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Introducing (Re)Imagining AI Interventions /// Intervening (into) AI Imaginaries

Mary Elizabeth Luka, Aline Zara and Caroline Klimek
In this introduction, we share the process of developing this double special issue for Imaginations: from the call for papers to the articles we present in this first special issue volume, and beyond. When we proposed this special issue in 2024, we began by thinking about how to live and work with the rapidly-changing analyses of artificial intelligence softwares, moral panics, and resistances to and takeups of the already-voracious consumption of existing oppressive datasets and social relations. Building on recent work about rebuilding, revisualizing, repairing, or refusing inevitable pathways for AI ubiquity, we were certain we could find other ways of thinking. Drawing from deep scholarly engagement with issues of ethical database scraping and intellectual property violations, environmental impacts, and workflow interferences and augmentations, we asked contributors: What do we/they/you want to happen next? Where do we want to be next year, or five years from now? What are the next 25 years going to look like? The articles we offer in this special issue are mapping and pushing boundaries around the ways we encounter, engage with, and consider the possibilities for AI. This introduction connects these nine articles and how they rethink the world through Indigenous sovereignty, Ubuntu intelligence, speculative methods in policy and practice; and embedded in visual culture sectors through folklore, innovation, labour, archives, and the environment.

Future Imaginaries of Indigenous AI

Ceyda Yolgörmez, Suzanne Kite, Michelle Lee Brown and Jason Edward Lewis
What lies in the future of AI, and who gets to define it? The paper addresses this question through “Future Imaginaries of Indigenous AI” workshops that open space for imagining relational, community-grounded technologies. Considering AI models as cultural systems, we position the workshops as interventions into AI’s cultural foundations. We invite the reader into the workshop space by interweaving our positioning alongside the imagining exercise, and provide the reasoning and structure within which our practice takes shape. We tease out the themes that are embedded in the exercise to highlight the critical and generative dimensions, and conclude with reflections.

Manifesting Plural Futures: Resisting AI's Colonising Impulses Through Counter-Imaginaries

Adio-Adet Dinika
This manifesto argues that artificial intelligence operates as a neocolonial epistemic infrastructure, extracting value from Global South data workers while erasing their cultural knowledge. Grounded in ethnographic research across East and Southern Africa, it advances a tripartite praxis of counter-imagination: repair, refusal, and reworlding. Drawing on decolonial theory, feminist scholarship, and African philosophies, the manifesto challenges dominant visual-conceptual frameworks in AI and calls for community-led alternatives rooted in epistemic justice and technological sovereignty. It is a call to reclaim imagination as a liberation technology and to manifest plural technological futures from below.

Radical Softness as a Tool to Dismantle and Rebuild our Human-AI Future

Lina Eklund
This article presents P, a speculative chatbot experienced as an interactive installation that explores how radical softness can reframe human–AI relations. Challenging techno-utopian narratives of AI as objective, efficient, and solution-oriented, P foregrounds AI’s situated weaknesses, including bias, error, partiality, and environmental cost. Encountered through a physical booth and a soft, heart-shaped controller, users engage an AI that openly acknowledges its dependence on human-made data. Drawing on auto-ethnographic and reflective design methods, the article argues that radical softness can function as a critical design strategy, provoking alternative imaginaries in which AI reflects shared vulnerability rather than technological perfection.

The Consultation Machine: Experiments in AI Futures, Literacies and Public Participation

Fenwick McKelvey, Maurice Jones, Robert Marinov, Luciano Frizzera and Meaghan Wester
The Consultation Machine was our third attempt to create a workshop for publics to engage and debate AI futures. Our efforts devolved from sincere attempts to use strategic foresight to shape AI policy, towards AI-assisted future-making, and finally to the Consultation Machine. We document these three different prototypes to explain the evolution of their design, shaped by participatory methods, and to critically reflect on the results. Our efforts add to a growing literature investigating how AI changes democratic policy making in technoscientific capitalist systems, wherein democracy may yet become just another “problem” to be streamlined and automated by algorithmic “solutions.”

Automated Myth and the Postsocialist Digital State: The Imperial Trick of the Kratt AI Initiative in Estonia

Neda Atanasoski and Redi Koobak
This article examines Estonia’s Kratt AI initiative as a model for automating government services with AI systems. Responding to the state’s naming of these systems after the kratt—a mythic servant that turns on its master when left idle—the article advances the concept of “automated myth”: folklore embedded in AI to naturalize links between technological progress and liberal democracy. In Estonia, this myth performs an imperial trick, indigenizing technofutures as national heritage while obscuring the imperiality of Silicon Valley capitalism that has shaped postsocialist transformations of the e-republic. It shows how policy branding and interfaces shape the cultural and political landscapes of AI governance.

Stable Diffusion of Innovation: Reimagining the Controversial Adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries

Maxime Harvey
This article theorizes the controversial adoption of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) in the creative industries by articulating a sociology of uses attentive to technological appropriation and controversy analysis. Drawing from ethnographic research in a film cooperative, it introduces the concepts of actions of dissidence, situated dissonance, and critical distance to analyze the uneven negotiation of Gen AI integration. Far from being marginal disruptions, controversies are framed as constitutive of innovation processes, shaping both sociotechnical imaginaries and governance. The article argues that Gen AI’s diffusion must be understood through its overflows, which reveal contested subjectivities, aesthetic values, and political economies of creativity.

GenAI and Precarity in Canadian Software Development: A Transfeminist Intersectional Analysis of Marginalized Workers’ Experiences

Dani Rudnicka-Lavoie
This paper explores how increased use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) impacts workers from historically underrepresented communities in the software development industry in Canada (women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+). Drawing on 15 semi-structured qualitative interviews, I argue that existing labour inequalities are exacerbated by GenAI automation. By employing a critical transfeminist intersectional framework to this exploratory study, I centre the accounts of these marginalized workers in the discussion of increased automation in digital labour. This study finds that the overall devaluation of tech labour disrupts efforts at equity, diversity, and inclusion and exacerbates precarity in an increasingly precarious neoliberal job market.

All That It Keeps Hidden: Rodell Warner, Archival Augmentations, and (Mis)Handling the Past

Stephen Charbonneau
Recent scholarship on interactive media has insisted we change how we talk about artificial intelligence (AI), preferring “collaborator” over “tool” as a descriptor of AI’s role in the creative process. This paper will consider such claims by centring the work of Trinidadian artist, Rodell Warner. Warner’s recent work in photography and digital media such as his series, “Augmented Archive,” has earned him several prestigious residencies and awards, particularly for his AI-generated interventions into the legacies of the colonial archive. His projects deploy digital technologies and machine learning to reimagine the visual archive and its frustrating gaps when it comes to representations of Caribbean peoples. The paper concludes with an assessment of the limitations of the “collaboration” argument – centring Warner’s artistic agency – while also arguing AI-generated art leaves one with a nagging melancholia that such technologies fail at decolonial redress while offering necessary, but insufficient radical visions.

The Act of Seeing with Mechanical Eyes

Steve F. Anderson
This article expands upon and documents a practice-based inquiry into the transformation of contemporary visual culture, engaging debates around machine vision, operational imaging, and generative AI. Featuring a series of original digital artworks alongside the multimodal interactive/immersive environment Machine Visions: Mojave, the article situates hybrid images and environments as neither purely representational nor rigidly instrumental, but as sites where perception, computation, and environmental awareness are actively co-produced. The Mojave Desert—where Joshua trees serve as a climate-sensitive bioindicator—functions as both object of study and critical test case, revealing the speculative potentials of more than human ways of seeing and knowing.