Climate change increasingly arrives as a water crisis: through floods, droughts, and rising seas. The tools we use to plan for it are built to predict and optimise. But prediction alone is never neutral, and it has limits: it tends to narrow the field of what feels possible, making technocratic, linear paths appear inevitable, while leaving out the lived, local, and emotional realities of the people who will inhabit them.

In Currents of Imagination we take a different approach. AI, for us, is never a neutral tool. It is a system, shaped by data, infrastructures, and politics that acts on the world whether or not we intend it to. Rather than treat it as a predictive engine, we work with it critically and deliberately, as a speculative partner for widening the range of urban water futures we can imagine, rather than closing it down. The project is co-led with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Link), a leading international institution for art, media, and technology.

Together with a wider network we develop experimental AI models trained not only on hydrological data, but on narrative, affective, and embodied knowledge. Artistic research is not decoration here but a method of knowing; participation is not consultation but co-authorship.