Dialogues on the Present of the Future
Dates:
Sat 09.05.26
14:00
Venue:
PACT Zollverein
Bullmannaue 20A
45327 Essen
Deutschland
Tickets
When purchasing tickets, you have the option of choosing between four different price categories based on your own assessment:
- Minimum price
- Reduced price
- Regular price
- Supporter price
Furthermore, we offer a number of free tickets so that everyone can participate, regardless of their income. Simply contact us or send us an email to service@pact-zollverein.de.
Admission
1 p.m.
Language
Spoken English
Culinary offering
In the evening, our gastronomy in the foyer offers regional, seasonal and fresh cuisine as well as a selection of drinks. Please note that we currently accept only cash payments here.
© Nonhuman Nonsense
On the second day of ›Hidden Futures‹ at PACT, artists and researchers will engage in a dialogue to explore different forms of knowledge and practices that go beyond the promises of technological developments. The future is conceived here as a present shaped by predictive systems that already organize and yield reality.
The programme brings together eight perspectives on phenomena where technology and visions of the future intersect – ranging from the cosmological to the everyday. In four rounds of talks, each of which will be followed by a Q&A session, topics such as the idea of legal personhood for Mars, the global flow of goods from China, predictive policing, AI infrastructures, disability justice technology, and urban planning in landscapes of extraction will be explored.
With Choy Ka Fai, Ren Loren Britton, Nonhuman Nonsense, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Yi Gu, Tomas Percival, Sarah Ciston and Chelsea Haramia.
PROGRAMME
2 p.m.
Welcome and Opening Remarks
2:15 p.m.
Cosmic Collective – Frictions between human and nonhuman worlds
Nonhuman Nonsense – ›Planetary Personhood‹
Chelsea Haramia – ›From AI to Aliens: Unsustainable Technology and the Extraterrestrial Turn‹
followed by a discussion and a Q&A
3:30 p.m.
Mapping China – Notes from the Yellow Magic Era & China, rendered
Choy Ka Fai – ›Notes from the Yellow Magic Era‹
Yi Gu – ›China, Rendered‹
followed by a discussion and a Q&A
4:40 – 5 p.m.
Break
5 p.m.
Shifting Language - The Technological Everyday & Disability Justice
Nelly Y. Pinkrah
Ren Loren Britton – ›INDEXING FOR DISABILITY JUSTICE: BLOCKS, PLATES, BOARDS, VOLUMES AND SHAFTS‹
followed by a discussion and a Q&A
6:15 p.m.
Our Digital Tools – Prison Records & AI War Cloud
Tomas Percival – ›Prison Records‹
Sarah Ciston – ›AI War Cloud‹
followed by a discussion and a Q&A
from 7:30 p.m.
Get-together & Bar in the foyer
Dates:
Sat 09.05.26
14:00
Venue:
PACT Zollverein
Bullmannaue 20A
45327 Essen
Deutschland
Tickets
When purchasing tickets, you have the option of choosing between four different price categories based on your own assessment:
- Minimum price
- Reduced price
- Regular price
- Supporter price
Furthermore, we offer a number of free tickets so that everyone can participate, regardless of their income. Simply contact us or send us an email to service@pact-zollverein.de.
Admission
1 p.m.
Language
Spoken English
Culinary offering
In the evening, our gastronomy in the foyer offers regional, seasonal and fresh cuisine as well as a selection of drinks. Please note that we currently accept only cash payments here.
PROGRAMME
Cosmic Collective – Frictions between human and nonhuman worlds
with Nonhuman Nonsense & Chelsea Haramia
Nonhuman Nonsense – ›Planetary Personhood‹
›Planetary Personhood‹ is an interplanetary campaign pursuing radical space decolonization. The project proposes legal personhood for the entire planet Mars, and considers the possibility of solidarity with the entities already there – the stones! Through a Universal Declaration of Martian Rights, the project asks: can humanity extend kinship and care to a planet, even without ›life‹?
© Nonhuman Nonsense
Chelsea Haramia – ›From AI to Aliens: Unsustainable Technology and the Extraterrestrial Turn‹
In this work, the artist posits the ›Extraterrestrial Turn‹, which is both a conceptual shift and a methodological tool that allows us to challenge anthropocentric and Earthbound frameworks of sustainable technology while at the same time exploring our role as a species-level collective that stands in responsibility – relations to the planetary, the extraplanetary, and the alien.
