Robert Collins

Antidefuturing: Breaking What Is Fixed

As algorithmic decision systems (ADS) increasingly govern daily life, they are often obscured behind seamless, frictionless interfaces. This design paradigm establishes a digital hegemony, hiding deep systemic complexities to prioritize extractive efficiency over user agency. Echoing historical critiques of automation from Marx’s warnings of industrial alienation to the Situationist tactic of détournement, my research explores how we can playfully subvert these systems through Agonistic Design. By rejecting false consensus, we can use contestation and encourage agonism to reclaim digital agency.

This talk examines the intersection of critical making and the values of repair. I will present two recent projects that attempt to sidestep institutionalism and reveal hegemonic power. First, The Contestation Café is a grassroots social intervention supporting individuals harmed by automated systems, reimagining repair as a collective struggle against opaque algorithms. Second, The Conspiracy Capitaliser is a speculative AI interface. By allowing users to physically generate bespoke conspiracies, it critically exploits the mechanisms by which algorithms monetise outrage.

Finally, I will introduce the concept of defuturing; how profit-driven designs and systems foreclose plural, sustainable futures. Countering this, I frame subversive acts as practices of antidefuturing. By breaking the hold of preordained technological ecosystems, we proactively reopen the future. I will discuss how this philosophy guides my upcoming artworks, shifting my focus toward building alternative, artist-run infrastructures and localized open-source models. Ultimately, my ongoing practice seeks to prefuture a landscape where vulnerability, collective repair, and agonistic pluralism are structurally embedded, ensuring communities remain active co-creators of their technological realities.

Biography

Robert Collins is an Irish artist, speculative designer and PhD researcher in Contestable Design at the Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden.

His work explores the inherent noise and power dynamics of contemporary technology through speculative objects, tactical interventions, hardware and software. Robert’s research investigates Agonistic Design as a means for communities to assert agency over opaque AI and algorithmic decision systems.

Through subversive, self-directed projects like The Conspiracy Capitaliser and The Contestation Café, he actively challenges technological solutionism by championing friction, the critical instincts of the repairer, and the collective right to contestation.