Playbook
I. Executive Summary
C/Change, a joint initiative from the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Gray Area and funded by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, aims to incubate new visions for cultural exchange in digital spaces.
The project investigates the potential for emerging technologies to enable inclusive, accessible fora for cross-cultural communication and mutual learning. Since its inception in 2021, C/Change has implemented a number of programs and activities, including:
- Creative R&D Lab: Across two Open Calls, C/Change received almost 400 compelling project proposals representing a diverse array of approaches to tech-enabled cultural exchange (see Figure 1). Two cohorts of multi-disciplinary creators were granted funding, mentorship, and support to produce interactive, scaleable prototypes that reflect one of C/Change’s three focus areas: feminist technologies, planetary futures, and digital democracy. Over the course of two Creative R&D Lab cycles, the initiative incubated 10 projects, developed by 31 lab members representing 10 countries around the globe, that re-envision cultural exchange for the future.
- Signals, a digital publication: Starting from the notion that dynamic technologies offer possibilities for bolstering cultural exchange in the 21st century, C/Change launched a digital platform to articulate the opportunity space of tech-enabled connection and explore design frameworks to support it. Signals brings together insights from key industry leaders, emerging thinkers, and interdisciplinary artists and designers in the form of critical inquiries and interviews.
- Public workshops: To bring the public into a co-creative design process, C/Change and the Creative R&D Lab teams hosted 10 interactive workshops at Gray Area in San Francisco, which were attended by over 150 community members with diverse backgrounds. Through these workshops, as well as panels, festivals, and other events, C/Change has brought together a unique network of practitioners with expertise in a wide array of disciplines, underscoring the intersectional nature of practicing cultural exchange in the digital age (see Figure 2).
- Events: C/Change also hosted a variety of events, including a panel on Whistleblowing for Change at Gray Area Festival 2022 (produced in partnership with Disruption Network Lab), a showcase of C/Change projects at Gray Area Festival 2023, and online public salons highlighting the outcomes of each Creative R&D Lab cycle. Together with City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, MIT Press, and the Centre for International Security Studies at University of Sydney, C/Change presented For the Protection of All Beings, a weekend symposium exploring the effects of advancing technologies on culture and the environment.
To consolidate the learnings accrued over the past two years of building toward the future of online cultural exchange, C/Change presents the following Playbook, a resource for designers, technologists, artists, cultural producers and organizations, and more looking to implement safe, inclusive, and forward-looking digital platforms that bring people together. The C/Change Playbook is organized around a set of ten principles, which sketch out a paradigm for cross-cultural interactions in virtual spaces as well as a speculative vision for how cultural exchange as a practice can evolve to meet the demands of our present moment. Each principle is grounded in a case study from the C/Change initiative, showing how the ideals discussed can be applied to real-world efforts. Intended to spark dialogue around new practices of online cultural exchange that incubate the kind of global coordination and collaboration required to tackle the existential challenges we face, the C/Change Playbook is a living resource that will only succeed through others’ reframing, expanding, and remixing of the insights to follow.
II. Joint Statement from Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Gray Area
What will cultural exchange look like in 2050? Emerging technologies have profoundly altered the fabric of human relations, reshaping the way we presently connect and envision our interactions in the future.
Social media, video conferencing, and instant messaging have already transcended geographical constraints, fostering instant communication and collaboration globally. Advanced immersive technologies and Generative AI continue to transform human interaction, blurring the line between reality and artificiality and underscoring the imperative for ongoing research to comprehend their impact and establish positive regulatory guidelines for development.
Looking toward the near future, how can we design virtual experiences that successfully foster conversations instead of perpetuating isolation? This question is not only at the heart of the different parts of the project, but also profoundly motivated the genesis of the initiative. In navigating this evolving landscape, the essence of the project is to harness these technological developments in order to support inclusive dialogues from diverse perspectives.
By synergizing our efforts, networks, and unique expertise, the collaborative partnership between the Goethe-Institut, with its longstanding commitment to fostering international cross-cultural dialogue, and Gray Area, a hub for a creative community across arts, science, technology, and the humanities, proved instrumental in shaping the success of the project. Together, we embarked on a journey to outline the forthcoming changes in cultural exchange practices, driven by a shared belief in the power of holistic, interdisciplinary collaboration.
Anchored in a commitment to experimental positive action and tangible outcomes, and guided by our thematic focus on planetary futures, digital democracies, and feminist technologies, we navigated a path toward collaborative action. This materialized as an R&D Lab, “Signals” magazine, workshops, festivals, and diverse contributions from a global community.