© Chelsea Haramia
Nonhuman Nonsense is a research-driven art and design collective working with social dreaming and world-making. They use "nonsense" as an antidote to "common sense" – embracing paradoxical stories to explore the ethical and metaphysical frictions between human and nonhuman worlds. By creating contradictory proposals, they show that separating these entangled worlds is, in itself, nonsense.
Dr. Chelsea Haramia is a philosopher and ethicist whose research takes root at the intersection of science, technology, values, and the environment. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Science and Thought (CST) at the University of Bonn, working on the ›Desirable AI‹ project. She is also co-Director of the Discovery and Futures Lab at the SETI Institute (Mountain View, California).
Nonhuman Nonsense is a research-driven art and design collective working with social dreaming and world-making. They use "nonsense" as an antidote to "common sense" – embracing paradoxical stories to explore the ethical and metaphysical frictions between human and nonhuman worlds. By creating contradictory proposals, they show that separating these entangled worlds is, in itself, nonsense.
Dr. Chelsea Haramia is a philosopher and ethicist whose research takes root at the intersection of science, technology, values, and the environment. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Science and Thought (CST) at the University of Bonn, working on the ›Desirable AI‹ project. She is also co-Director of the Discovery and Futures Lab at the SETI Institute (Mountain View, California).
Mapping China – Notes from the Yellow Magic Era & China, rendered
with Choy Ka Fai & Yi Gu
Choy Ka Fai – ›Notes from the Yellow Magic Era‹
In 2014, China announced the epic new silk road initiative as a global co-prosperity project. As the factory of the world at that time, it had a gripping power on the material domination of the world, and the vision was to transform itself in the next decade to emerge as the new superpower of the world. ›Notes from the Yellow Magic Era‹ is a project devoted to observe the Chinese influences on the world’s future. Choy Ka Fai is fascinated about the flow of Chinese goods to the rest of the world, and how China’s soft power infiltrates everyday lives around the world. The research begins at the trade and logistic superhighway from Yiwu to Madrid.
Yi Gu – ›China, Rendered‹
Yi Gu's project examines China’s ›Real-Scene 3D‹ initiative as a new infrastructure of territorial governance. Focusing on oblique photogrammetry, it asks how claims to seamless 3D realism depend on expert mediation, hidden labor, and new forms of data-driven land control, especially in rural China.
Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist whose practice reimagines the limits of the human body at the intersection of dance, media art, and performance. His multidisciplinary work transcends traditional realms to question realities beyond our own. His series ›CosmicWander‹ (2019–present) investigates Asian shamanic dance cultures through performance and exhibition, premiering at the Singapore Art Museum and tanzhaus nrw, Düsseldorf. His performance works have been presented by Sadler's Wells (London), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), and Kyoto Experiment (Japan). Recent exhibitions have been featured at the Biennale of Sydney, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn). Ka Fai holds an M.A. in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art, London.
Yi Gu is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. She works on modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on Asia, especially China. Her research spans politics of aesthetics, data visualization, Cold War visual culture, mass art and amateur practices, photography in Asia, and critical cartography and geospatial media.
Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist whose practice reimagines the limits of the human body at the intersection of dance, media art, and performance. His multidisciplinary work transcends traditional realms to question realities beyond our own. His series ›CosmicWander‹ (2019–present) investigates Asian shamanic dance cultures through performance and exhibition, premiering at the Singapore Art Museum and tanzhaus nrw, Düsseldorf. His performance works have been presented by Sadler's Wells (London), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), and Kyoto Experiment (Japan). Recent exhibitions have been featured at the Biennale of Sydney, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn). Ka Fai holds an M.A. in Design Interaction from the Royal College of Art, London.
Yi Gu is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. She works on modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on Asia, especially China. Her research spans politics of aesthetics, data visualization, Cold War visual culture, mass art and amateur practices, photography in Asia, and critical cartography and geospatial media.
