About Us
Overview
At UKAI Projects, we research, prototype, and produce culture for what’s coming. Our work is a response to the increasing automation and regularization of everyday life. Many are no longer confident that the future will be better than the past or even the present, so we turn over more and more systems to the logics of efficiency and size. We deliver on projects that diversify the pool of solutions we have to draw upon now and going forward.
At UKAI, we embrace other values in the creation and outcomes of cultural work and explore the kinds of culture(s) we’ll need to deal with issues such as climate change, rising inequality, authoritarianism, and as-yet unknown crises. We do this through experimentation with cultural infrastructure, collaboration, and expression.
Founded in 2017 and commencing activity in 2018, UKAI is based in Toronto but global in activity with projects and partnerships in Japan, China, Malawi, Egypt, Jordan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the United States, Switzerland, and across Canada.
UKAI Projects asks questions that matter to us and then seeks out and supports an excess of response. We prefer answers to questions that extend from outside of official ideologies and that complicate the assumptions on which society operates. From this excess, new constellations of meaning can be constantly assembled and re-assembled to make sense of what is happening.
We believe that artistic and cultural practices are central to taking action and making things better.
UKAI Projects is incorporated federally as a non-profit arts organization. Our projects explore issues where polarized positions are common, such as artificial intelligence, community development, and economic inequality.
Our approach is dialogic, rather than dialectic, and we seek out different lived experiences, expertise, abilities, and geographies to provide a fuller picture of what is going on
We commission responses where there are gaps and prototype solutions that extend from the patterns that emerge.
Read more about our approach→