Similar to the other components of the C/Change initiative, this Playbook also emerges as an experiment, encapsulating our insights into 10 “operational” principles. It serves as a guide for those venturing into similarly crucial endeavors, inviting reflections on how these principles might adapt globally.
Gratitude extends to our exceptional team, with special acknowledgment to Hannah Scott, Raphael Arar, the whole team at the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Gray Area. Our sincere thanks to Peter Kettner, Nora-Nele Heinevetter, Renke Fahl-Spiewack, Elena Vera Simms, and the Foreign Office for their unwavering support from 2021-2023. We hold this collaboration in high regard and eagerly anticipate its continued success.
We look forward to your suggestions, questions, or creative inspirations as we collaboratively navigate the path to shape an inclusive and diverse future of human interaction and connection.
— Bettina Wodianka, Noémie Njangiru, and Nadav Hochman
III. Introduction
Evolving cultural exchange for the future
In a digitally activated world, do we find ourselves more closely connected, or are divisions with long histories becoming more deeply entrenched? What does cultural exchange look like in a world that dances between the blurry borders of the embodied and the virtual? What cultures are we exchanging, and what do we do with what we have shared and learned?
Since cultural exchange emerged as an idea and a practice, it has undergone constant transformation. Johannes Ebert, Secretary-General of the Goethe-Institut, notes the Institut’s shift toward “partnership-based cultural cooperation” through dialogue and co-production in recent decades.1 External forces have also necessitated an evolution in how we practice cultural exchange. The birth of the internet in the 1990s created an explosion of connections between individuals around the world, both accelerating and transforming the ways in which experiences, ideas, and stories are shared. This acceleration of many-to-many communication has broadened the scope of cultural exchange from an institutionally-led phenomenon to a cornerstone of our increasingly networked social lives.
Today, our challenges look much different than they have in the past. From a dawning climate emergency and the rise of authoritarianism globally to the explosion of artificial intelligence and an epidemic of social isolation, the problems we face require coordinated efforts across multiple levels of organization — in other words, change will not come from the top-down, but from collaboration between individuals, institutions, corporations, and governments. If cultural exchange as a practice arose in response, and as a possible solution, to the challenge of international hostility, how might it function as a means of meeting the demands of our present moment? Today it seems crucial that forums for cross-cultural exchange, where people encounter ideas, artifacts, and perspectives different from their own, undergo yet another transformation: from top-down conduits for cultural presentation to crucial spaces for enabling the kind of collaborative learning required for global coordination.
The C/Change initiative, a joint initiative from the Goethe Institut San Francisco and Gray Area and funded by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, seeks to chart possible pathways by which this transformation might unfold. In order to instantiate speculative visions for the future of tech-enabled cultural exchange, C/Change operates a Creative R&D Lab, which funds and supports cohorts of interdisciplinary teams developing interactive prototypes that advance new paradigms for online communication and collaboration. Additionally, the program’s online publication Signals opens up a channel for discourse around the transformation of cultural exchange, broadcasting new frameworks for technological development in order to build a more inclusive, accessible, and global digital future.
C/Change positions cultural exchange as a vital practice for coordinating transnational, interdisciplinary action to tackle the multiple compounding crises that threaten human flourishing and planetary health. In this vision, the future of cultural exchange looks like climate scientists, philosophers, and software developers exchanging practices in an effort to forecast the future of regional cuisines; it looks like artists in Taiwan, the Philippines, and the United States coming together to deploy offline information repositories that subvert authoritarian regimes’ internet censorship and shutdowns; it looks like digital creators coming together to build a decentralized live-streaming infrastructure that puts control in the hands of artists.
To put theory into practice, this playbook serves as a guide for cultural organizations, interdisciplinary creators, entrepreneurs, educators, and more looking to stage substantive, digitally-activated collaborations, whether across borders or within their own communities. The following 10 principles serve to structure a new vision for online culture exchange and reflect learnings gained through the C/Change initiative. Think of this as a blueprint for weaving a new practice of cultural exchange into your own work, as an invitation to open all of our efforts up to the value gained through diverse ways of knowing and the urgency of border-defying collaboration aimed at tackling the problems we face.
1 Ebert, Johannes. “New Concepts of Cultural Exchange: Constant Renewal.” Goethe-Institut, October 2020. Translation by Faith Ann Gibson.
