The Glory Mold Project

Glory Mold: 2084 is part of our wider Glory Mold project where we creative immersive installations, run workshops and go on residencies to explore what this slime mold-AI can offer how we think about the relationship between people and technology.

This is a speculative future project and lots of what we do is work with artists, community groups, academics and organisations to imagine new storylines and elements of this alternate universe.

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We've done workshops at FACT Liverpool, at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the Watershed Bristol and the Digital Humanities Research Hub in London.

Residencies have helped us collaboratively answer questions like what does celebrating your birthday look like in 2084? How would slime molds approach data sovereignty? How do different open source LLM models respond to different ethical challenges?

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We are particularly focused on decolonial and anti-capitalist approaches to AI and exploring how our Scottish context fits within a wider global framework of AI use. We're are inspired by the work of Dr. Joy Buolamwini at the Algorithmic Justice League, making the racist and anti-black bias built into the many algorthms that we encounter (AI and otherwise) visible, comprehensible and impossible to ignore; the AI Decolonial Manyfesto offering ways of coming together to examine AI that hold multiplicity and writers like Paola Ricaurte and Ted Chiang who between them hold mirrors up to the whole AI lifecycle and the feminist, anti-capitalist decolonial frameworks for understanding and remaking them.

Writers like Professor Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti have given us new ways to look at AI as an expression of wider social scripts (check out her excellent substack), and also with her collaborators at the Meta-Relationality Institute. A good starting point for anyone interested in dissecting AI is their particularly good introduction to having difficult conversations about AI.

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They write

Over the past year, I have been walking with others into the increasingly charged terrain of AI, not merely as a technological phenomenon, but as a portal into deeper questions about how we relate to each other, to planetary limits, and to the ongoing unraveling of social, ecological, psychological, and political systems. In this walk, I have encountered not just critique, but something closer to liturgy: rituals of refusal, mourning, moral posturing, and fear. These responses are affectively and historically grounded, often carried with conviction and care. But they can also become rehearsed, weaponized, and retributive, especially when the space to breathe is too narrow, and the wounds too fresh. AI, in many of these spaces, does not arrive as a tool or a curiosity, but as a trigger. It becomes the face of theft, the harbinger of disorientation, the avatar of capitalist greed, the destroyer of jobs, the final enclosure of language and labor, the last trick of empire before the ground gives way.

Their reminder that all conversations about AI are felt, embodied things, has often helped us interrogate this huge and complex maze. 
 

So often, what sounds like disagreement is actually a collision of nervous systems: one constricted by dread, another animated by curiosity, a third numbed by exhaustion. And when those systems are invisible, we tend to interpret each other’s positions as either naive or dangerous, rather than noticing: we are not feeling the same thing because we are not standing in the same place