The most competitive domain in global technology is the development of AI, that holds the key, as many believe, to economic, political and technological dominance for the parties managing to wield its power. China stands at the forefront of these developments, in direct competition with various states and tech companies, and is developing a specific Chinese branch ofmanmade intelligence (as the exact English translation of the mandarin phrase for AI would be) based on the unique techno-political circumstances in the Chinese geozone.

This Vertical Atlas focuses on the implications of AI developments in Chinese city management, political and economic governance as well as in the current Chinese cultural imagination. With presentations by Shuang Lu Frost, Harvard University anthropologist, and Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chen), renowned sci-fi writer.

The program opens with the book launch of Introduction to Comparative Planetology, by Lukáš Likavčan, that presents an analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and the geopolitics of climate emergency. Different figures of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth are compared in order to assess their geopolitical implications.

Stanley Chan

Chen Qiufan (A.K.A. Stanley Chan) Chinese representative speculative fiction author, translator, curator. Chan is known for his stylistic combination of SF realism and new wave. His works have been translated into many languages and received multiple domestic and international awards. His representative works include “Waste Tide", “Future Diseases”and“The Algorithm for Life”. Now he's running Thema Mundi Studio on developing Scifi relevant contents.

Shuang L. Frost

Shuang L. Frost is a social anthropologist at Harvard University (Ph.D. candidate, 2020). She works on digital technology, political economy and social policy with a regional focus on China. Employing ethnographic and computational methods, she explores how individuals produce, experience, and moralize technological disruption in their local moral worlds. She is also committed to use her research findings to inform technological design and social policymaking that empower grassroots communities in global technological transformations.

Lukáš Likavčan is a researcher and theorist, writing on philosophy of technology and political ecology. He is a PhD candidate at Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University, Brno. Likavčan teaches at Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU, Prague, and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, where he also graduated from The New Normal education programme in 2018. He is a member of display – association for research and collective practice, Prague.