I was part of the BeFantastic Together Fellowship in 2021. It is an international art fellowship that invited “collaborative practitioners in art, design, and technology to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML), data & networks around the theme of the climate crisis.” The fellowship ran online from August to December and connected artists, designers, and technologists from all around the world. I got to collaborate with Srishti, a filmmaker, Swati, a playwright, and Vinko, a software developer. The former two are based in India while the latter is based in Spain.

Stories from your Future is an interactive text-based narrative set in 2050 Delhi addressing the crisis of water scarcity. The participant makes difficult choices as they navigate through the story. A provocation to reflect on the climate emergency and the agency we hold today.

Stories from your Future references choose-your-own-adventure books, or more recently, Netflix’s Bandersnatch. The work requires participants to make decisions at various points as the story unfolds. Each decision made by the participant leads them down a separate path in the narrative.

The medium that participants will experience Stories from your Future through is a fictitious AI chatbot companion known as cloudbee. Cloudbee is imagined as an app used by governments to ration and allocate resources to citizens in a world where countries and cities are fast approaching or living past Day Zero (defined as the day where water levels go so low that municipalities are forced to shut public access to tap water).

Experience Stories from your Future on its microsite

I worked on the design of cloudbee, from the initial wireframes to high-fidelity Figma prototypes. I also helped to hack Twine so that it matches the needs of our project.

Find out more about my art practice on Luke Warme