Shared Futures is a long term, a multiform collaboration that invites people to imagine futures. At the Festival the artists Emma Fält, Roberto Fusco, and Anna-Maria Väisänen group of 60+ people are presenting the following parts of the project.

Imagining Future Bodies

Fält and Väisänen have held weekly workshops in Kuopio for 60+ people. The group explores the urban space and the living environments of the participants, as well as the related needs and dreams for the future. Deep and radical listening, wild co-imagination and a multisensory approach have been central to the work. In the live- situation at the Art Museum of Kuopio the group works with materials they have chosen to be an important part of imagining the future, its possible bodies and environments.

Performers invite the audience to explore the space of imagining the future 100 years from now.

Tuning in to the future

Is a sound walk where the audience can discover hidden pirate radios scattered in the city of Kuopio. We have been interviewing the participants of the workshops to address questions about the future of economy, ecology, and automation as well as personal desires and speculations attached to specific places in the city. Fusco has used the entire text-based dataset to train a neural network (GPT-Neo) to generate alternative answers. The machine-made text has been edited together with the original answers to create site-specific “scripts”, a possible conversation between human and machine that did not happen yet.

Located in key places of the city and marked on a provided map, those radios will broadcast a human and artificial soundscape. People will be able to listen to the workshop participants in dialogue with a voice interpreting the AI-generated text. The trained network will help us tune in to both what is already in the given answers but not yet formulated, and also to imaginative unspoken horizons.

About the Project in 2022:

The Shared Futures project organises regular art activities free of charge for Kuopio’s residents aged 60 and over for a year

The workshops are guided by artists Emma Fält and Anna-Maria Väisänen. The artistic activities of the Shared Futures project are based on an artwork concept by Fält and Väisänen bearing the same name.

The project supports the maintenance of wellbeing and functional capacity among older people through a process founded on the participants’ needs based on presence, listening and respecting the participants’ boundaries. One of the key goals of the project is to promote the accessibility of art and culture among older people. The artist–instructors explore the urban space and the participants’ living environments with the participants as well as any related needs and dreams the participants may have. This process will serve as the basis for artwork that will be presented at the ANTI Festival in September 2022.

The Shared Futures workshops are part of the IKO Cultural Wellbeing for Older People project that promotes the welfare of older people through art. The project is funded by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and it is implemented in cooperation with the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Theatre Centre, the Culture for All service and the Aili network. In Kuopio, ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is responsible for the implementation of the IKO project.