rootoftwo on civic imagination, technological power, and why the future must be collectively authored rather than inherited
5 August 2026
As artificial intelligence, surveillance, and digital infrastructures increasingly shape everyday life, the question of who gets to imagine the future has become profoundly political. In ‘Anyspace? Whatever.’, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, artist duo rootoftwo transform the exhibition into a participatory space where visitors become active collaborators in envisioning more equitable civic futures. Through games, speculative design, architectural propositions, and AI-mediated dialogue, the exhibition challenges assumptions about technological neutrality while insisting that imagination itself is a form of public agency. In this conversation with ART AFRICA, rootoftwo reflect on the politics of participation, the urgency of reclaiming collective visioning, and how art can help expose the invisible systems that shape contemporary life.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘Anyspace? Whatever’ invites audiences to imagine alternative futures rather than accept inherited systems. What inspired you to approach the exhibition as collective speculation instead of a fixed vision of the future?
We are concerned that by design, the vast majority of us are excluded from contributing to forging more equitable visions of the future. This is what we call under-imagined futures, and the only means to counter this is through inspiring civic imagination. The exhibition explores and critically examines past and present collective sites and means of civic imagination, from World’s Fairs to design competitions, through artists’ zines and storytelling to world-building and game activations. Who and what is centred and excluded are questions we keep returning to throughout the works that are part of the exhibition. ‘Anyspace? Whatever.’ invites participation and visioning as an antidote to the sense of inevitability that dominates so much of contemporary thinking on technology and public life.
At the heart of the exhibition is The Rotunda, where visitors engage in conversations with an AI system. What interests you about positioning artificial intelligence as a participant in public dialogue about civic life, rather than simply a technological tool?
The Rotunda functions as a platform for public reasoning—not as a neutral technological intervention, but as an exercise in deliberative democracy that directly challenges the power structures embedded in our current notions of innovation. We reject the framing of AI as a ‘neutral tool.’ Instead, we recognise technology as a site where specific cultural, economic, and political biases are encoded. By positioning the public as active co-authors who set the terms of engagement, we create a space to reclaim agency from the ‘systemic inevitability’ often imposed by these platforms. This is central to our practice at rootoftwo: we flip the narrative to expose the contradictions in our civic life, using The Rotunda not to celebrate technology, but as a site for the collective, uncomfortable, and necessary visioning required to construct our own, self-determined futures.
Much of your practice questions the assumption that technology is neutral. How can contemporary art create space for critical conversations about the invisible infrastructures of data, surveillance, and power shaping our everyday lives?
We operate as a creative and civic studio that treats art-making, research, and strategy as indivisible. For over a decade, we have explored the tension between the promises of innovation and the realities of who those systems serve. For us, contemporary art is not a neutral zone; it is a site of critical inquiry and collective visioning. By making the ‘invisible’ infrastructures of surveillance and data capitalism legible, we aim to transform them from background conditions into shared questions with rights-based stakes. We don’t just create space for conversation; we build forums to examine the power imbalances in both the art world and the broader civic sphere, ensuring that the futures we build are grounded in the agency of those historically and presently marginalised by these systems.
The exhibition foregrounds participation, asking visitors to become active contributors rather than passive observers. What emerges when audiences are invited to co-author the work, especially when the subject is the future of our cities?
Engaging with systems and active participation are defining features of all our projects. ‘Anyspace? Whatever.’ spans various forms and scales of interaction, including tabletop games, computer-generated films, prints, archives, sculptural installations, and architectural concepts. Collectively, these pieces establish contrasting cautionary and hopeful depictions of public life, cities, and technological futures. It’s a sandbox and experiential space to frame responses, expand knowledge, and, through embodied play, forge capacity for resistance and civic imagination. This exhibition positions cities as the site by which broad publics can envision and act to build alternatives, to go on offence against the kind of techno-feudalism currently underway and undermining the civic sphere. To function in this capacity, cities themselves must be reimagined and shaped through deliberative and discursive practices. What we’ve found so far with this exhibition, and similar projects, is that it operates as a catalyst for critical connections and collective agency, radiating beyond the museum in the reflections, relationships, and conversations that visitors have afterwards.