IV. 10 Principles
Enacting a new practice of tech-enabled cultural exchange
➀ EXPERIMENT
Reinforcing speculative thinking with speculative prototyping
In the face of multiple compounding crises, speculative thinking has emerged as a reaction to the evident need for new ways of being in the world. From rethinking economic structures and navigating our increasingly digitally-mediated social lives to projecting outcomes of technical progress in artificial intelligence, forecasting the future has emerged as a practice that aims at navigating our way out of an unstable present. The dominant form of this futurist practice finds roots in Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s Speculative Everything, where they argue for a design methodology that imagines “possible futures and [uses] them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want.”2 Echoes of science fiction sound throughout this definition; indeed, such speculative practices make use of fiction-craft as a mode of designing for a world that could be, in an effort to counteract the tendency for traditional design techniques to reinforce the world as is — a design philosophy that is increasingly out of step with the crises we face.
Too often, however, speculative thinking starts on the level of discourse and fashions compelling concepts and frameworks that describe what the future might look like, but fails to test those ideas in the world. The stakes are only getting higher — we urgently need to actualize alternative futures. Introducing speculative visions into the real world through on-the-ground experimentation is critical for stress-testing and adapting ideas based on feedback so that they take root and scale. Thus, we might describe such a design practice as a prescriptive mode of speculative thinking that mediates between desired futures and present realities in order to materialize proposed solutions and iterate upon them quickly.
2 Speculative Everything, p. 2.
Case Study #1
C/Change Creative R&D Lab
Through two year-long cycles of the C/Change Creative R&D Lab, ten teams took an idea about how available platforms of connecting and sharing cultural stories online could function differently, and actualized them through online prototypes. In traversing the path from speculative vision to interactive experience, each team faced a variety of challenges and successes, which we’ll explore further throughout this playbook. This practice of speculative prototyping employed by R&D Lab members favors publicizing works-in-progress to encounter the public at an early stage. For each team, public-facing workshops, where members of the community engaged with the project’s ideas and provided feedback to help guide its development, allowed the ideas to evolve to better serve the needs of their intended audiences. Here, cultural exchange becomes more than just the goal of these projects: it functions as an integral part of a research and development process aimed at creating safer, healthier, and more inclusive digital tools, platforms, and experiences.
Upon completing the C/Change Creative R&D Lab, project teams continued to expand their projects to reach new audiences. For instance, Tasting Tomorrow (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2022), a global initiative to support culinary traditions by facilitating the transfer of information about ingredients likely to be sustainable in conditions of climate change, enacted diverse partnerships to extend its impact around the globe. In collaboration with the Highland Institute, the Consortium is currently working with rural communities in the Indian state of Nagaland to develop new versions of familiar recipes using ingredients from locations around the world that anticipate the climate of Nagaland in half a century. Simultaneously the Consortium is collaborating with the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana to share climate-adapted Mexican dishes with people living in Mexico City. The Consortium is also working to adapt the vernacular architecture of Europe, Asia, and North America to withstand climate change in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics in Germany. These international, interdisciplinary collaborations are key to projects centering cultural exchange.
➁ HACK
Critically engaging with emerging technologies
The tools and platforms that enable a digitally connected ecosystem of cultural exchange are developed almost exclusively with the aim of profit generation, a goal that often runs counter to the interests of healthy, safe, and accessible arenas for conducting collaborative work across borders. How, then, should cultural producers negotiate the politics of technology?
In a conversation with C/Change, augmented reality artist Nancy Baker Cahill posed the question: “No tool is neutral, so how can they be deployed or used subversively to be less extractive and more empowering?” One strategy for engaging with products developed by Big Tech corporations, as Baker Cahill points out, is to creatively re-appropriate these tools to one’s own ends, and to explore their potential for enabling new forms of organizing and creating. Donna Haraway terms this doubly critical and productive mode of working with technologies developed for the aims of militarized capitalism “modest witnessing,”3 whereby radical hackers and activists protest digitized hegemony while also carving out spaces to tinker with and purposefully mis-use technological artifacts. This mode of creative hacking has a long history in the realm of new media and digital art practices, from JODI’s Folksonomy project that manipulates YouTube videos4 and DISNOVATION.ORG’s Pirate Cinema installation which hacks and re-contextualizes live peer-to-peer file sharing data5 to Adam Harvey’s VFRAME computer vision toolkit for analyzing conflict zone media.6 By applying these tools and techniques toward creative and politically subversive ends, hacker-artists both reveal the socially destructive effects of digital media and point toward alternatives.
