Prompting Nowhere
An ongoing design research project funded through the MullenLowe NOVA AwardsThe designer, poet, activist and author William Morris published News from Nowhere in 1890, imagining his romantic vision of a future Britain rooted in socialist and ecological ideals. In Nowhere there is time for everything; people approach life and work as artists and craftspeople. He argues that the world becomes not only more just, but more beautiful as a result. This vision stood in stark contrast to the Victorian London Morris was witnessing during the height of the Industrial Revolution – and to the London we see today.
Like Morris, I found myself yearning for this seemingly lost future and the freedom to craft. My initial intention was to imagine myself as an inhabitant of Nowhere, practising what I thought to be crafts: weaving, printing and woodworking to name a few. But when faced with the realities of modern production and consumption, this idealised approach felt both futile and privileged. My area of research shifted towards interrogating not simply the technologies which shape us, but rather the environments they create in our collective consciousness.
This led me to consult experts across a wide range of disciplines – from Brian David Johnson, Intel’s first futurist and Artificial Intelligence (AI) consultant, to Dr Elizabeth Savage, a leading art historian on Western printing practices between the 15th and 17th centuries. Together, these dialogues explore what it means to craft in the digital age, the evolving relationships between labour and fulfilment, and how generative AI is reshaping both.
To guide these interviews and provide points for discussion, I created a first attempt at making an AI ethically compliant to Morris shown below.
Despite aspects of this future being tangibly within reach, we seem to be actively eradicating them: literally, through environmental degradation but also culturally, as we homogenise and commodify human creativity, experiences and futures through algorithmic systems. This project explores what it means to craft in the digital age, and projects how artificial intelligence (AI) might participate in a future shaped by Morris’ ideals.
All data storage and processing is entirely local on a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB), and the power required to process an input must be provided by the user through physically
treadling the sewing machine.
For more information on this project and the research process, please click here to view the PDF.
And if you wish to learn more about the programming behind this, I have uploaded the code here.