Through 463NCY, play becomes a means of confronting complex ethical questions about autonomy, control, and resistance. What can games reveal about political and social systems that other artistic forms cannot?
Games provide an embodied and structured space to rehearse resistance and engage in collective visioning. We don’t believe that games are the only means for this, but for us they offer an accessible entry point to consider the social, political, and ethical implications of data, privacy, and artificial intelligence. Players perform and resist the mechanisms of surveillance, optimisation, and data-harvesting. In this way, 463NCY (pronounced agency) makes the tech industry’s “invisible” infrastructures legible and contestable. We have been developing and playtesting the game with communities in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Paris, and now within the context of the museum. Strangers unite to challenge the system amidst shared laughter, high-fives, and encouraging shouts of “you got this”, transforming the museum into a site of collective visioning. The joy of cooperation and play becomes a radical tool—not for escapism, but for the hard, necessary work of reclaiming agency and building alternatives to the extractive structures shaping our lives.
Your work often moves between art, design, research, and civic engagement. How do you navigate these overlapping disciplines while keeping each project grounded in lived experience rather than technological abstraction?
We begin with the people, the context, and the specific circumstances in which each project is situated. Our work centres the perspectives of those historically and presently marginalised, moving across disciplines to complexify issues and explicitly reject false binaries and the technological abstraction that often masks systemic harm. We have encapsulated our approach in the phrase, ‘Under-imagined futures have consequences.’ We foreground a plurality of experiences, exposing mental and cultural frames, and the biases and values embedded within them, as constructs. These frames and imaginaries are indelibly a part of culture, and they can and do get stuck. We recognise that culture is also the most effective means for getting ‘unstuck.’ This is the work of intentional civic imagination: it requires consistent self-work, reflexivity, and the audacity to reclaim agency from the sense of inevitability pervasive in public life.
Detroit has long been a city associated with innovation, industry, and reinvention. How have the city’s history and communities shaped your thinking about equitable technological futures and collective imagination?
Neither of us are from Detroit. Previously, we lived and worked in other de-industrialising cities in the US and United Kingdom. In each of these places, there was a sense of a revolution happening. A transition from being world-class at a previous way of doing things and having the realisation that this needs reinvention for the present moment and the future. We chose Detroit, arriving in 2008. To borrow from activist Grace Lee Boggs, “we are lucky to be living in Detroit.” To live in Detroit is to be humbled and inspired by the ingenuity and resilience of its residents, our neighbours. Detroit reveals the ‘seams’ of our modern infrastructures, where the promises of progress often clash with the realities of who benefits most from these systems and who is harmed. Here, we get to contend with this ‘past-future’ ‘future-present’ landscape, aware of the unique and devastating way that Detroit has moved the world. By operating here, we move past the abstractions of techno-feudalism, hyper-capitalism, climate instability, and social fragmentation to participate with others in the essential work of building collective agency and actions. Detroit is a place of profound opportunity and solidarity, forging adaptive translocal networks to redefine the social and civic towards more equitable global futures.
Throughout ‘Anyspace? Whatever,’ there is an underlying optimism that new forms of dialogue can reshape how we think about governance and public life. In a moment marked by rapid technological change, what gives you hope that artists can influence the futures we are building together?
Artists and contemporary art alone are not enough to impact the futures being built. Art can be a catalyst for collective action, visioning, critique, and resistance, but it is equally comfortable with upholding the status quo, aiding and abetting existing power structures. It’s not neutral, and it is often faithless. It is through the intentional collective work of people that we can influence the futures we are building, to ensure they are more equitable and just, or not. As artists and practitioners, we exist in and are shaped by the communities and the identities we inhabit. For us and other artists intentionally engaged in just systems and social transformation work, we are merely doing our part, using the means and modalities available to us to aid in the broader struggle towards more preferable futures. The more that we can communicate in thoughtful ways about what we all need or want, the more we can practice civic imagination then the less likely we are to under-imagine the future. While the future remains volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, we all possess the right to imagine and work toward a future where we, the planet, and other species thrive together.
This exhibition is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit until 20 September 2026.
