AI Imaginations – Narratives in Digital Futures

The aim of the workshop is to investigate how societies imagine artificial intelligence (AI) and how these socio-cultural imaginaries shape innovation, policy, and human–machine relations. The project analyses ‘narratives’ engaging AI technologies including AI embodied robots and disembodied chatbots, in literature, films, artistic practices, public discourses, the visions of cultural economy and politics. By doing so, we can consider how and why public imaginaries of AI and its narratives are constructed and diffuse various meanings and practices in order to better understand digital futures. Although research on AI ethics and the potential risks of AI has been extensively discussed, little attention has been given to the ways in which historical traditions, social discourses and political visions in different contexts shape the narratives of AI technologies. Hence, our discussion will draw on an analysis of these narratives to foster dialogue across the boundaries between nature and culture, human and non-human, and the West and the East.

Date: Thursday 15 October, 2026
Time: 09:30-12:30
Venue: Deptford Town Hall, Room B109, Goldsmiths, University of London

Contact: Dr Tomoko Tamari (Goldsmiths, University of London) for further information

Programme

09:30–09:35
Introduction by Dr Tomoko Tamari

09:35-10:05
The relationship between AI and humans in films and TV series: between domination and humanisation
Professor Rainer Winter (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)

My contribution highlights typical narrative patterns in films and tv series that explore the theme of artificial intelligence. A distinction is made between films that focus either on the humanisation of artificial intelligence or on its dominance and controlling role. Films serve as arenas for cultural and societal debate, in which the potential implications of artificial intelligence are discussed in a critical and multifaceted manner.

10:05-10:15 Q&A

10:15-10:45
AI as Protagonist and Mirror: Socio-Narratives in the Age of Algorithmic Storytelling
Dr Marc Ortmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

This talk examines artificial intelligence not only as a technological system, but as a cultural figure through which societies narrate themselves and their possible futures. It introduces the concept of AI socio-narratives: socially circulating narrative forms that make artificial intelligence meaningful by organizing hopes, fears, classifications, and visions of agency. From older myths of animated beings to contemporary generative media, AI companions,
and political-technological imaginaries such as Society 5.0, the talk asks how AI becomes both protagonist and mirror of social life. Its central claim is that AI is not only narrated by society; it increasingly participates in narrating society. In the age of algorithmic storytelling, narrative responsibility therefore becomes a crucial social and political question.

10:45-10:55 Q&A

BREAK – 10 minutes

11:05-11:35
Wor(l)ding AI: Socionarratology as a Grammar for Comparing AI Imaginaries
Philipp Weitzel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Artificial Intelligence is often discussed as one technological imagination that travels globally. Building on the concept of Sociotechnical Imaginaries, I propose a Socionarratological approach to AI Imaginaries. While Sociotechnical Imaginaries show how societies envision desirable futures through science and technology, Socionarratology asks how such visions become socially operative: AI does not become socially forceful through technology alone. It becomes plausible through cultural grammars that organize bodies, affects, authority, and agency.

The talk develops this argument through a comparative reading of artificial bodies and AI futurities across German/European and Japanese contexts to develop Socionarratology as a way of comparing AI imaginaries without reducing them to national mentalities. The talk examines how different cultural grammars make human–machine futures imaginable, embodied, ritualized, archived, and politically consequential.

11:35-11:45 Q&A

11:45-12:15
Techno-animism in Japan: Posthuman and Digital Futures
Dr Tomoko Tamari (Goldsmiths, University of London)

The paper attempts to scrutinize and deconstruct the image of Japan as a robot-loving country. It is often acknowledged that Japan is a unique nation which has a strong affection for artificial objects, including robots, which is arguably a different attitude from that of the Western countries. ‘Techno-animism’ is often cited to explain a ‘peculiar’ Japanese attitude towards artificial objects from the perspectives of historical and cultural background. Animism refers to a belief of ‘anima’ (spirits) of artificial objects that co-habit and blurs the boundaries between the human and non-human realms. Combining ‘techno’ with ‘animism’ is seen as illustrating Japan’s apparent ‘human-machine co-existence society’. Bringing some counter-grounds toward ‘Japanese’ techno-animism, the paper analyses such politically re-invented narratives.

The paper also further considers contemporary animistic ontology which emerges as one of consequences against the human-nature binary (Cartesian dualism) and anthropocentrism in the Western scientific paradigm. Drawing on Viveiros de Castro’s notion of ‘perspectivism’ (different beings can inhabit different perspectives in the same world) and Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘machinic animism’ (the capacity of souls to resemble and become something other than themselves), the paper explores relations between ‘tecno-animism’ and contemporary animistic ontology. This approach can also explain anthropomorphism in human perception and helps better understand the inter-relationality between human and non-human in posthumanism.

Posthumanism tends to refuse human exceptionalism and advocates the human’s entanglement with other organic and inorganic forms, including future technologies, such as AI. Here we can see that both posthumanism and techno-animism have similar traits for understanding the world we live in. In this sense, techno-animism can be no longer regarded a specifically Japanese social phenomenon, but can be understood as a global phenomenon for understanding contemporary techno-animistic ontology.

12:15-12:25 Q&A

Closing remarks by Professor Mike Featherstone, (Goldsmiths, University of London)