It’s here! The first of our double special issue reimagining the way we think about AI for the Imaginations Journal of Cross Cultural Image.

In our original call for papers, we began by thinking about how to live and work with the rapidly-changing analyses of artificial intelligence softwares. We asked about wide embraces and moral panics, and about resistances to and takeups of the already-voracious consumption of existing oppressive datasets and social relations. The project has evolved into a beautifully diverse double issue of Imaginations. In this double special issue, we consider a range of critical framings and interventions that understand AI as the latest wave of technological change that may be able to help or hinder us in our weird and sometimes wonderful daily grind(s), rather than as a totalizing and inevitable replacement of human existence.

The authors involved in this first part of the double issue are rethinking the world through the lenses of Indigenous sovereignty, Ubuntu Intelligence, and speculative methods in policy and practice, among other approaches. They investigate and are embedded in visual culture through folklore, innovation, labour, archives, and the environment.

One of the key themes in CLCF is to engage with policy, and a full four of the articles look at ways of governing AI, and activating policy on the ground.

In “Future Imaginaries of Indigenous AI,” Ceyda Yolgörmez, Suzanne Kite, Michelle Lee Brown, and Jason Edward Lewis offer a space to speculate about technological worlds through a series of workshops of the same name.

Next, Adio-Adet Dinika asks how we are “Manifesting Plural Futures: Resisting AI’s Colonising Impulses Through Counter-Imaginaries.” Taking data workers in Kenya as a primary case study, this article positions imagination as a liberating technology and builds on theories of Ubuntu Intelligence to show how this may reorient sovereignty, ownership, governance, and community.

Through a design strategy grounded in radical softness, Lina Eklund examines emotional futures through the speculative chatbot P in “Radical Softness as a Tool to Dismantle and Rebuild our Human-AI Future.”

Fenwick McKelvey, Maurice Jones, Robert Marinov, Luciano Frizzera, and Meaghan Wester report on a series of research-creation workshops in “The Consultation Machine: Experiments in AI Futures, Literacies and Public Participation” to propose new ways to shape public consultations and the futures they inform through policies and governance.

Neda Anatasoski and Redi Koobak offer “Automated Myth and the Postsocialist Digital State: The Imperial Trick of the Kratt AI Initiative in Estonia” to discuss the Estonian government’s AI strategy and systems, called Kratt AI. Named after the Estonian mythological figure of the kratt, this article reveals how this adoption of kratt mythology positions these automated systems within Estonian heritage and obscures their origins in Silicon Valley’s capitalism and imperialism.

Turning to creative industries, our key site of investigation in CLCF, two articles in this special issue aim to find ways to reveal the present and future impact of AI systems. In “Stable Diffusion of Innovation,” Maxime Harvey looks at a film co-op to reveal moments in AI adoption as “actions of dissidence,” “situation dissonance,” and “critical distance.” By studying these moments, this article seeks to open up broader conversations around AI implementation, resistance, and governance.

And turning to creative worker experiences, a core concern here at CLCF, Dani Rudnicka-Lavoie shares “GenAI and Precarity in Canadian Software Development: A Transfeminist Intersectional Analysis of Marginalized Workers’ Experiences.”

Connecting to another key approach at CLCF, that of making creative interventions in visual culture around AI, two authors offer us visually and conceptually rich ways of examining how colonial legacies have shaped AI and are reshaping environmental awareness. Stephen Charbonneau examines Caribbean colonial archives in “All That It Keeps Hidden: Rodell Warner, Archival Augmentations, and (Mis)Handling the Past.” And in “The Act of Seeing with Mechanical Eyes,” Steve F. Anderson assembles the first in a series of artistic investigations to explore entanglements and continued tensions between lens and software-based images, activating photographic 360 videos, 3D environments, and the software Midjourney.

Fundamentally, what these pieces are showing us is that academics, artists, creative workers, policymakers, and citizens are grappling with how to adapt to a world and world order that is shaking and shifting under our feet even as we are shaking and shifting along with this world order. Since we first issued the call for papers in the fall of 2024, just as CLCF was getting underway, the scale of growth in the North American and European military-industrial complex has tilted increasingly towards the military part of this equation. Sometimes, the function of AI seems to lie more effectively in its ability to scale up surveillance, policing, war footings, and the divide between rich and poor rather than in public good, in creating worlds where people live good lives, and where relationships (whether personal, business, or civic) can be nurtured and the earth can be healed.

Still, we are left with the questions we asked in the first place: Where do we want to be next year, or five years from now? What are the next 25 years going to look like?

The articles we offer in this special issue help map and push boundaries around the ways we encounter, engage with, and consider the possibilities for AI. Several of our contributors offer ways to think about interventions and openings that lead towards futures that can move past or alongside ideas about collapsing economies, world relations, and everyday, ordinary civility. They are also setting refusals so that we can collectively focus on the more imminent future. How we think about and act on these interventions at this moment is a methodology of living with the ubiquity of AI in ways that are insightful, functional and helpful, and sometimes even sustainable and joyful. We hope that you enjoy reading and engaging with these articles as much as we have, and stay tuned for part 2!