Events

We offer open and participatory events that showcase interdisciplinary work and impact and spark ideas, inspiration and debate. 

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Edinburgh Futures Conversations – Shaping our AI Futures

Playfair Library Hall Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Hybrid Hybrid Event

This panel opens the fourth in the University’s Futures Conversations series on Artificial Intelligence. In this event, we bring together leading experts from the worlds of science, politics, and civil society to debate what our AI futures may bring, and to develop ideas for what is needed to advance our collective ability to put AI to the best possible use.

Free

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want

Inspace 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Hybrid Hybrid Event

In this panel, speakers will briefly showcase their work on the intersections of technology and sexuality. When we are repeatedly told who and what to desire by apps, platforms and websites the relationship between technology and sexuality feels impossible to escape. We might not know what we really, really want.

Free

Living with Robots

Playfair Library Hall Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Hybrid Hybrid Event

A panel discussion among experts on what it means to ‘live well’ with robots.

Free

Reimagining Universities: Speculative Scenarios for Higher Education

Bayes Centre, The University of Edinburgh, Room G.03 47 Potterrow, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Professors from the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh will share their speculative scenarios for Higher Education Futures in an event which will be a mix of research-sharing, storytelling and collaboration.

Free

LIMBIC: Ego, Elegy, Ecstasy

Inspace 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Hybrid Hybrid Event

This audio-visual performance by composer Philly Holmes responds to Limbic, a poetry collection by Peter Scalpello. Through words, sound and imagery, the performance traces a personal narrative exploring intimacy and queer discovery, enacting the confusions and graces of a queer life through hybridity of storytelling forms.

Free

Robotic Poems: A Writing Workshop with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Virtual Event Virtual Event

In this workshop, participants will learn basic coding elements to create a simple poem generator. The emphasis is on play and experimentation, with some background information on literary techniques. Participants will experience how computational poetics and computational thinking can jumpstart or become part of a creative writing process.  

Free

The Inquisitive Bodymind: Scottish Dance Theatre and Dr Marisa De Andrade

Traverse Bar, Traverse Theatre 10 Cambridge Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The multidisciplinary event will feature short performances by Scottish Dance Theatre’s dancers, including an excerpt from ‘Thin h/as h/air’ by choreographer Pauline Torzuoli. Inspired by the natural phenomena of Itla Okla and Hair Ice, this playful and poetic solo work follows the journey of a man: from scientist to the spirit of a tree.

Free

For the Love of Fashion

Virtual Event Virtual Event

Our love of fashion is driving an unsustainable system of manufacturing, distributing and disposing of our clothing that is impacting our planet. How can we change our behaviour and the system for the love of the planet? How can we harness new technology such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics and informatics, and creative tools such as Augmented and Virtual Reality?

Free

Post-Internet Pleasure as an Act of Poetics

Virtual Event Virtual Event

This writing workshop will look at a range of writers and theories, exploring interdisciplinary strands of New Media hybrid writing. You will be provided with the tools and ideas to craft your own digital poetics, and means by which to use the virtual on the page, creating and fostering a relationship between the machine and the author.  

Free

Hybrid Humans: Harry Parker and Bertolt Meyer

Virtual Event Virtual Event

How can the latest developments in technology, robotics and implants lead to powerful and liberating possibilities for what bodies can be? In this event, speakers share their eye-opening accounts of disability, identity, and how robotics and AI are altering what it means to be human. 

Free

Hate in the Digital Era: Lilia Giugni and Matthew Williams

Virtual Event Virtual Event

How has technology exacerbated systems of oppression in the 21st century, and what can we do to resist? This event features a conversation with authors Matthew Williams and Lilia Giugni whose works examine different yet intersecting issues of human behaviour in the digital era. 

Free

Utopia Lab: Futures Dreaming

Project Room (1.06), 50 George Square 50 George Square, Newington, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Our Utopia Labs are ‘no-spaces’, places where everyone is welcome to join us in dreaming futures that inspire our experience of the present. In this session invited speakers will present visions of their Utopia, which we will (individually or in groups) respond to by creating our own artistic and creative mini-Utopias.

Free

It’s All About the Feelings…

Inspace 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

A creative research project led by Beverley Hood, an artist and Reader in Technological Embodiment & Creative Practice at the University of Edinburgh, featuring actor, Pauline Goldsmith. How does sentiment recognition technology actually work and how accurate is it? This performance will reveal how emotional AI databases actually work, behind the smoke and mirrors.

Free

Galvanised: Big Mind – Collective Behaviour and Collective Intelligence

Playfair Library Hall Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Virtual Event Virtual Event

This Galvanised seminar addresses the opportunities that collective behaviour and collective intelligence may offer for addressing a wide range of social and political issues. In keeping with the dual science/arts theme of Galvanised, the seminar will be presented by a biological scientist and a social and political scientist. 

Free

Technomoral Conversations: Technologically Mediated Intimacy

Inspace 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Virtual Event Hybrid Event

Technomoral Conversations is a “fireside chat” series organised by The Centre for Technomoral Futures. This event will focus on our relationships with machines, from robot pets and therapeutic companions to apps for dating and romance, to technologies embedded in our bodies.

Free

Catharsis In the Age of the Metaverse

Inspace 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The rise of Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality (AR/XR) with their applications urge us to investigate whether “catharsis” is still conceivable, in hybrid or entirely artificial environments; and how a reconfigured concept of “catharsis” can be envisioned as part of the co-evolution of human, natural, and artificial life forms.

Free

Antagonistic Sextet: A Performance by Raw Green Rust

Inspace 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Virtual Event Hybrid Event

Raw Green Rust are an improvising laptop trio that make abstract glitch-dub that draws on wide ranging musical interests and interconnectedness. For this event, the trio will perform as an ‘Antagonistic Sextet’ with and against their own performance history.

Free

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Power trip event season event flyer

POWER TRIP

Our Autumn 2023 programme of events explored leadership in all its forms – from the seats of power to the front lines of activist movements and even in our own workplaces.

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Love Machine event season digital flyer

Love machine

Our Spring 2023 programme of events explored the interconnections of AI and data with humanity through conversations, performances, and workshops.

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First Breath Autumn Event Season brand leader. Image of dandelion and umbrellas on orange background. Text reads: 'First Breath: Autumn Event Season'. Includes Edinburgh Futures Institute logo.

First Breath

Our Autumn 2022 programme featured more than 20 events exploring crisis, migration, displacement and equality coalescing around the theme of Climate Justice.

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"The production and intellectual content of your recent events has been fantastic! Thank you for the opportunity to attend and learn. This is probably the best event I have been to all year."

Event attendee, Love Machine Spring 2023

"Really, really impressed with Futures Institute events. Properly impressive speakers, and seamless technical management. Thank you for keeping them hybrid/online – it's a really nice way to keep in touch!"

Event attendee, Love Machine Spring 2023

"Amazing! I hope that Utopia Lab can ring in every event season, the dream space that you curate and allow to flourish is an important and novel lens that Edinburgh Futures Institute offers partners, students, staff, researchers and anyone with an interest in collaborative thinking and doing."

Event attendee, Love Machine Spring 2023

Our public events seasons are co-created with people from across the University of Edinburgh. If you'd like to contribute ideas for the programme please contact the events team.

Call for proposals

Meet the events team

Headshot of Alice Carr

Alice Carr

Events Co-ordinator
Headshot of Fraser Pringle

Fraser Pringle

Project & Events Administrator
Headshot of Ioannis Kalkounos

Ioannis Kalkounos

Programme Manager
Lewis Williams

Lewis Williams

Events Technician

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