Discussions: Speculative Hardware

May 24, 2026 @ 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM GMT+2 Add to Calendar
Room 3

Gather together to discuss speculative hardware.

That Which Sustains: Afro-now-ist Musings on Open Hardware

A response to Afro-futurism, Afro-now-ism insists that we respond to the urgent issues that prevent us from thriving and the systemic boundaries that make these issues seem insurmountable. This presentation will share a framework to engage this call to action through open hardware.

Maya Williams

Maya Williams is a multimedia artist and writer with a background in fabrication. Their work explores the ecological foundations of Black, Indigenous, and Queer cultural technologies as a means for informing how we live with and design emerging technologies. Their work is particularly informed by practices of caretaking, resistance, and land stewardship.

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Designing Time difference: creating autoethnographic speculative objects

I made a watch that doesn’t tell time. It looks at the system of time and asks how we might redesign it to be more responsive to our natural rhythms. The process of making it looked at how we shift design methods away from universalized need and centre marginalized values.

Izzie Colpitts-Campbell

Izzie works to critically examine our interaction with technology, straddling the line between art and design through an interdisciplinary approach. Her focus is on exploring novel ways to engage with our world, whether technology-mediated or not. They are currently working on their MA in Fashion Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.

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"Somoure": Assistive robotics as a practice of care

Robots are not neutral; they embody social, political, and economic values. When care is automated, assistive robotics sit between production and social reproduction. Somoure is an artistic research project that critically engages this tension by reproducing and hacking a lab-developed feeding robot through hacker-maker practices and a co-design process with activists, engineers, philosophers, and artists.

Mónica Rikić

Electronic artist from Barcelona. I develop my practice through creative coding and electronics, combining them with non-digital objects to create handmade robots and weird electronics. I’m interested in critical thinking around alternative technologies and open hardware. I’ve been working in art for many years.

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