3 Haraway, 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM: Feminism and technoscience. New York, NY: Routledge. p. 3
4 https://net-art.org/folksomy-project
5 https://disnovation.org/piratecinema.php
6 https://vframe.io/
Case StudY #2
Platform Labs Workshops
How might online platforms be creatively misused to foster stronger connections and foster greater collaboration? C/Change’s Platform Labs workshop series, developed and led by designer, researcher, and artist Raphael Arar, explored experimental workflows among digital collaboration tools, from Notion and Airtable to Scribble Together, to cultivate more engaging ways of sharing virtual spaces. By hacking and repurposing interactions among corporate, non-profit, and indie productivity platforms not explicitly intended to communicate with each other, members of the C/Change network garnered greater agency in designing remote collaboration experiences that felt novel, generative, and playful. These interactive experiments were bolstered by interviews with some of the founders, designers, and engineers behind the platforms in use. Through learning about the common design patterns that these existing tools employ, participants were then able to iterate upon them in pursuit of new protocols for online collaboration.
➂ CO-CREATE
Incorporating community participation into design and development processes
In transitioning toward a model of cross-cultural connection centered around the values of co-creation and mutual learning, projects that enable cultural exchange and the digital tools that facilitate them cannot come exclusively from the top down. Rather, they should be co-produced with those involved in the exchange. As such, the notion of scalability, or how the functionality of a given piece of hardware or software changes with growth, also changes. Where scalability in technology development circles is almost entirely a function of technological capacity, scalability in a practice of tech-enabled cultural exchange is a function of social need and community response. In this context, growth does not exist for growth’s sake; rather, digital projects focused on cross-cultural communications should scale in response to social needs. To identify these social needs in an inclusive manner, developers and stewards of virtual communities must maintain open channels of communication with the community they serve.
Trinidadian type designer and start-up founder Agyei Archer expounded the importance of involving the input of the communities impacted by new technologies in a conversation with C/Change. Archer noted that the contexts in which dominant digital platforms are created, more often than not designed and developed through the lens of Silicon Valley, do not reflect the conditions of other communities around the world. “The way you make products in California or in New York cannot be the same way you design for businesses at home in Trinidad because of all of the realities that make our situations different,” Archer elaborated. From this frustration, Archer went on to found Unqueue Studio, a software development studio focused on the needs of Caribbean business owners:
“There wasn’t really a precedent for making work at home. We developed our proprietary processes, and we have a set of inputs for understanding our market that don’t work in an American market. So about two years after we started, we felt like we could take some of those methods, and help other people achieve their goals as well. Right now, we’re working with a bunch of other Caribbean startups and government institutions to get their products developed to the same standard that we would have made.”
Agyei Archer’s story exemplifies the community-centered approach to developing programs and platforms to enable all sorts of exchanges. Incorporating feedback, community input, and public demos at every stage of the process can go a long way toward ensuring that online cultural exchange initiatives reflect the needs of those involved.
Case Study #3
Digital Rights Monopoly
Co-creation, mutual learning and inclusive design also play a central role for the Digital Right Monopoly project (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2023). The team, representing the Digital Grassroots network that unites young activists across the global south advocating for digital rights, put the values and goals of inclusive design practices by creating Community Personas. These case-studies were based on real conversations conducted with members of the Digital Grassroots network and were intended to ground the team’s project, a game that enables players to better advocate for data sovereignty and online privacy, in lived experiences. “The burden usually falls on the communities that are most affected to ensure change happens,” team member Esther Mwema notes. To counteract this tendency, Digital Grassroots provided their community consultants with stipends for their participation and labor.
“It was also important for us that the personas we used did not further marginalize the groups we were aiming to spotlight,” Mwema continued. “This process meant that when we did not receive enough feedback, we created new mechanisms to allow our community members to understand the game so they could provide input into its co-creation.” By empowering community partners to share stories about digital rights that reflect their lived experiences, the team behind Digital Rights Monopoly also increased the likelihood that their project will continue to grow within diverse communities.
➃ CULTIVATE
Forging communities of practice
Traditionally, the practice of cultural exchange has described the coming together of distinct, typically nationally-determined cultures, usually facilitated by (para-)governmental institutions. Today, however, the cultures that represent each of us are very often not place-specific; the internet has accelerated a pluriverse of gathering and identity formation along infinitely many axes. We’ve become “dwellers on the threshold between the real and virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along.”7 How, then, should a practice of tech-enabled cultural exchange treat ideas of community when traditional means of facilitating cross-cultural connections are so deeply rooted in physical place?
