Onboarding The [Un]Governable Assembly (TUNG)
Many of us have been trained to be governed by others and less on how to govern together. Yet, we all need to regulate, compliance-check, and conclude.
This workshop starts in-between being governed and governing to experiment in forms of collaboration, teambuilding and “harmonising”. The workshop departs from the EU AI Act and its risk-based “harmonised rules” intended to regulate humans and invites a lake to collaborate in a counteroffer, where, together, we speculate how we might coexist.
TUNG embodies as a temporary research center that is an assembly of co-facilitators sculpting discourse together. It has three stages: First, the EU AI Act’s rhetoric will be laid down after which, then, excerpts will be taken up into active propositions. Finally, a quick discussion on any newfound forms of enactments or trainings revealed while working through earlier stages.
The Workshop’s Premise: The year is 2046 in this workshop. We are all researchers/ designers at the TUNG Center. We have recovered the legal texts from the ‘Great Regulation’ of 2024. Your task is to work with a nonhuman entity to read between the lines — to find the ghosts, hopes, desires and needs in the machine — and to counter-propose how we should, could, or might have designed with AI, departing from the Act’s seemingly black-and-white rhetoric. Our goal is to collectively develop methodologies to critically and aesthetically challenge dominant narratives of AI regulation and use, all while opening to new imaginings for coexistence and [un]governance.
No prior knowledge of EU law is assumed. We ask only: what becomes possible when one actively engages with the letters of the law.
This workshop is facilitated by Studio Alight (Samantha Hookway & Fredrik Garneij) and Nana Nwachukwu. Studio Alight is an arts and technology creative collective formed to alight the invisible who have exhibited at the Rian Design Center in Falkenberg, Sweden and within the Institute of Patent Infringement installation exhibited in 2018 in the Dutch Pavillion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, at the V&A as part of the London Design Festival and at the Het Nieuwe Institiuut in Rotterdamn. Studio Alight consist of Samantha Hookway an artist/designer, design educator and currently a PhD Candidate at Chalmers School of Technology in Interaction Design and Fredrik Garneij a connectivity artist, designer, and engineer. Nana is a PhD Researcher & Lawyer looking at the intersection of Computer Science, Public Policy and Law. She’s a student at Trinity College, Dublin and a research member of the Sustainable Actors in Ludic Terrains (SALT) Research Group at IxD/CSE at Chalmers University, Sweden. Nana currently works at the operational side of transparency turning what AI providers disclose into standardised, comparable governance records that organisations use for compliance.