Technological innovation increasingly shapes how we live, care, decide, and relate to one another. Yet conversations about these futures often revolve around regulations, technical feasibility, or business models. What happens if we create spaces where these futures can be felt, questioned, and collectively imagined?
About the talk
Sjors Groeneveld introduces The Digital Data Divide, an immersive speculative project that invites audiences to experience contrasting futures shaped by personal data and AI. Rather than arguing for or against technology, the project creates moments for reflection on autonomy, dignity, surveillance, and solidarity.
Building on this work, Groeneveld expands the lens to other research-creation projects at the intersection of art, care, and technological change. These include Project MensWens (HumanWish), in which artists translated societal hopes and concerns about technology into new works, and a series of short films developed in collaboration with filmmakers and the In Science International Science Film Festival. Across these projects, speculation is not a way to forecast the future, but a way to make space for reflection, revealing hidden assumptions, emotional responses, and ethical tensions. The talk explores how artistic and speculative practices move us from designing technologies to collectively imagining and questioning the ways they reshape our lives and relationships.
The choice between a red and a blue pill might come sooner than you think...
About the speaker
Sjors Groeneveld is a senior lecturer at Saxion University of Applied Sciences (School of Nursing) and a PhD candidate at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. His work explores how emerging technologies, particularly AI and data-driven systems, reshape professional practice, education, and our understanding of care.
Working across research, art, and practice, he collaborates with artists, designers, filmmakers, and healthcare organizations to make technological futures tangible and discussable. Through research-creation projects and immersive speculative work, he investigates how imagination, storytelling, and collective reflection can surface the cultural and ethical dimensions of technological change.
He is involved in (inter)national initiatives on technology and healthcare education and contributes to public and academic debates on digital transformation and professional identity. Groeneveld is also a member of the Cross-Cultural Responsive and Accessible Technologies for Societal Impact (CCTS) collaboration, a partnership between Saxion University of Applied Sciences, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Alberta.