Practicing cultural exchange in the present should preserve the specificity that has historically enabled mutual learning between different lived experiences, while also broadening notions of how one forms the communities that contextualize those experiences. With the ubiquity of the internet, a tension emerges between scalability and the apparent potential to reach a wide global audience on the one hand, and the resonance and potential for greater impact that comes with targeting a specific audience. Though the promise of the internet to connect every human being might at first seem like an immediate solution to the problem of redefining cultural exchange (everyone can exchange culture with everyone else!), what we would gain in scale we might lose in substance. Rather, the function of digital connectivity in modern cultural exchange lies in diversifying the axes along which communities can form and in multiplying the channels through which exchanges happen.
In conversation with Signals contributor mai ishikawa sutton, artist Alice Yuan Zhang translates the question of why we need community as “a question of how we situate ourselves in relation with each other, including with the broader ecological planetary realm, in a way that is conducive to long-term accountability and collective responsibility.” Considering how this expanded awareness translates into digital community formation, Zhang does “believe that community can happen online, [but] will also always spill out of digital realms as long as we live in our bodies and on this planet. We do need to be clear about how we define membranes of community and why, and whether we can practice a scale of concern that is as wide as each layer of the infrastructure that it depends on.” Here, Zhang’s emphasis on appropriately defining community in order to ensure proper distribution of care points toward the importance of fostering safety in communities, especially those that manifest online.
7 Sherry Turkle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); excerpt pp. 9–10)
Case Study #4
R&D Lab Project — Browser Histories and Toguna World
Existing digital tools that aim to enable community formation often fail to meet the specific needs of certain groups. Browser Histories (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2022) encountered this problem in considering the sex worker community and their needs and desires for sharing stories and increasing awareness around the intimately entangled histories of cyberspace and sexual labor. For such an at-risk community, the internet can serve as a vital source of connection but can also compromise safety and lead to unwanted visibility. Thus, the project team endeavored to counter the universalist ethos of major platforms by developing an online community space by and for sex workers. As an online platform designed exclusively for a specific community and not for the general public’s participation, Browser Histories demonstrates the efficacy of creating specific applications of technological tools in an effort to create safe and engaging online spaces.
A project oriented toward a broader definition of community, Pierre-Chrisophe Gam’s Toguna World experience (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2022) starts with dreams: participants are invited to gather around a virtual table and share their visions for the future. By bringing people from disparate perspectives and experiences together to collectively envision alternative futures, Toguna World fosters a virtual environment where difference is nurtured rather than flattened. Additionally, through Gam’s imaginative and thoughtful facilitation of these dialogues and the careful curation of the experience, the project sets up generative guardrails to avoid some of the pitfalls that occur in virtual conversations, where context tends to collapse and sensational content is privileged over complexity and nuance.
➄ STRATEGIZE
“Online” is not a silver bullet for safe and accessible exchange
The early days of cyberculture fashioned the internet as a place where “anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs.”8 Despite an unraveling in the ideal of the internet as a free utopia, online spaces still present themselves as universally accessible facilitators of communication and collaboration, especially in Western contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic only hastened our collective acceptance of the digital world as the domain in which everything from work and play to creativity and sociality takes place. It seems only natural, then, to take for granted the broad accessibility, ease, and safety of online cultural exchange.
Yet, governments around the world can be quick to censor online content or completely cut off access to the internet at any hint of social unrest. A practice of cultural exchange for the 21st century must not treat the digital/physical divide as a binary. Far from a total virtualization of previously physically embodied activities, the concept of the digital looks more like a blurry flow between the in-person and the in-browser, the IRL and the URL. A truly global online cultural exchange ecosystem should nimbly adapt to counter attempts to thwart safe and open digital communication.
8 https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Case Study #5
R&D Lab Project — Offline.Wiki
To circumnavigate digital surveillance and internet shutdowns by authoritarian regimes, the project Offline.Wiki (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2023) utilizes USB stick-hosted “sneaker nets” as a subversive tool that enables activist groups to share information amid volatile and potentially dangerous online conditions. Such a strategy points to the necessary role “low-tech” solutions can play in the future of virtual cultural exchange, where internet-enabled experiences can be inaccessible or heavily surveilled. Offline.Wiki also centers and aids the necessary work of grieving and healing which activist communities facing oppression must undertake. This need for trauma-informed online (and offline) experiences grew out of the team members’ own experiences with state-sponsored censorship, algorithmic oppression, and the legacy of colonialism, from the arbitrary arrest of online dissidents in the Philippines to the 20-40 million monthly cyberattacks, labeled “cyber World War III,” that Taiwan currently faces. Employing a “deliberate, slow, bottom-up, and human-centric approach to technology use,” Offline.Wiki gives activists a virtual space to heal with the added reassurance of privacy and anonymity.
