Unionising the Speculative is a presentation and workshop that invites precarious cultural workers whose value of labor is likely to be challenged under the influence of generative AI. Participants will openly explore collective strategies of advocacy, such as Speculoos biscuits containing AI-generated images.
How can creative workers unionise with generative AI beyond anthropomorphism? How can we as creative workers be accountable to AI-led automation? How did linotype and personal computers cause the demise of the International Typographical Union (ITU) which used to be one of the most influential unions in the US? What is the role and limitation of speculation as a strategy in this?
This workshop will be an immediate response to these urgent questions. Using image generating AI, the participants will generate images that will be engraved on Speculoos cookies whose name shares its origin with the word “speculate.” The cookies will serve as a symbol of the speculative fund raising towards generative AI with Labor Ethics. The goal of the workshop will be to collectively speculate how this fund could be used and come up with the strategies of campaign to manifest the voices of creative workers about the influence of generative AI to the labor conditions of the creative working class.
Requirement for participants: A phone with Telegram installed.
This workshops is supported by the Ethics Studio and ADAPT Research Centre.
Noam Youngrak Son is a communication designer, design theorist, and cultural worker. Their design work encompasses small-scale publishing projects, speculative worldbuilding, workshops, lectures, writing, net art, and occasional performative interventions. As a cultural worker, they have co-organized the Ghent-based queer publishing collective Bebe Books since 2021. Son has expanded their focus from design to theory in order to critically engage with the ontology of the design industry, media, and broader material culture. This turn is informed by their observations of cultural assemblages that echo the extractive operations of capitalism on racialized and more-than-human populations. They are particularly attentive to the interconnected notions of speculation—both as an open artistic approach and as a process of value increase in capitalism. They research the tendency of the former in design to be subjugated by the latter and explore alternative methods for speculative design practices to realise their transindividual potential through collective organisation and workshop facilitation. In this process, Son utilises queer publishing as a technology for mobilising attention beyond the financialized “scarce resource” of the attention economy. In this context, publishing extends beyond mere printed matter to encompass the maintenance of communities and the cultivation of interspecies relationships. The term "queer" here is not used as a statement of identity but as a process—small yet collective strategies of publishing that challenge the modern myth of the heroic designer.
