Reflections on Futures in Tension

By

Federica Caciolli – XXX, University of Firenze

I entered the ETH-TECH Art Contest to test whether images could hold ethical tension instead of polishing it away. Futures in Tension is a sequence of ten illustrated cards—miniature thought-experiments that expose the ecological, social, and political forces hidden inside “ordinary” educational technology. They invite educators, students, and policymakers to pause before the next upgrade and look at what is already shaping our classrooms.

My process was deliberately hybrid. I drafted concepts first, then generated base images with different tools depending on the feel I needed—DALL·E 3 for painterly scenes, Midjourney v6 for collage-like compositions, and Stable Diffusion XL for charcoal textures. I exported depth maps or upscaled PNGs into Blender and Photoshop to model bespoke elements, paint over details, and grade everything with a teal–magenta palette, adding analogue flourishes like chalk textures and watercolor bleeds. Inspirations ranged from Moebius and Studio Ghibli backgrounds to Hannah Höch collages and classic chiaroscuro. Prompts were hypotheses; each output mapped what the model could—and refused to—see.

Ethically, the series moves across linked dilemmas: the planetary ruins behind data centers and devices; political power embedded in licenses and platforms; global inequality and bandwidth gaps; attention engineered into dependency; bias masked as “accuracy”; cultural monocrops where recommender systems flatten diversity; inquiry, co-design, and care as practices strong enough to re-stitch our tools; and, finally, future imagination as something we build together, transparently, brick by brick.

This project made me slower and more explicit about provenance, collaboration, and failure states. Above all, it reframed AI for me—not as destiny, but as a site for critique and construction. If these cards do anything, I hope they create room for that kind of conversation.