Artengine is thrilled to present New Suns, an exhibition born from a groundbreaking collective worldbuilding lab. This project brought together an interdisciplinary group of eight artists to explore radical futures through art and speculative fiction, guided by renowned science fiction author Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

The New Suns lab was designed as a space for expansive, collaborative creation, emphasizing generosity, inclusivity, and wild imagination. Participants engaged in an intensive weekend of lectures, workshops, and discussions to collectively construct a shared world. From this shared foundation, each artist then developed individual works, offering diverse perspectives within a unified vision.

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.

Valérie’s project aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between conservation biology and the arts, raising awareness about the pressing need to protect biodiversity in an era of change. Through a residency with Artengine, and in collaboration with Dr. Heather Kharouba, Valérie has created an experience that fuses art and technology. This collaboration presents an exciting opportunity to amplify the important role that art can play in raising awareness about biodiversity conservation, while engaging audiences in technological innovations fostered by Artengine.