dreaming Beyond AI, Momus and Eyebeam, the Salzburg Global Seminar, and Ars Electronica. Recent exhibitions include REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA), Honor Fraser Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and arebyte gallery (London, UK).

Amina Abbas-Nazari

Dr Amina Abbas-Nazari is a designer, researcher and vocal performer. Amina has researched the voice in conjunction with emerging technology since 2008. Their recently completed TECHNE-funded PhD investigated the sound and sounding of voices in AI conversational and machine listening systems, exploring the social, cultural and ethical implications of AI voice profiling practices. Their work has been presented internationally including the London Design Festival, Design Museum, Barbican Centre, V&A, Lisson Gallery London, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biennial, Critical Media Lab, Switzerland, Litost Gallery, Prague, Pedreira, Portugal and Harvard University, America. Amina has performed internationally with choirs and regularly collaborates with artists as an experimental vocalist.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

What Is It Like? is a group exhibition that explores the nature of subjective reality, inspired by Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (Nagel 1974, 435). Curated by Helen Starr, the exhibition reflects her practice of investigating the brain as a machine that constructs tailored realities (Starr, "Rendering Reality and The Poetics of Touch.")

Featuring artworks by Anna Bunting-Branch, Choy Ka Fai, Damara Ingles, Katarzyna Krakowia, Lawrence Lek and Kira Xonorika, this exhibition celebrates how artists use AI tools and techniques to craft cultural meaning, bridging creativity, innovation and humanity into our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

The exhibition delves into language, memory, and the boundaries of consciousness, shedding light on why AI models currently remain incapable of true sentience, emotion, or self-awareness. Through artworks employing soundscapes, VR, game engines, and the metaverse, it invites viewers to navigate the layered complexities of perception, experience, and consciousness—mirroring with its interactive stage-crafting how AI technologies generate immersive yet illusory realities.

Read more about the exhibition here. Following the opening, the exhibition is free and open to public from Tuesday to Sunday, 1 - 6pm until 4th May 2025.