Ottawa 2050 is a speculative design project developed by the Artengine team across a series of dedicated creation days in early 2026. It asks a simple question with a complicated answer: if we got to a new place in this city, somewhere where art and culture had genuine investment in foundations that encouraged it to thrive for everyone in the city, what would the journey look like that would bring us there?
The project touches on moments in time on this journey and creates a series of cultural artifacts — video essays, radio drama, institutional websites, job postings, policy documents — that together construct the texture of a city that got some things right. Each artifact is designed to feel like a document that might plausibly exist, as if recovered from an archive rather than invented for an occasion.
Ottawa 2050 is also a methodology — a way of using speculative making as a form of critical inquiry, and of testing how large language models and generative AI tools can participate meaningfully in that process.
The World of Ottawa 2050
A timeline of artifacts
The Ottawa 2050 universe has been built incrementally, with each creation session generating new documents and extending the fictional record. The artifacts produced so far span a roughly 20 years period within the speculative world, from 2030 to 2050.
2030-2040 New Institutions
Two interlocking civic bodies form the backbone of Ottawa’s transformed cultural infrastructure.
The Ottawa Cultural Printing Press is a network of subsidized community printing centres operating across the city’s boroughs, designed to support grassroots physical communication and reduce dependence on algorithmic distribution. The City Cultural Broadcaster (CCB) is a municipally funded body of three salaried hosts with full editorial independence, mandated to document and disseminate Ottawa’s cultural activity to local audiences.
Check out more about the CCB here.
Look into how the Cultural Printing Press works here.
Eventually a new type of public support system emerges. The Artist Salary Program offers twenty two-year living wage grants to Ottawa-based artists across disciplines and career stages — unconditional support for sustained practice, with a requirement for the selection council to publicly name recipients and account for its reasoning to all applicants.
2031 — STILL/STILL (magazine)
A design fiction artifact: Issue 5 of a bilingual arts and culture magazine from Ottawa-Gatineau — except the magazine doesn’t exist yet. Set in 2031, it looks back at the city five years after its 2026 bicentennial, treating Ottawa’s emergence as a major art city as settled fact. The premise: in a world of permanent crisis, a city defined by stability, comfort, and care became the unlikely avant-garde. Cozycore as critical position. Boring as radical.
Read STILL/STILL here.
2046 — The Selection (radio play)
This artifact is found after a data leak from the City of Ottawa. The jury process was always supposed to be private. Here you will find a dramatized recording of a grant jury deliberation set in Ottawa in 2046, in which four council members — Margaret, Kofi, Isabelle, and others — debate the recipients of the city’s Artist Salary Program: twenty two-year living wage grants awarded without project requirements. The play explores the ethics and blind spots of arts evaluation: how criteria calcify, how clarity becomes a form of bias, how deliberation actually works.
Present throughout the deliberations is Sys, an AI facilitator — a quiet acknowledgment that these tools are already part of the institutional landscape, in the world being imagined as much as in the room where the imagining happened. The play was developed through iterative AI-assisted writing sessions and brought to life using AI-generated voice performance.
Explore The Selection here.
2050 — The City That Stayed (video essay)
A video essay narrated by James Porter, a fictional Ottawa-based artist writing from 2050. Porter’s account of the city’s cultural transformation — told as a retrospective — provides the project’s emotional and argumentative anchor: a first-person reckoning with what changed, what was lost in the process, and what it cost to stay.
Artengine Production Team: Madeleine Merritt, Ryan Stec and Remco Volmer
Ottawa 2050 is as much an experiment in process as it is a creative project. It emerged from Artengine’s ongoing Artengine Creates initiative — a series of dedicated weekly creation days in which the team steps outside its operational work to pursue self-directed creative and critical inquiry.
Speculative Design as Critical Practice
The project draws on speculative design as a methodology: the practice of constructing detailed, plausible fictions not to predict the future but to put pressure on the present. Rather than mapping a route to an imagined destination, each session asks what the destination might feel like from inside — what documents it would produce, what disputes it would generate, what institutional language it would use. The discipline of making things that feel real — job postings that could be applied to, grant terms that could be argued about, radio drama that could be broadcast — is itself a form of critical analysis.
Working with AI at Every Stage
A central thread of the project has been testing how AI tools can participate in creative and critical work without flattening it. The team used large language models throughout: to synthesize ideas from recorded sessions, to develop characters and their deliberative positions, to draft and iterate institutional documents, and to generate and refine the written voice of the fictional narrator. Image generation was used to visualize Ottawa’s transformed public spaces — streets dense with community posters, printing centres, the texture of a city oriented toward physical public life.
This is not uncritical adoption. The team’s interest is in understanding where these tools genuinely extend creative capacity and where they produce a kind of plausible-sounding inertia — and in developing working methods that can distinguish between the two. Sys, the AI presence in The Selection, gives the project a way to reflect on that question from within the fiction itself.
The Method in Brief
Creation sessions follow a loose structure: extended dialogue in the morning to develop ideas, speculative making in the afternoon to give those ideas form. Sessions are recorded, transcribed locally, and processed through an LLM to track the evolution of the world being built and to synthesize decisions that might otherwise dissolve in conversation. The artifacts produced are not polished in advance — they accumulate detail and credibility over time, each one extending what the previous ones made possible.