Building On The Library Of The Incalculable
With Payal Arora
Artificial intelligence is often narrated as a posthuman nightmare: a future of sentient machines, automated governance, and the slow erasure of human agency. In her recent book From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, Payal Arora resists this apocalyptic imaginary. Drawing on long-term research across the Global South, she reveals a different technological landscape – one animated less by existential dread than by aspiration, pleasure, experimentation, and pragmatic negotiation. Against the dominance of fear-driven AI ethics, Arora proposes a shift in tone and terrain: from fatalism to situated practice, from universal pronouncements to lived realities.
Her forthcoming project, Library of the Incalculable, turns to what remains outside the computational frame. What forms of value evade metrics? What kinds of intelligence are carried in ritual, memory, ecological attunement, or informal collaboration? Rather than treating the incalculable as error or excess, the project approaches it as a generative field – an archive of gestures, stories, and relations that resist reduction.
Opening Techno-Ancestrality, Arora brings these trajectories into conversation with the festival’s wider concerns: technologies of divination and fabulation, practices of counter-coding and fugitive communication, ancestral biotopes and forms of collective care. Her keynote invites us to rethink intelligence not as prediction alone, but as relational, embodied, and historically grounded—where technology is neither savior nor specter, but a site of ongoing negotiation.
This keynote is presented in collaboration with V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, in connection with the publication “The Library of the Incalculable” by V2_ Publishing.
