(S)Low-Tech AI at the Victoria and Albert Museum: Designing With Time, Not Speed
Amid the frantic race for faster, bigger, newer in artificial intelligence, Studio Above&Below’s installation (S)Low Tech AI at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, (running through mid‑October 2025), offers a radical pause.
AI becomes embedded in culture, design, and daily life. Photo: Slow Culture Cafe, 2025
As everything becomes faster, we need a breaking point. Art objects and installations can help us understand why it is so important, even in the fast-paced world of AI, to slow down, take a pause, and experience the value of slow AI applications.
Slow AI as a Design Value
Rather than pushing for instant outputs, the (S)Low Tech AI installation at the V&A treats computation like geology: layered, materially aware, and accountable. Four stones—each linked to geological sites in Scotland—serve as physical touchstones; when rearranged, they generate sound and imagery over time.
Each interaction adds a layer, accumulating like sediment, rather than erasing what came before. In doing so, the work challenges assumptions about AI’s pace, resource use, and ethical stakes. The future it proposes isn’t about speed—it’s about care.
Curatorial Tactics for Visibility & Craft’s Divergent Reading
One of the installation’s most compelling moves is making invisibles visible: the environmental cost of training algorithms, the cultural erasure in data sets, the material extraction that underwrites “free” AI. (S)Low Tech AI doesn’t hide its lineage; it traces it. The stones are not generic props—they carry histories. The visuals and sounds aren’t just outputs—they are responsive to arrangements, to presence, to human engagement.
Where tech media often celebrates novelty and disruption, maker and craft networks see echoes of ancestral knowledge: stone carving, ornamenting surfaces, working with natural materials, and time itself as a tool.
In the London Design Festival 2025, you can see this ethos in other highlights: the “Material Matters” fair exhibiting sustainable woodwork; EcoLattice in Aram Gallery offering recycled 3D‑printed elastomer furniture; or the Bank of England’s “Reconstructing Value” benches crafted from shredded banknotes. These events underscore a shared fascination with substance over spectacle.
Why This Moment Matters
We’re living through a moment where ethics, climate, and heritage collide with technology. As AI becomes embedded in culture, design, and daily life, questions about resource extraction, data ownership, labor, and environmental impact grow louder. (S)Low Tech AI reframes those questions not as sidebar concerns, but as core design parameters. It insists that architecture, art, and tech can’t be separated from the earth that makes them, or from human histories they draw from (or erase).
Institutions like the V&A and events like the London Design Festival are showing that the frontier of design is not just in innovation, but in care, responsibility, and time. For audiences accustomed to rapid change, this slower, more deliberate pace offers something richer: reflection, accountability, possibility.
