Betti Marenko

This talk interrogates algorithmic governmentality through the lens of uncertainty, reclaiming uncertainty not as a deficit to be managed but as a vital terrain of resistance against computational capture. Drawing on the work of Félix Guattari, alongside Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Brian Massumi and Tiziana Terranova, it examines how planetary computation operationalizes predictive systems designed to extract, model and pre-empt human potential. Contemporary digital infrastructures — what Terranova calls the “Corporate Platform Complex” — function as extractive, predatory and pathogenic assemblages that transform contingency into programmable certainty. The talk argues that algorithmic governmentality constitutes a regime of automated reason in which anticipatory calculation replaces causality and uncertainty is continuously reformatted into measurable risk. What is at stake is not simply the automation of decision-making, but the erosion of ambiguity, hesitation and open-ended becoming. Revisiting Guattari’s concepts of Integrated World Capitalism and General Collective Equipments, I propose the notion of algorithmic equipment to describe the distributed computational architectures that organize perception, affect, desire and social participation under conditions of planetary computation. These equipments do not merely mediate experience; they actively produce modes of existence calibrated for extraction and behavioural modulation. Against this logic of capture, the talk advances uncertainty as an ontological and political resource. Because computational systems must constantly seize and stabilize the indeterminate, the space of ambiguity remains a site where resistance persists. Drawing on Massumi’s account of potentiality and Guattari’s notion of “optional matter,” I argue that uncertainty contains the unrealized excess that continually escapes prediction. Resistance therefore emerges through friction, refusal, hesitation, recalcitrance and deviation: micro-political gestures capable of interrupting the smooth operationality of predictive systems and reopening the possibility of alternative futures. Ultimately, the talk proposes an allyship with uncertainty as both conceptual orientation and political strategy. To defend uncertainty is to defend the capacity to remain more — and more indeterminate — than what computation can ever predict in advance.

To face increasingly uncertain and turbulent futures it is crucial to develop approaches that work with uncertainty across disciplines, fields of expertise and a multiplicity of epistemic cultures. Because of its increasingly processual, ethical and future-facing drive to tackle world challenges, design has a leading role to play in this endeavour. However transdisciplinarity presents challenges. What does it mean exactly to work together across disciplines? The talk presents a constellation of concepts to orient possible journeys into transdisciplinarity. It draws on process philosophy to suggest an intellectual rationale to transdisciplinarity, and proposes a transversal approach to design that highlights imagination, inventive problem-making (rather than problem-solving), and the co-creation of spaces of learning and unlearning.

How can design craft potential futures in a scenario shaped by planetary computation? Unlike 4th revolution narratives that frame the future of human-machine interaction as techno-dystopias, a future of human-machine coevolution can be imagined by speculating on digital uncertainty: the potential for unpredictability in computation, manifest in the autonomy of algorithmic agency. Human-machine interaction is then reframed in terms of human-nonhuman ecologies that are emergent, cohabiting and highly contingent. Speculation via design is proposed as a mode of strategic, metic intelligence, able to capture and to capitalise on this systemic unpredictability, enabling the proposition of what ‘may be’: future-crafting in action. Invited Talk. Presented at the Symposium: Agents in the Anthropocene: Trans/disciplinary Practices in Art and Design Education Today.

The issue I explore with this position paper concerns dominant cultural scripts around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the need to imagine different narratives in light of machine learning’s autonomous performativity. The aim is to offer a philosophical reflection, not only to sidestep narratives of techno-determinism, dystopia and existential risk to mankind, but also to speculate on how to imagine a (more) benevolent AI based on uncertainty and the co-evolution of humans and technology. The paper presents the speculative methodology I call FutureCrafting: a forensic, diagnostic and divinatory method that investigates the possibility of other discourses, equally powerful in building reality, constructing futures and having tangible impact. FutureCrafting is speculation at the juncture of design and philosophy, pivoting around the open-ended figuration of the what if…? It articulates collaboration rather than competition, coevolution rather than antagonism, and privileges the indeterminate and the imaginative. To conclude, the paper makes reference to the non-human intelligence of the octopus and to how this can inform a more imaginative AI.

In “The Digital Murmur of Algorithm Magic,” Betti Marenko examines the algorithm as a contemporary form of enchantment, situated within the historical continuum linking magic and technology. She proposes that algorithms act as modern incantations—performative utterances that bring realities into being through planetary computation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the “magical universe,” Marenko interprets algorithmic processes as aesthetic and ontological forces that construct, rather than merely represent, human reality. Algorithms, operating through recursive and self-defining functions, embody a horizon of contingency and mystery that challenges the reductive comparison with recipes or procedural logic. Machine learning’s opaque decision-making processes illustrate this new form of inscrutable, nonhuman agency that shapes perception, cognition, and power. Through Simondon’s framework, Marenko argues that technicity and religion, both heirs to magic, reemerge today in algorithmic systems as hybrid expressions of a renewed magical unity. In this reconfigured milieu, the black screens of our devices function as new “key points” in an enchanted reticulation that binds humans, machines, and the world. The algorithmic universe, she concludes, hums with an incantatory digital murmur—an aesthetic, performative, and affective force that reanimates the relationship between technology, magic, and the creation of reality itself.

In her talk “Cultivating the Innovator Mindset: A Lifelong Journey” at the Hybrid Innovation Symposium, Betti Marenko explores the intertwined nature of creativity, design, and innovation within conditions of uncertainty. She distinguishes creativity as the capacity to generate new and valuable ideas, and innovation as the process of realizing these ideas into impactful outcomes. Arguing that innovation thrives not through rigid methods but within dynamic “problem spaces,” Marenko emphasizes that uncertainty is not an obstacle to overcome but a vital material to work with. Through this lens, Hybrid Innovation becomes a container for experimenting with uncertainty, encouraging open-ended inquiry, problem-finding, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Central to this framework is lifelong learning—the continuous, self-motivated pursuit of knowledge and adaptability that equips individuals to navigate accelerating change. Marenko highlights “learning to learn” as a critical skill, fostering resilience, agility, and creativity in the face of global complexity. She concludes by redefining cultivation—through patience, care, and attentiveness—as essential to nurturing the innovator’s mindset. Rather than embracing speed and disruption, Hybrid Innovation champions a slower, more reflective approach to creativity and transformation, cultivating the conditions in which innovation can truly emerge.

This chapter introduces an experimental approach to design research that uses metaphor and chance as tools for exploring the unknown. Centred on the Future Philosophical Pills project, it presents a post-qualitative methodology that transforms uncertainty into a productive and creative material for inquiry. Rather than imposing fixed frameworks or predictions, this approach cultivates openness to what the future may—or may not—bring, inviting designers to engage in “serious play” and speculative experimentation. The metaphor of the pill operates on two levels: as a curative agent offering conceptual clarity and as a pharmakon—both remedy and poison—signifying the ambivalent and transformative nature of philosophical inquiry. Through randomly selecting and interpreting Pill and Prompt cards, participants engage in chance-based, co-creative reflection, generating insights that connect the speculative and the pragmatic dimensions of design. This divinatory and transdisciplinary practice situates design as philosophy-in-action, using metaphorical thinking to decode the present and imagine plural futures. Ultimately, the chapter proposes that doing futures inquiry through the Future Philosophical Pills is not about prediction or control, but about cultivating attentiveness to the unknown as a vital, generative force for thinking and making futures differently.

The chapter introduces a speculative–pragmatic framework that merges philosophy and design to enhance futures literacy. Conceived as a deck of forty “Pills,” each representing a philosophical concept, and paired with forty “Prompts,” the project invites designers and learners to critically and imaginatively engage with uncertainty, speculation, and world-making. Rooted in process philosophy and transdisciplinary practice, the Pills act as diagnostic and generative tools to challenge assumptions about the future. They promote “philosophy-in-action,” where theory and practice intertwine to foster open, creative inquiry rather than fixed solutions. Drawing on the metaphor of the pharmakon—both cure and poison—the Pills embrace the productive tension between clarity and disruption, using uncertainty as material for design and reflection. Through chance-based methods, participants co-create meaning, countering deterministic, risk-averse, and neoliberal approaches to the future. The Pills encourage a shift from problem-solving to problem-finding, positioning design as a speculative and ethical practice of questioning and imagining alternatives. Ultimately, the Future Philosophical Pills constitute a pedagogical and methodological experiment in post-qualitative inquiry—transforming uncertainty into a catalyst for invention, fostering critical reflection, and enabling transdisciplinary, imaginative engagement with futures as open, plural, and continually emerging.

Planetary computation. An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails on signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the 4th Revolution when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience, data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smartalgorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and coevolution of the human with the nonhumanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact ofthe ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the nonhuman, a mix of the human with machines, dataflows, codes, algorithms; strange entanglements of silicon and carbon?

