8/10 Love Language Models panel @ Unsound Festival, Kraków

8/10 Open Futures panel @ Unsound Festival, Kraków

https://www.unsound.pl/en/2026/warszawa-krakow

Love Language Models, on Technological Desire, Artifice & Speculation

Creative communities evolving alongside technical architectures and digital infrastructures have long navigated a double-edged reality. The mixed blessing of openness, once rooted in the utopian ideals of liberty through technology, has increasingly given way to systems of enclosure, where platforms and tools simultaneously operate as both instruments of control and vehicles for liberation. As music industry executives transition into defence technology and autonomous weaponry, artificial intelligence increasingly entangles into political and cultural spheres. This panel considers how affect and imagination offer asymmetric resistance. Drawing on economic science fictions and counter-hegemonic futures from elsewhere, we examine how desire, artifice, and speculative thought can return us to dignity and agency.

"it is clear that what structures social reality - the so-called ‘economy’ - is itself a tissue of fictions… economic and social fictions always elude empiricism, since they are never given in experience; they are what structures experience.

Fictions can be engines for the development of future policy. They can be machines for designing the future … Fictions are also simulations in which we can get some sense of what it would be like to live in a post-capitalist society. 

The task is to produce fictions that can be converted into effective virtualities - fictions that not only anticipate the future but can already start to bring it into being ... as capital’s cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have not been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The production of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative."

Mark Fisher, Economic Science Fictions foreword, Goldsmiths Press, 2018 (edited)