➅ VISIBILIZE
Considering how data represents us
The computational tools that facilitate and characterize much of modern culture rely on discreteness: ones and zeros, executable code, bits and bytes of information stored in servers around the world. This binary logic seems antithetical to cultural production and exchange: in order to digitize the complex, coded, implicit, and tacit knowledge and artifacts that make up culture, something must be lost along the way. Moreover, data in the digital world often exposes vulnerable communities to unwanted visibility, while invisibilizing others in order to distort complex realities.
Though the question of digital representation is a thorny one, practices of cultural exchange must be intentional about how communities involved are represented online, and calibrate their degree of visibility to each specific context. As data feminists Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F Klein note, “Data is a double-edged sword. In a very real sense, data has been used as a weapon by those in power to consolidate their control—over places and things, as well as people. […] Data is part of the problem, to be sure. But they are also part of the solution.”9 It’s important for practitioners of tech-enabled cultural exchange to consider the role data and representation play in any digital context, and how you might safeguard your community or work to amplify its voice and presence among broader audiences
9 Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020); excerpt pp. 14–19
Case Study #6
R&D Lab Project — Missing Objects Library
The project Missing Objects Library, by Jill Miller, Asma Kazmi, and Kathy Wang, was spurred by a frustration with available resources for virtual 3D objects. Popular marketplaces like TurboSquid and Sketchfab tend to overrepresent hyper-sexualized female bodies, for example, while featuring virtually zero assets that represent the lived experiences of women, trans people, and gender-nonconforming folks, such as tampons and breast binders. As a result, our growing digital worlds and metaverses increasingly replicate and reify the misogyny found in the non-digital world.
To counteract the white, cis male-centeredness of virtual worldbuilding, Missing Objects Library (MOL) identifies various communities whose experiences are left out of dominant object repositories in order to widen the scope of representation. Importantly, the team behind MOL focuses on a community-centered curatorial process. Rather than deciding top-down what objects should be included and how, Jill, Asma, and Kathy engage the public in collective object scanning workshops, where community members are invited to turn the objects that are important to them into digital assets. This way, 3D game designers, artists, and worldmakers are empowered to self-determine how they want to be represented.
➆ BROADEN
Looping between humans, machines, and non-human entities
Where cultural exchange has been traditionally understood as taking place exclusively between humans, the dawn of the climate crisis has laid bare the reality that humans are a part of nature and that the futures of humans, planetary systems, and other non-human entities are shared and contingent. C/Change R&D Lab projects Tasting Tomorrow and All Possible Rivers illustrate the centrality of non-human entities — from edible plants to rivers — in shaping our cultural identities. As we move into an era marked by cascading climate emergencies, practices of cultural exchange that seek to provide solutions to planetary-scale problems need to broaden the scope of representation to include the needs of non-humans.
When so much of cultural exchange activities take place in peer-to-peer virtual spaces, it can be difficult to find avenues for incorporating the needs of the whole planet. Artist Nancy Baker Cahill faced a similar tension in her augmented reality work, but felt that she wanted to speak to “the interdependence that will be required to survive.” From this pull toward the interspecies, she created the AR piece Corpus, which invites viewers to share in the awareness that “we depend on other species as much as they may depend on us.” Works like Corpus demonstrate the power of digital and hybrid mediums in shifting collective consciousness around a relational perspective, wherein we can only understand ourselves in relation to other human beings, living things, and systems.10 Artist Alice Yuan Zhang also underscores the ecological realities of our computational systems where we typically view the technological as divorced from nature. “Biological entities are being folded into datafication and becoming legible to computational systems in human-defined ways that will affect how or whether they survive,” Yuan Zhang notes. “How is the world already networked and how do we want to facilitate more intentional entanglements?”
10 Ron Wakkary. Things We Could Design: For More Than Human-Centered Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
Case Study #7
R&D Lab Project — All Possible Rivers
To make such entanglements between human, ecological, and technological worlds visible, Federico Pérez Villoro’s project All Possible Rivers (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2023) applies mathematical simulation techniques to visualizing the possible forms the Rio Grande/Bravo might take as the environment continues to change. The Rio Grande/Bravo acts not just as a hydrological body, but as a cultural zone unto itself, a political symbol, and an ecosystem whose future is intimately tied to our own. Pérez Villoro’s virtual simulation underscores the relational nature of the river and the fact that it cannot be understood in isolation or through the perspective of one discipline or community.