Design is often viewed as an activity focused on shaping futures or, more precisely, on creating ‘better’ futures. However, an important yet often overlooked reality is that the future is uncertain, unpredictable, and fundamentally unknown. Based on this premise, the Open Debate section seeks to explore the relationship between Design and Unknowns. By examining its philosophical, ethical, cosmological,practical, and pedagogical implications, this section wishes to offer new perspectives for design research: slowness, as a way to approach the encounter with the unknown, as well as a way to design it; problematization, as a rethinking of what we know; an engagement with the possible, to emphasize the non-linearity of how unknowns may shape potential realities; de-scripting, as a way to decouple from established blueprints and de-colonise futures; and a stance against the inevitabilism that strips potential from the unknown. These concepts introduce the voices that populate the section, exploring different dimensions of the relationships between Design and Unknowns.

In a world of endless predictions and precision algorithms The Power of Maybes offers a daring new way forward. What if uncertainty isn't a problem to solve, but a gift? This book reclaims hesitation, ambiguity, and not-knowing as powerful tools to resist the rigid control of digital systems. The Power of Maybes explores the radical idea that embracing uncertainty is essential in our age of planetary computation. Where machines seek to lock down knowledge, capture potential, dictate futures, and foreclose possibilities, The Power of Maybes argues for the cultivation of doubt, ambiguity, and un-knowing as forms of resistance. By reframing the unknown as a powerful resource, The Power of Maybes presents a bold approach to living and thinking alongside machines without surrendering to their grip. Blending philosophy, design, and critical tech studies, The Power of Maybes challenges dystopian fears and utopian hopes about technology, and champions new ways of being open, ungridded, unscaled. It's a call to cultivate the unknown and nurture potential. For those ready to reclaim their agency in an algorithmic age, this book is a guide to living with oceanic uncertainty -and finding power in it.

My paper approaches the theme of computational creativity by looking at uncertainty as an epistemic and aesthetic tool that must be examined to address the challenges brought to critical practice by planetary computation. It positions uncertainty as central to how the encounter of the human practitioner with non-human machines is conceptualized, and as a resource for building speculative-pragmatic paths of resistance against algorithmic capture. It proposes ways to cultivate uncertainty and use it as a design material to produce new types of knowledge that question machines’ pre-emptying manoeuvres and resist their capture of potential. The argument proposed is that uncertainty affords the production of new imaginaries of the human-machine encounter that can resist the foreclosure of futures (what will be) and are sustained instead by the uncertainty of potential (what might be. Dwelling in a space of potential – Deleuze’s virtual, or what I call a space of ‘maybes’, requires of the practitioner a repositioning of their epistemic perspective and reflecting on the following questions: how can material knowledge be made by engaging with modes of un-knowing and not-knowing in machine interaction? How can these modes of un-knowing and not-knowing be fostered as a critical and political onto-epistemological project of reinventing critical practice for the algorithmic age? The paper argues that the machinic unknown should be engaged with - not through the conventional paradigm that pitches human vs machine creativity and attempts to rank and score them through similarities, but rather through a (paradoxical) deepening of the unknowability at the core of the machine and machine’s own incommensurability.It then proposes the Chinese notion of wu wei (active non action) as a stratagem to experiment with to craft speculative-pragmatic interventions, and to augment the ‘power of maybes’ as a space of anti-production, and resisting reduction.

Betti Marenko explores the changing status of the technodigital object – and the mobile intensities that characterize the current objectscape – to account for objects’ evolving intelligence. She looks at how hand-held mobile devices (smart phones, IPods, IPads PDAs), are reshaping the nexus object-subject into temporal discontinuities of human and non-human assemblages. Her talk argues that the shift from object to event delineated by Gilles Deleuze – where space becomes time, form becomes formation, and moulding becomes modulation – needs to be taken on board by design practices and discourses as constitutive of a material-driven epochal shift. A morphogenetic perspective on matter prompts design to question some of its assumptions around how objects actually come to exist, and in broader terms, design’s own relationship with materiality. She argues for a shift in design’s theoretical location, from design as a problem solving activity – a task-oriented, performance-measured, linear exercise, that reduces uncertainty, a conventional view of design as a technology of affective capture enforcing and reproducing market ideologies – to design as a problem finding enterprise – that is, an enterprise that veers towards problematizing and complexifying the existent. Within this morphogenetic framework design should come unhinged from its teleological fixation with form and function, and embrace instead an intuition-based apprehension rooted in ‘following matter’, vagueness and variation. This perspective is deployed to examine the silicon-based materiality of digital devices and their key component, the microchip. Silicon is examined in reference to both Deleuze’s prophetic ‘revenge of the silicon’ and also by looking at how a new breed of microchips that ‘follow’ neural activity (neuromorphic chips) are bypassing the distinction between carbon and silicon-based life, animate and inanimate matter, and articulating new forms of intelligence. The convergence of silicon and carbon, via Deleuze’s concept of nonorganic life, allows Marenko to read the technodigital object as the site of diverse material intelligences unfolding morphogenetically, beyond the narrow paradigms of cyborgness on the one hand and dematerialization on the other.

