We’ve had a packed summer working on the ground in London, Singapore, Marseille and North America. A highlight for us was stumbling across a major exhibition on E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) at LUMA Arles, which felt like bumping into long-lost ancestors (more on that below!).

We’ve got several on-site projects still under wraps, but in the meantime read on below for: The Interspecies Parliament • Shortlisted for an award • A new essay on Understanding/Standing Under a Tree • Exhibitions on multiple continents • And much more!

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​Low Carbon Chinatown​ is coming to Hackney!

Blending art, science, technology and food culture to explore climate action via local food systems, Ling has been partnering with Hackney Council for the past few months on a series of interventions in the borough. A new multimedia exhibition, Harvesting Climate Action, will launch October 1st, transforming Hackney Service Centre into an interactive space for climate action. At its heart are 100 recyclable cardboard chairs, each representing a climate action and 100 members of the public who will gather on 7th November for the Low Carbon Banquet finale at Hackney Town Hall, serving delicious low carbon dishes developed in collaboration with East & Southeast Asian communities, scientists and food writers across the UK.

Assembled as a multimedia installation, the chairs are embedded with datamaps, food-making videos, audio stories and living produce. Each one offers a bite-sized exploration of the carbon footprint of our food system, its ties to culture, and its impact on daily life. The climate actions, gathered in collaboration with local residents, scientists, economists, artists, council staff and young people, range from everyday habits to large-scale advocacy. Some align, others even contradict, reflecting the complexity of choices we face in tackling the climate crisis. The project explores the power of an ordinary citizen, and the impact we can each have, along with 99 other people, or even scaled to the entire Hackney borough.

Harvesting Climate Action is open to the public from Monday to Friday, 9 to 5pm (except Wednesday, closes at 4pm) at Hackney Service Centre.

Tickets will be announced soon, keep an eye on our instagram later this week!

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Essay: Understanding/Standing Under a Tree Get into the conceptual details of our project T(h)ree in our write-up for Hurry Up We’re Dreaming Issue 3 [paywall / also available on Medium] where we lay out how collective conversation and decision-making with non-human species is key to our shared futures. Read T(h)ree: Understanding/Standing Under a Tree here

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Nesta's Policy Live: An Interspecies Parliament

A couple weeks ago, Usman was invited to participate in Nesta's Policy Live, to present his proposal for an Interspecies Parliament, inviting humans and non-humans to share in decision-making about our collective futures, a vision for the future of London with a hypothetical £100 million budget.

While we’re making a lot of progress understanding non-human species, decoding their communications and acknowledging their sentience, what we haven’t done is prepare for cross-species collective decision-making and how to deal with cross-species disagreement. What happens when we are confronted by the fact that non-human species deeply disagree with our approach? What happens when we accept that they have other ideas and other perspectives? How will we manage conflict?

​Read more about the proposed Interspecies Parliament here.

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Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.)

In July, while working from Marseille, we had a field trip to Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an exhibition at LUMA Arles which was an absolute revelation for us.

While we're broadly familiar with the pioneering cross-disciplinary work of E.A.T. and many of the group's members (engineers at Bell Labs collaborating with a broad range of artists working across theatre, performance, visual arts, technological systems and environments), this exhibition highlighted how these efforts “extended beyond the art world into social issues such as education and environmental sustainability”.

Having worked in interactive art and architecture for decades, we thought we had a pretty comprehensive understanding of the history of art and technology, but this show was utterly captivating for two reasons:

• first, it introduced us to stunning work and perhaps lesser-known E.A.T. practitioners we knew little about (let alone experienced -- there are several recreations of interactive experiences in the exhibition);

• and second, re-discovering this lineage of investigations, concepts and implementations (that felt both technologically expansive and deeply human) was a strong reminder that we’re contributing to a discourse that is decades old, and that we’re building upon the truly revolutionary work that others have done.

This visit, all-too-short, had a profound effect on our work this summer, influencing almost every project we’re working on. Highly recommended, really hope it goes on tour!

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Our project Wild Imaginarium, at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, has been shortlisted for an Archiboo Award - Best Use of AI and Immersive Technologies! We're up against firms like Foster + Partners and Future City so competition will be fierce... Stay tuned for November 2025 results!

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In Other News...

• ​Playing Democracy 2.0 has been at Ars Electronica Festival, where 617 games were played and about 2500 people took part over 5 days. It’s moving on to Cinekid Festival - catch it in Amsterdam 11 October to 26 October 2025.

• Our work on “digital placemaking” was recently highlighted in a new publication by the Canadian Urban Institute: Let’s Talk About Placemaking.

• ​Natural Fuse has spent the summer at Biosphère Montréal as part of “Transform! Designing the Future of Energy” exhibition and will spend another year there. Catch it next in South Korea from January to October 2027!

We’ve recently been giving talks at architecture and design studios around the world to share how digital technology is reshaping architecture and public space, transforming how people experience cities. If you’d like us to come in and bounce around some ideas with your team, we’d love to hear from you!​

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