Looks Like New

MEDLab research fellow Kadallah Burrowes speaks with Lauren Gardner, Executive Director of Open Source Collective, about what it means to build infrastructure for the commons and why the lessons of grassroots arts spaces might hold the key to the future of collective digital life. Gardner stewards a network of over 2,500 open-source and community-driven projects, providing fiscal sponsorship and shared infrastructure to thousands of maintainers and contributors worldwide.

Her path to the global open-source movement runs through some of the most generative DIY spaces in recent memory: Babycastles, the New York arcade-turned-social-gallery that reimagined game culture, and the School for Poetic Computation, where code, critical theory, art, and collaborative practice converge. Their conversation asks what artists, technologists, and anyone interested in working collectively might learn from decades of building environments where creativity and the commons come first.

In this month's episode, in conversation with MEDLab fellow Stephanie Abdalla, Dr. Gebru discusses AI ethics research, the history of the AGI movement, and movements of resistance that can lead us to alternative AI futures.

Dr. Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR for short), an independent organization of academics, activists, and engineers who believe in technology that benefits everyone. Dr. Gebru is also the co-founder of Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility, and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. She has received a number of accolades, including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME 100’s most influential people.

In this episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab's Kadallah Burrowes sits down with political economist Nick Srnicek to examine the rise of platform capitalism and the forces shaping today’s digital economy.

The conversation moves beyond technological hype to focus on labor, automation, and political possibility. Rather than framing automation as a simple story of job replacement, Srnicek argues that digital systems reorganize work through surveillance, algorithmic management, and precarious employment structures. As platforms increasingly function as social infrastructure, questions of governance, ownership, and democratic accountability become unavoidable. This episode challenges listeners to see the digital economy not as inevitable, but as a political construction one whose future remains open to collective imagination and action.

Recently on Looks Like New, host Kadallah Burrowes is joined by Ytasha Womack, an author, filmmaker, and independent scholar whose work has been foundational to how we understand Afrofuturism as both a cultural movement and a philosophical practice. Best known for Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Womack has spent decades exploring the intersections of Black culture, technology, imagination, and liberation across writing, film, music, and embodied practices like dance.

In reference to her book, The Afrofuturist Evolution, this conversation explores Afrofuturism as an active world-building practice rather than a distant or purely speculative future. Womack reflects on living inside futures once imagined by thinkers like Octavia Butler, the role of imagination in shaping present realities, and how ancient cosmologies, rhythm, and storytelling can inform more humane technological systems.

On this month's episode of Looks Like New, MEDLab’s Stephanie Abdalla speaks with Dr. Nesrine Mansour about rethinking architecture in the age of digital media and artificial intelligence. Their conversation explores how sacred spaces are being reimagined amid rapid technological change, alongside broader questions of authorship, agency, and bias in architectural imagination. They also discuss AI literacy and pedagogy, and the transformative potential of artificial intelligence within architectural practice and education.

Dr. Mansour is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at CU Boulder whose work sits at the intersection of architecture, spirituality, digital media, and AI. A former research fellow at the Princeton Center for Theological Inquiry, she has published widely across disciplines and is currently editing Religion and AI: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches, forthcoming with Bloomsbury.