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy, and quantum physics. It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.

Today’s social, political, and environmental emergencies require specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing practices to produce new kinds of knowledge. The Summer School wants to explore the emerging systemic transition which demands a radical transformation of knowledge models. The uncertainty that characterizes times of crisis forces us to question the strategies, tools, and instruments at our disposal to understand the current context and change it through design. With the pandemic striking our usual way to think the future, this may be the opportunity to better understand the huge potential of future literacies as a methodological tool to convey concepts and information in rethinking knowledge boundaries. Located at the intersection of the material, the cultural, the epistemic, the ontological, the technological, the philosophical, the political, design contains the seeds of the capacity for becoming an agent of radical transformation and generative production. It can do that on the condition that it becomes also a medium of critical inquiry, unleashing its capacity to interrogate the present and build new worlds, beyond the overwhelming deterministic visions pushed by contemporary socio-technical and socio-economic systems. The School will be a theoretical and pragmatic occasion to challenge knowledge systems, based on deterministic blueprints and models, and to reimagine and re-make design as a mode of inquiry and as a practice to interrogate the present. It might lead to an inter-, trans-, post-disciplinary exploration exploring the role, agency, and responsibility of design in showing unexpected possible directions of change. It might be a meta-knowledge inquiry about Research through Design within the perspective of decolonizing knowledge, unfolding the opportunities of knowing, and world-building. It might be an investigation of how speculative and critical approaches can be deployed to rethink futures in light of theories and the practices coming from other disciplines.

How do we do critique in algorithmic age? As planetary computation is redesigning human modes of existence, altering cognition, perception, and circulation of affects, not only is it changing what counts as human; it is also radically changing how knowledge is produced and what counts as knowledge. During the talk we will examine some of the dominant narratives circulating around digital technologies to question the techno-determinist visions they embody – in particular notions such as ‘solutionism’, ‘techno-enchantment’ and ‘platform design’. We will consider ways in which how our human relationship with (and to) machines – in the broader sense of the term - could be rethought as developing meta-stable hybrid ecologies of the human with the nonhumanity of machines, with a focus on how the encounter with artificial intelligence could be re-imagined. We will then use these ideas to illuminate the cognitive and epistemological shift generated by the data-driven logic of computation in the light of theories of algorithmic governance (Rouvroy), and conclude with some pointers for designers wishing to mobilize these ideas in their work.

This paper, written during lockdown while involved in remote teaching, looks at the impact of platform technologies to reflect on how human agency has been machine-reconfigured in the name of efficiency. It posits that a technocratic shift operates by capturing the messy flow of embodied experience, turning it into an operational and constantly upgradable toolkit, and asks for a consideration of the implications of this process of “toolification”, especially in the context of creative studio practice.

In a context increasingly defined by post-normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993) it is acknowledged that complex world problems cannot be addressed by one discipline in isolation. To face increasingly uncertain futures it is therefore crucial to develop approaches that work with uncertainty. Because of its future-facing nature and current drive to tackle world challenges, design has a leading role to play in this endeavour. The article proposes a research framework informed by the development of hybrid literacies – transversal toolkits across design, technologies and futures studies – that can furnish learners with transdisciplinary skills. These are deemed necessary to address uncertainty and complexity by deploying speculative-pragmatic, imaginative practices that foster modes of working, learning and unlearning together. To illustrate this approach, the article draws on the ongoing collaboration between two academic institutions renowned respectively in the field of Art and Design (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London) and Science and Technology (Tokyo Institute of Technology) to offer a personal reflection and insights around transdisciplinarity and hybrid literacies in action.

Planetary computation. An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails on signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the 4th Revolution when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience, data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smartalgorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and coevolution of the human with the nonhumanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact ofthe ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the nonhuman, a mix of the human with machines, dataflows, codes, algorithms; strange entanglements of silicon and carbon?