On September 10th 2025 I hosted a panel for the British Science Festival in conjunction with ZKM. The title of the event was ‘Art for Democracy Experiment’. For the Bristish Science Festival blurb we asked ‘How can we democratise museums and make them tools of social change?’
The event took the form of an open discussion/seminar with a live link up feed to ZKM – particpants were invited to discuss ideas around Stafford Beer’s work, Project Cybersyn and how such utopic projects might be re-used today as both tools to help instigate ground up community activism and as a means to challenge the condition of neoliberal occupation
The event was inspired by conversations we’ve been having between Alistair Hudson, Scientific-Artistic Chairman of the ZKM and his team, in partnership with myself and members LJMU Libraries and Archival team. These have cantered around the Stafford Beer Archive, which we house at LJMU, and particularly the Project Cybersyn and Team Syntegrity Archive. What we aim to do is find new ways, in an age of AI, to democratise and activate existing online/offline archives as toolkits for real-world change. Believing that there is always latent and untaped potential held within historical archives, we want to develop pilot toolkits (focusing on Beer’s Project Cybersyn and Team Syntergity as ‘portals) that would make archives more open to use and usership – and thereby offering ways to rethink how institutions themselves can share and activate the potentials held within their archives as toolkits for social change.
Use Value and Art 
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