Artist as Futurist: Reflections from a UAS IN-depth Module

Last week, I had the opportunity to facilitate an IN-depth module at the University of the Arts Singapore titled Artist as Futurist. Although UAS provided the workshop content, the experience resonated strongly enough that I felt compelled to document the learning trajectories, tensions, and shifts that emerged across the three sessions. What follows is not a summary of content delivered. It is, instead, a reflection on how thinking evolved through discussion, critique, and making. Throughout the sessions, the emphasis was not on arriving at fixed positions but on cultivating the capacity to articulate, test, and take responsibility for one’s own stance under conditions in which certainty was deliberately withheld.

The facilitation sessions began with an introduction to the futurist movement, which understandably felt distant and historical. Several participants questioned why we were studying this particular art movement at all, and what relevance it could hold for contemporary practice. Over time, the reason for beginning there became clearer. Early futurism emerged pre-WWI, at a moment of profound technological and societal disruption. In this sense, it mirrors our present condition: a pre-AI or early-AI threshold marked by optimism, acceleration, faith in progress, and significant blind spots. Rather than treating futurism as a style to be admired or rejected, we approached it as a way of examining how artists respond when the ground beneath them shifts. Reframed in this way, futurism became less about history and more about orientation, a lens through which present dilemmas could be examined without collapsing prematurely into answers.

One of the most noticeable shifts across the sessions was a movement away from immediate judgment toward more deliberate modes of engagement. During structured observation, analysis, interpretation, and reflection, several participants reported that their thinking slowed. This slowing was not experienced as a loss of intuition, but as a means of reclaiming agency. It allowed students to become more aware of what they were responding to, why they responded in that way, and which assumptions were shaping those responses. This shift became especially important once we moved into questions of technology and artificial intelligence, where speed and convenience so often stand in for reflection.

Discussions around AI shifted most clearly when conversations moved from abstraction to situated practice. When AI was framed in relation to students’ own disciplines, whether design, music, animation, or visual arts, positions became more grounded and specific. Questions of authorship, labour, bias, and responsibility ceased to be theoretical and became material. Initial positions varied widely. Some participants were firmly opposed to the use of AI. Some were largely unconcerned. Others were uncertain or ambivalent. By the end of the module, although agreement was neither expected nor required, most had moved beyond indifference. Concern did not necessarily translate into rejection. More often, it took the form of responsibility: a recognition that engaging, questioning, or even refusing to engage are all consequential choices.

A turning point came when we leaned into dilemmas rather than solutions. Earlier discussions of futurism and AI may have felt abstract or opaque. Once dilemmas were articulated clearly, the purpose of the earlier conversations became more legible. The goal was never to arrive at a single position, but to learn to hold complexity, articulate a stance, and understand what that stance commits one to. As I often said during the sessions, “there is no answer.” This shift became especially evident during manifesto development, where assumptions had to be surfaced, and positions could no longer remain implicit.

Not every method landed cleanly. The inverted-thinking exercise on creating a deliberately “terrible” manifesto was taken quite literally and became playful, even exaggerated. Yet this exaggeration revealed the absurdities and dangers embedded in unexamined values. In hindsight, this moment of levity created space for subsequent seriousness, allowing the following discussions to be more focused and grounded. Some methods work not through precision, but through contrast!

A recurring insight across the sessions was that manifestos are not only political instruments. They are fundamentally human ones. Making art, designing systems, and using tools that affect others are already ethical acts, whether or not they are framed as such. Values are always present. Recognising this does not restrict creativity, but instead clarifies responsibility.

Regarding values, I shared a reflection from my artistic and pedagogical practice, drawn from a principle in jazz. Wynton Marsalis has remarked that while music is for the listener, the musician is the first listener. The same applies to tools like AI. To use them responsibly, one must engage deeply enough to understand how they shape thinking, decision-making, and values. Agency does not arise from avoidance alone, but from informed and intentional use. By the end of the module, positions were clearer, stakes were higher, and ambivalence gave way to responsibility. That, more than any single outcome, reflects the role of artists as futurists. Not predicting the future, but shaping how it is questioned.

This experience reaffirmed for me the importance of facilitation as a distinct pedagogical skill. Not teaching content, not transmitting positions, but designing conditions under which students are compelled to think, articulate, and take responsibility for their own stances. This is increasingly central to how I approach curriculum design, assessment framing, and studio-based learning across institutions; work of this nature sits at the intersection of pedagogy, practice, and institutional responsibility. I remain interested in continuing conversations with programme leaders, academic planners, and institutions that are seriously considering how artists, designers, and musicians are prepared to navigate emerging technological conditions with clarity, agency, and ethical depth.