➇ COALESCE
Assembling interdisciplinary teams to drive innovation
The ability to connect across borders is critically important even as the forces that necessitate such points of exchange make it more difficult. Such borders may be geographical and political, but dividing lines can also be drawn between disciplines and ways of knowing. Given that the perspectives and know-how needed to solve a problem is likely in a different place than the problem itself, interdisciplinary innovation is an essential tool for building the future of online cultural connection.
Toward this end, the C/Change R&D Lab brought together project teams that represent a wide range of perspectives and skills. Spanning backgrounds including design thinking, artistic practice, software engineering, machine learning research, hydrology, ecology, and environmental science, these teams centered interdisciplinarity within their project activities as well as cross-pollination between different teams in their respective cohorts. The selected projects demonstrate that technological innovation does not come from technical development alone, but through collaborations that cross knowledge boundaries.
Case Study #8
R&D Lab Project — Dragon’s Delusion
As technological advancements, as well as capital investments, in artificial intelligence continue to skyrocket, applications of AI are becoming more prevalent in our daily lives. The task then becomes critically engaging with these breakthroughs within diverse communities of practitioners to identify the most socially and culturally beneficial applications of machine learning. Dragon’s Delusion (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2023) responds to this need by applying generative AI to experimenting with the new modes of storytelling that this tool might allow.
The team behind Dragon’s Delusion started out with an initial goal to “learn through deep collaboration with artists and technologists in order to create a tool that is accessible for the general public.” After surveying the landscape of generative AI and discussing possible approaches, the team members united around a story project lead Lawman Lok shared over dinner:
“When teaching in Hong Kong, [Lawman] had his class interview their parents about how they fled into Hong Kong. That opened up unheard family stories and deepened generational connections. If that kind of connection could be replicated with our tool online, we would be able to form communities and write history directly with people whose stories are typically erased. In a time of war and media suppression, we decided that should be our ultimate vision.”
In assembling a multidisciplinary team of machine learning engineers, research scientists, filmmakers, and animators, the project demonstrates the value of viewing AI development not as a narrowly technical endeavor but as an inherently cultural, social, and creative process.
➈ MAINTAIN
Enacting new models of cultural infrastructure
The reckonings with extractive economic structures and their maintenance through centralized internet governance systems that have emerged over the last few years have led to an increased urgency in devising new ways of structuring digital ecosystems. The question of prototyping alternative organizing structures is especially relevant for cultural exchange practitioners as we move toward a more co-creative model of cultural production that engages both institutions and individuals.
Visions of a decentralized internet offer a glimpse into one such model of a more collective cultural and creative ecosystem, but the imbrication of blockchain technologies and ever-proliferating financialization is hard to escape. How, then, can we create structures that enable multiple stakeholders to collaborate to create and sustain safe, generative spaces for communities to share knowledge and collaborate to address critical issues? Can the blueprints of a speculative decentralized internet serve as a guide?
“Decentralization has its place as a protocol, a strategy, a way of organizing, but it’s also easier said than done. I’m less interested in the conversation of what is broadly good or bad but rather, what are the cases that [decentralized frameworks] are used for and at what scale? And who gets a say? How transparent and accountable can the process be?”
— Alice Yuan Zhang, Signals
Case Study #9
R&D Lab Project — Is This Thing On?
Focusing on live streaming as one area of technological development that has shifted artistic practices without granting artists much of a say in how such platforms are developed and deployed, Is This Thing On? (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2022) explored alternative technical, economic, and social protocols for creative live streaming. As the proliferation of discourse around the blockchain and Web3 proliferated in 2021, a decentralized option for online streaming infrastructure seemed to present itself as an alternative to current platforms. Rather than rushing to adopt a new technology, however, Team Is This Thing On? extensively deliberated the possible benefits of decentralized internet infrastructures in granting greater autonomy to creators, as well as the potential risks of blockchain’s carbon footprint and its imbrication in the increasing financialization of creative labor. The team held 100+ internal Zoom calls to discuss this question, carrying out the important work of engaging emerging technologies intentionally and turning that process itself into a critical performance within the software development pipeline.
In the end, THING started as a centralized network using available cloud software, and plans to progressively decentralize as they continue to hold public conversation and livestream events. By intentionally setting out to evolve the tool in concert with user feedback and the shifting tides of technology trends and developments, the team was able to engage with decentralized technologies not on value-laden terms of good or bad, but rather on a more pragmatic level that considers the needs of a particular community (artists who work with web streaming) and aims to actively involve them in the development process.
