Here are my 12 cultural highlights. Two exhibitions, three pieces of music, two live events, a film, two books, a radio station and a poem. Then scroll on for 10 highlights from my own work.

1. Cinthia Marcelle - A Conjunction of Factors

The best thing I saw this year.

There’s a lot of art trying to disrupt hierarchy in its various forms at the moment. In much of it, I feel a real desire to contribute to a political discourses, but nothing new to add beyond preachiness. Some is so boring it makes me question whether I still care about these movements.

Marcelle’s work is an antidote, a reminder of the power of art to address complex topics without delegating to the intellect. Her work reveals.

The basic insight is, again, seemingly straightforward: that every community practices the design of itself.

In June, I was on the stage at Electro-Magnetic Field festival sharing a hypothesis that much of the trouble we have with online behaviour is exacerbated by, rather than solved by, top-down control that limits individual expressivity.

I explored this through the analogy of rewilding, a movement in environmental conservation which aims to restore ecosystems to their wild state and allow nature to regulate itself.

Hello from Milan where Cave of Sounds has just opened for a year-long at the Museum of Science and Technology. Eight digital instruments, each made by a different artist, are networked into a single interactive sound installation, which is then exhibited without performers for visitors to play.

… in this space, creating and hacking technology is a musical act in itself. So what happens if we create the instruments together? Like how we improvise together in a jam, except with the instrument-building bit. Would we end up with an ensemble to match the spectral balance of the orchestra? Would our individual musical identities still shine through in the outcome?

Look at the words on my keyboard: ⌘command, ⌃control, fn function, ⇧shift. These describe the processes of a factory or a military unit, not a conversation, nor a dance, nor friends eating together. What of the rest of being human?

Behind every interface is a model world.
People are modelled as profiles.
Emotions are modelled as emojis 🤷.
The interface defines how I can sense and shape that world.
It defines my relationship to that world: what I can do, who I am, and who I can be.

AI that generates images from text is hitting the mainstream.

… But when I tell participants the model's trained on my own visual experiences, I feel a shift in how they receive it. They're no longer just navigating a hallucinatory machine, but glimpsing the human entangled inside that machine.