Episode 104 is with Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow, two artists whose work sits right in the thick of media art, public imagination, climate, systems thinking, and the human/non-human tangle. Marina is also an old friend and collaborator from some of my earliest art-and-technology projects, which gives this conversation a nice familiar drift while still opening up plenty of new terrain.

The center of the episode is More&More, the speculative card-deck and facilitation framework Sarah and Marina have been developing since 2016. It is worldbuilding by way of constraint: pick six strange cards, accept that they are true, inhabit the consequences, take on a role, make an artifact, and then look back at the present from the world you just made.

This is structured imagination with teeth. It gives people just enough structure to get past the blank-canvas panic and into the more interesting question: if this is true, what else has to be true?

We get into why they steer people away from default dystopia, why holidays are one of the best ways to understand a world’s values, and how systems thinking becomes something you cannot unsee once you have started doing it. The conversation also moves into the politics of imagination: abolitionist workshops, traumatized communities, rigid institutional groups, and what happens when people need permission to cut the cord to the present.

Toward the end, we talk about a possible AI futures deck, and the conversation gets into the useful muck: model personas, training data, energy use, corporate ownership, artist agency, and the need to stop treating digital tools as immaterial. The point is to get closer to the material realities of the systems we are already inside, and to have better, stranger, more honest conversations about what comes next.