Artist andcomposerAnn Rosén performs a short concert.Ann Rosén (born 1956) is the composer, musician and artist who began her career in the visual arts in the 1980s with interactive, intelligent, and intriguing works. Since the 1990s, the artistic focus has been on music and sound art and Rosén has more than one hundred works behind her. The works have been performed at the Swedish Royal Opera,Moderna Museetin Stockholm, and South Bank in London, among othersRosén’s art revolves around the exploration of interpersonal communication, how we can understand ourselves in relation to the outside world and the barriers that can arise between us and others.

Moderator Johanna Koljonen opens The Conference 2022.

“Why not create a dish from the smell of old book?”“The most beautiful idea is to be able to eat a song.”Senses can evoke memories. Jordi Roca explores the connection and interaction between senses, childhood memories, smell and taste. Inspired by Marcel Proust and his ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Jordi shares about his work evoking memories through smell, taste and texture: how he created desserts inspired by perfumes by deconstructing each perfume to create an aroma leading to him making his own perfume. He moved further and extracted the smell of an old book evoking a memory of reading old literature. Could you also eat a forest after a rain? Or taste different colours, each of which would have a specific melody attached to it? Might we evoke a sense of smell of people who had lost it by combining an experience of different senses, like seeing, hearing and others?

“Fiction is an extraordinary shared language.”Fiction is a product of culture but it also produces culture: it impacts how we see the world. The line between fiction and reality is a thin one, and the urban space is one where our imaginaries are often played out. Through his piece ‘The Planet City’, Liam Young takes us on a cinematic drift through imaginary worlds: one fictional, one we are currently living in. What if we stepped back, made room and let global wilderness return? How do these fictional worlds we construct portray our technological possibilities and our gravest concerns?As already inhabitants of a planet city, we have remade the world. A new kind of story is needed to guide us into the future. We need to visualise our collective futures. We need to shape where we all want to go next. By telling the fictive story we get the chance to imagine a possible future, and by doing so, giving us the opportunity to imagine a new story for the planet: “As we write stories we also write the world.”

“Search is not a query. It’s always a conversation. You’re not building a search engine - you’re building a tool for users to embark on a knowledge quest.”Matt Webb explores how different types of common search mechanisms online work and the type of results they return. He goes through a history of more analogue search systems to give context to the search algorithms we all use today. Matt frames search as not being a query but rather a conversation where people are using the search tool to embark on a knowledge quest. In doing so, he reveals the limitations of popular search tools and the silos they keep us in.He has explored different ways of making search and aggregation tools work for himself in slightly different ways. By creating his own systems, he is able to come across new information before it gets to the point of trending or being recommended by an algorithm. Matt closes by sharing some ideas for how we could each build our own systems to find the information we’re truly seeking.

“How will we garden the future of our abilities to speak with computers?”Hillary Juma spoke about how each of us has a different experience interacting with voice recognition systems. The challenges we face in our interactions with voice recognition software differ significantly, for example some accents aren’t understood by systems as well as others because they were not included in training data sets. Being diagnosed with dyslexia prompted Hillary to interact more with the voice-to-text systems and explore various voice recognition systems. In doing so, she realized their shortcomings and has become a “cyber doula with a specialism in linguistics” to acquaint people with these systems and their complexities.

“My entire life my sense of self has been mediated by a computer screen.”Growing up, Maya Man has always been fascinated with the presentation of self and the meaning of true authenticity in different contexts. Her sense of self has always been mediated by a computer screen, leading her to experiment with the possibilities this presented but also feel that everything she was doing was some form of performance for a third person audience. In her recent work, she has subverted the tone of voice of Seventeen magazine covers and motivational Instagram posts to explore notions of performance, identity, and our presentation of self in the 21st century.

QA for the sessionHow to use a computer featuringMatt Webb, Hilary Juma andMaya Man

“Occupations paying less than 20 dollars per hour are most at risk to be replaced by technology.”How do you heighten your chances of making money for rent in the future? Carl Benedikt Frey suggests creativity, social intelligence and the abilities to perceive and manipulate will be central skills. These particular skills are still proving hard to automate through Artificial Intelligence. So how do we build and strengthen these skills? Does our education system and social environments support these learning processes? Who does not have access to this type of learning? Will we even need money for rent in the future? What can we build with our creativity, if we do not need to work to pay for a place to live?

“Covid-19 has done more for the digitalisation of organisations than the COO and CEO.”During their online meeting, Calle Rosengren’s colleague from Lund University received four missed calls from her son. There must have been a fire in his room. She knocked on his door. Nah, no fire. He wanted to know whether he could eat the last semla. How do we find healthy digital boundaries and a chance to focus in these new hybrid working days?Rosengren’s research suggests that it’s worth looking into some digital boundary management strategies. Suggested strategies circle around for example building good habits very consciously. But also - and particularly in this seriously urgent semla situation - involving any family members in conversations around digital boundaries.