Visit to Stockholm University of the Arts 22.04.26

This week the Future of Good Decisions project had the pleasure of visiting SKH, Stockholm University of the Arts, hosted by Petra Bauer and Paola Torres Núñez del Prado. Connal Parsley and Paola Torres Núñez del Prado gave a seminar on “The Textures of Value: Creative Research, Technical Mediation, and Econormativity in the 'Age of AI'". In their talks, the presenters addressed methodological, political and conceptual aspects of their research practices, spanning creative arts, critical legal research, and artificial intelligence. Both engaged with algorithmic technologies to focus on 'bottom-up' approaches to value and values--as well as the need to acculturate new values as part of our response to today's eco-technical inflection point.

Connal focused on the connection between two major strands of the Future of Good Decisions project. First, the use of Live Action Role Play as a method for prefiguratively modelling participatory co-design and system evaluation in government. This research has a speculative dimension in which we suspend the established value criteria through which administrative decision-making is assessed, asking instead what new conceptions of value and values might emerge through a collective experimental practice. Second, the ‘Econormativities’ project, being developed with Professor Margaret Davies (Flinders) and Dr Conor Heaney (Kent), joined recently also by Professor Scott Veitch (Hong Kong). This project is developing an alternative to accounts of normativity as something made or discovered exclusively by humans, to guide and measure human activity. An 'econormative' approach understands normativity as inherently ecological, made through complex relations between co-evolving entities, encompassing material, technical, social, and processual aspects of life, guiding their evolution.

This combination of elements is also present in Paola Torres Núñez del Prado’s work, which is developing new approaches to economic and social value through a sophisticated multi-modal artistic research practice engaging with the potential of algorithmic networks. The image on this post is drawn from Paola’s work Qhipa Khipu.

Thanks to SKH, Petra Bauer and Paola Torres Núñez del Prado as well as all the seminar participants for the very stimulating discussion, and a chance to think inventively together.