Here’s the exhibition text for the work:
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A Harbinger, A Horizon, and A Hope: Three Heralds of Possible AI Futures (2025)
Through research-led worldbuilding and critical practice, Goatley presents three voice-enabled AI devices that each represent a distinct and possible near future scenario for AI technologies and their relationship to individuals, communities, and society. Audience members are invited to interact with each fully functional device to learn more about these potential futures and the experiences of the people living through them.
The first device, The Harbinger, predicts one outcome of the ongoing embedding of monopolistic AI companies into the delivery of government and public services. In this future, a device called the HealthFoundry has been built by US intelligence technology company Palantir and placed within GP practices across the UK to oversee the automation, and replacement, of NHS GP pastoral care.
The Palantir HealthFoundry, aka the ‘Harbinger’.
The second device, The Horizon, explores a post-abundance future where climate change and resource scarcity has restricted cloud data center usage dramatically, and everyday people must adapt to a life without tools they used to rely upon. It’s a slow, low-tech AI assistant running on hacked and recycled components and a solar-powered battery, built by a lone former AI engineer to help them adapt to their new life as they cling to memories of their past.
The ‘Horizon’, a post-abundance engineer’s attempt to resurrect the past.
The third device, The Hope, proposes a future where community-owned technologies and equitable practices offer a viable alternative to the exploitative nature of today’s tech companies and the products they create. It’s a ‘smart display’ powered by shared resources which supports the inhabitants of a tower block who have embraced a more communal, accessible, and sustainable version of AI in their daily lives.
This commission is both an exploration of these possible futures, as well as a proposal for more responsible uses of AI in art practice. The designs of the devices in this work embrace concepts such as degrowth computation and permacomputing, and all function through local-hosted, low-power approaches with no use of AI data center processing in their operation and ensuring complete audience privacy. At their core, the works foreground the stories at the heart of each work rather than the tech, with the aim of proposing a better future for this field of practice.
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This project puts into practice a lot of my research and writing on the topic of AI, technocapitalism, permacomputing, and critical use of AI tools in art practice. I’ve learned a lot, and will be feeding that into the work that comes after.
I’ll post some deeper context for each of the three pieces that make up the work in the coming weeks, but right now I’m buried in the studio putting the finishing touches to the third and final device. I hope you can make it to Edinburgh for the show.
It was a pleasure to preview ‘The Horizon’ at the Paul Mellon Center for British Art earlier this month. Thank you to the team there, and to Pedro Oliveira who was the respondent for my talk ‘Towards Anti-Capitalist AI Art and Post-Abundance Computational Practices’. Our discussion will be available online soon, I’m told.
I’ll be at the city-wide festival LUGA in Luxembourg September 15th, with a new day-long installation and performance. More info soon.
I’ll be in Berlin hosting a panel at the Human Machine Symposium at Akademie der Künste on November 15th. Some great participants, I’m looking forward to it.
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