➉ PRESERVE
Archiving cultural knowledge
Bolstered by the affordances of digital technologies for storing and hosting information that can be accessed globally, cultural organizations can participate in a cumulative ecosystem of knowledge and resource sharing whereby projects do not begin and end with the individuals who start them, but can be taken up, expanded on, and remixed by future organizers. Practices of cultural exchange are situated within a network of other actors and projects doing similar work; this greater collective of discrete initiatives should be grounded in a culture of sharing and mutual learning such that knowledge production becomes cumulative and collective rather than individual and proprietary.
Open-sourcing and templatizing work is therefore a crucial element of practicing tech-enabled cultural exchange. Such a culture of sharing requires cultural producers to document, reflect on, and share their processes and learnings — in other words, archiving cultural knowledge could be treated as an integral part of facilitating online exchanges.
This digitally-assisted practice of archiving must evolve beyond traditional forms of preserving cultural memory that rely on institutions rooted in extraction and financialization, and which privilege Western ways of knowing. New models for collective memory, rather, must democratize the process by which knowledge is deemed worthy of preservation and work to broaden access to such preserved knowledge as widely as possible.
Case Study #10
R&D Lab Project — People’s Graphic Design Archive
From ACT UP posters and Iranian logo design to 90s punk show flyers and Black Panther newspapers, the wide range of user-submitted pieces hosted on the People’s Graphic Design Archive (C/Change Creative R&D Lab 2022) exemplifies the decentralized approach to preserving cultural memory. The simple upload interface enables community members from around the world to upload their own graphic design histories for the public to view freely, thereby addressing gaps in representation present in more institutional collections of design ephemera. The PGDA also enables contributors and users to more easily share knowledge with a broad public thanks to its browser-based format.
Reflecting on the outcomes of the C/Change R&D Lab experience, PGDA team member Brockett Horne notes a boost in engagement with the digital archive, including “thousands of uploads, more public presentations, social media dialogue, and an increase in registered users.” Internally, the group also has “a much stronger sense of how technology can be used to make archives more inclusive.” In expanding access to practices of preservation, experiments in community archives like the PGDA expand and shift what counts as “canon.”
V. Afterword
This adaptable blueprint for building toward the future of cross-cultural communication guides cultural producers in taking ideas from the realm of forward-thinking speculation to hands-on iterative prototyping.
This prototyping process is strengthened by participatory design practices in which the communities for whom a given tool or experience are intended—which may extend beyond humans to include the environment and non-humans—play an integral role in the development cycle. By critically engaging with or creatively “misusing” emerging technologies, from artificial intelligence and immersive reality experiences to decentralized infrastructures, practitioners of tech-enabled cultural exchange can exercise agency in charting paths toward alternative technosocial futures. This process, however, must carefully navigate the pitfalls to which many online platforms over the past decade have succumbed, from censorship and internet shutdowns by authoritarian regimes to the double-edged sword of under-representation in digital space and unwanted visibility. Finally, deliberating protocols for adequately valuing cultural labor and archiving knowledge will promote the resiliency of digital projects amid a changing technological landscape.
The goal of this playbook is to equip organizations, technologists, and cultural producers with strategies and starting points for designing digital cultural exchange experiences with intention. As the tools and heuristics outlined here are adopted and tested in new contexts, further findings, amendments, and complications will inevitably arise. These elaborations are a welcome and intended facet of the iterative feedback loop we imagine this work exists within. We encourage other artists, technologists, designers, and interdisciplinary creators to build new tools for online cross-cultural exchange with these principles in mind, and then to share their findings so that this compendium can evolve.
To kickstart this evolution, there are a number of areas where the insights accrued over the course of the C/Change initiative can be expanded in new contexts. For example, the projects incubated within our Creative R&D Lab were led by individuals and small teams working to produce prototypical versions of larger visions; adopting these principles within larger teams building production-level software could yield vastly different results. How do these principles for designing safe and accessible online cultural exchange experiences scale up to large companies developing social technology?
As an epochal period of geopolitical turbulence and disruption—compounded by climate catastrophe and the lingering impacts of the pandemic—threaten to entrench divisions, the need for spaces where people can encounter and learn from ideas different from their own is more apparent than ever. The C/Change Playbook offers interdisciplinary creators a framework for building infrastructure to support planetary-scale cooperation and the collective construction of our shared future.