Shifting Language - The Technological Everyday & Disability Justice
with Nelly Y. Pinkrah & Ren Loren Britton
Nelly Y. Pinkrah
Nelly Y. Pinkrah reads language itself as a historic, epistemic technology and traces its recursive operations across speech, sound and code through Caribbean, Black‑studies and media‑theory constellations. Her writing, sound‑scapes and visual interventions always converge on the relational, and she consciously creates moments that hold the weight of a room and let thought become shared and, possibly, collective.
© Nelly Y. Pinkrah
Ren Loren Britton – ›INDEXING FOR DISABILITY JUSTICE: BLOCKS, PLATES, BOARDS, VOLUMES AND SHAFTS‹
This index serves Disability Justice Tech. It tells stories with hir-her-his-storical technologies and negotiates affordances of naming affinity and embodiminded difference. Moving against techno-racial-capitalist narratives assuming that ‘we’ are only users – to be impacted upon and extracted from – here are a series of hir-storical intersectional, crip, Disabled, coalitional, queer, trans*, BIPoC innovations that shift terms around technology – towards the trans*crip plural.
Ren Loren Britton © Christian van't Hoen
Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a Black and media‑studies scholar whose research spans Black studies, media and technology, poetics, politics, and critical pedagogies. Her doctoral thesis investigates «The Technological Everyday» through Édouard Glissant in relation to language as technology, history, cybernetics, poetics, and epistemology. She co‑runs the School of (Un)Thought with Mitch Pfeifer (part of the ASchool network) and serves on the speakers’ circle of the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity (KriSol).
Ren Loren Britton is a trans-disciplinary artist-designer dancing with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy and disability justice. They make multi sensorial media installations. Trans*ness in their practice considers what would be needed so that – pleasure for all – would be possible. They attend to plural hir-his-her-stories and presents of social and technical infrastructures making lives accessible and possible.
Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a Black and media‑studies scholar whose research spans Black studies, media and technology, poetics, politics, and critical pedagogies. Her doctoral thesis investigates «The Technological Everyday» through Édouard Glissant in relation to language as technology, history, cybernetics, poetics, and epistemology. She co‑runs the School of (Un)Thought with Mitch Pfeifer (part of the ASchool network) and serves on the speakers’ circle of the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity (KriSol).
Ren Loren Britton is a trans-disciplinary artist-designer dancing with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy and disability justice. They make multi sensorial media installations. Trans*ness in their practice considers what would be needed so that – pleasure for all – would be possible. They attend to plural hir-his-her-stories and presents of social and technical infrastructures making lives accessible and possible.
Our Digital Tools – Prison Records & AI War Cloud
with Tomas Percival & Sarah Ciston
Tomas Percival – ›Prison Records‹
›Prison Records‹ investigates digital tools used in the prison and probation services in England/Wales. It examines how routine administrative tools (databases, risk assessments, and information-sharing protocols) exert significant, if often opaque, effects on incarcerated individuals' lives. At the same time, ›Prison Records‹ foregrounds the agency and resistance of those subjected to these systems.
Tomas Percival © Claudia Peppel
Sarah Ciston
›AI War Cloud‹ is an interactive database and art installation that maps military and commercial dual-use AI systems, explaining the current techno-imperial boomerang that is perpetuated by machine learning. It asks what are users' responsibilities when the digital tools they encounter daily are also used to wage war at a global scale.
Sarah Ciston © Paige Zangoglia
Tomas Percival is an artist and researcher whose work examines technologies of (in)security. He is co-editor of ›Border Environments‹ (2023), ›Militant Media‹ (2024), and ›Common Sensing‹ (2025). He holds an MFA from UCLA and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
Sarah Ciston is Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their artistic research builds tools to bring intersectional, critical–creative approaches to machine learning. Winner of the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize, they are the author of “A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets” and co-author of Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press, Spring 2026).
Tomas Percival is an artist and researcher whose work examines technologies of (in)security. He is co-editor of ›Border Environments‹ (2023), ›Militant Media‹ (2024), and ›Common Sensing‹ (2025). He holds an MFA from UCLA and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
Sarah Ciston is Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their artistic research builds tools to bring intersectional, critical–creative approaches to machine learning. Winner of the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize, they are the author of “A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets” and co-author of Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press, Spring 2026).
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