Recent EU law now allows citizens to complain if they have been harmed by AI, but what if they have co-conceived your offspring without you even knowing it?

For Future Artefacts 20th Episode we’re welcoming back Nina Davies with her new work SubScanners, alongside guest co-host Rebecca Edwards. This is the fourth work in a series of fictional traditional dances which loosely follow the structures of western folk dance; agricultural, spiritual, war and courtship. Set within a 15 minute fictional podcast from a nearby future, the characters discuss InterReproduction in the space sector, a reproduction research program for deep space exploration. They share InterRepro’s "counterfeit labour scandal", resulting in the emergence digital offspring and of new courtship rituals called SubScanning.

Davies presents questions on relationships with digital personhood inside and outside of a phone screen, and how reproduction and labour might exist outside of the body. Together we imagine what types of digital kinship might exist for these offspring, how we could care for them as children, and what their material connections to us might be.

SubScanners warns us about the corporate consumption of public law, presenting a fiction where digital persons are co-opted by corporate guardianship and the only way people can regain control of their digital selves is to play these companies at their own game and settle the matter in family court.

Working primarily with video, performance, writing and installation, Nina Davies considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which they emerge. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been exhibited and shown at Matt’s Gallery, London; Transmediale, AdK, Berlin; Seventeen, London; Pradiauto, Madrid; and, Chemist Gallery, London. Her work has been selected to partake in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023; Circa x Dazed Class of 2022 and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. In 2021 she co-founded Future Artefacts FM with artist Niamh Schmidtke and was awarded an Arts Council Project Grant to produce their 2022 programme and in 2023 they produced a mini series for Het HEM’s online programme The Couch.

Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture.

Artist: Nina Davies

Hosts: Rebecca Edwards and Niamh Schmidtke

Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis

Producer: Mat Jenner

Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead