Between October-November 2025, we welcomed Mother Cyborg from Detroit, USA to Bristol as artist in residence!
Mother Cyborg visited Bristol as part of a fellowship supported by The ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol. We were excited to invite her here to Knowle West for a mini-residency alongside her fellowship.
Who is Mother Cyborg?
Mother Cyborg grows out of more than twenty years as a musician, technologist, community organiser, and educator. She is motivated by a vision of the future in which the greatest possibilities for collective liberation, art, and technology merge. She develops music, art, and educational tools to reveal the complexities that occur where technology intersects with social spaces, economies, and relationships. Her work has involved community organising in Detroit (Michigan, USA), which featured creating guides teaching residents in low-income neighbourhoods to build and run their own Internet Service Providers.
She has lots of amazing resources around community tech available for free on her website here. These publications include ‘A Peoples Guide to AI’, ‘(Re)Building Technology’, ‘Towards a Future of Tech’, ‘Opening Data’, ‘Teaching Community Technology’ and more.
During her visit to Bristol, she focused particularly on her quilting practice.
In using traditional craft and bright colours to examine complex issues of technology, I hope to open analogue spaces that allow us to reflect upon our collective relationship with internet technologies, identity, legacy, and the future.
-Mother Cyborg via her website.
What happened at KWMC
Alongside all her activity across Bristol with Sociodigital Futures Institute, Mother Cyborg ran sessions with two groups at KWMC here in Knowle West:
The Great Oak Tree Hub: a community-run group committed to bringing together individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds to foster meaningful connections and provide a supportive space for personal development and wellbeing. Activities on a Thursday focus on sewing. More info here.
Staff at KWMC and The ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol: including academics, researchers, creative technologists, artists, facilitators and more.
Participants used the same materials and addressed the same question: “What does the future need from us today?”
Both of their responses emphasised the importance of relationality and compassion as central elements in how we imagine the future and work towards it.
“With The Great Oak Tree Hub, participants expressed concerns about the social isolation that internet technologies have created and the possibility that emerging technologies could further fragment human connections. Together, we formulated a collective question for viewers of the final quilt to reflect on: “Dear future, where is the love?” This question embodies a shared desire to prioritise relationality and compassion as a fundamental design principle for the future.
In the staff workshop, participants examined similar themes from a more theoretical perspective. They wrestled with the “collective sludge” of data that will shape the historical memory of our time, questioning whether such data can truly represent lived experiences. The conversations shifted toward ideas such as pluraversality, ethical futurity, and the limitations of individual perspectives. Ultimately, they reached a relational conclusion similar to that of the community group. Their message to the audience is, “I understand myself in relation to you.”
Even in their early stages, both quilts demonstrated practical and attainable visions. They moved away from abstract idealism and instead created possibilities that felt actionable on both personal and structural levels.”
-Mother Cyborg in her blog for ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures
Learning for a Classless Digital Future
In November 2025, KWMC brought together community leaders, educators and creative thinkers for an evening of honest conversation, radical imagination, and a shared commitment to building futures where everyone can thrive.
Set against the backdrop of our Foundations for the Future exhibition – charting nearly 30 years of KWMC’s work in creativity, technology and social justice – the event invited us to look back at what’s worked, confront what’s broken, and imagine the futures our communities deserve.
Mother Cyborg shared lessons from Detroit, speaking about community-led tech infrastructures and the need to reclaim technology as a tool for justice rather than surveillance or exclusion. She advocated for building futures with what we have, centring local strengths, and refusing narratives that say tech innovation only comes from the top. She asked questions like, ‘How can creativity, art and media help create connections and build relationships?’ and ‘How can tech help us create opportunities to connect?’.
Technology is a tool for liberation. Communication is a human right.
– Mother Cyborg, Learning for a Classless Digital Future.
What’s next?
We’re excited to welcome Mother Cyborg back to Bristol in June 2026 to support us in running a DiscoTech!