Maurice Jones

interdisciplinary researcher, artist, and cultural organizer

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Research

My interdisciplinary and community-centered research mobilizes Postcolonial, Black, and Feminist approaches within the emerging field of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) to investigate sociotechnical systems across four interconnected areas: Festivals and the Infrastructures of Digital Culture, Cultural AI and the Commons, Computational Research-Creation, and Transnational AI Governance.

Following poet, scholar, and curator Hannah Star Rogers’ call for the symmetrical application of Science and Technology Studies theories and methods to the cultures of both art and science, I examine the politics, imaginaries, and relations through which technologies, institutions, communities, and creative practices become entangled; how these relations shape technological development and governance; and how researchers and practitioners might critically situate themselves within them.

Festivals and the Infrastructures of Digital Culture

My research on Festivals and the Infrastructures of Digital Culture examines festivals, cultural organizations, and artistic communities as sites where emerging technologies are not simply adopted but actively produced, tested, interpreted, reshaped, and contested. In my doctoral thesis Temporally Autonomous Spaces: A Black Quantum Rhythmanalysis of Festivals at the Intersection of Art, Music, and Technology and through the community-engaged action research project Future Festivals, I investigate how such cultural formations produce distinctive technological imaginaries, practices, infrastructures, and modes of collective experimentation.

Cultural AI and the Commons

My work on Cultural AI and the Commons extends the inquiry on the infrastructures of digital culture to the changing conditions of cultural production in the age of artificial intelligence. Through my community-centered action research with ArtIA, I engage with artists, cultural institutions, technologists and creative workers to advance a commons-based approach to AI development, adoption and governance rooted in collective ownership, cooperative infrastructures, and creative reappropriation.

  • Paper2026

    ArtIA: imagining a new digital commons for creative AI

    Jones, M., Blottiere, M., McKelvey, F., and Simon B. · AI & SOCIETY

  • Chapter2026Forthcoming

    Co-créer les communs de l’IA : vers une gouvernance partagée au service des artistes

    Blottiere, M. and Jones, M. · Presses de l'Université Laval

  • Conference30–31 Oct 2025

    Culture as Generative AI: Strategies for the Always-Already AI Commoner

    McKelvey, F., Jones, M., and Simon, B. · York University

  • Report2025

    ArtIA: Building a Commons for AI in Digital Creation

    Jones, M., Blottiere, M., Pasquier, P., Siebert, O., McKelvey, F., Casemajor, N., Mahoas, K., and Baltazar, P. · Society for Arts and Technology

Black Computational Research-Creation

My studio practice in Computational Research-Creation—which I refer to as A Maroon’s Technical Practice—deploys methods of speculative design, critical making and sonic fictioning in mobilizing Black radical theories, practices and aesthetics to creatively work with, through, and in resistance to AI. I am particularly interested in developing technological systems and aesthetic experiences that explore Fugitive Machine Agencies as emergent, non-compliant forms of machine behavior that resist optimization, legibility, and control.

Transnational AI Governance

In my work on Transnational AI Governance, I study public participation in the development and governance of emerging technologies across Canada, Europe, and Japan, with particular attention to how civil society, cultural communities, and marginalized publics intervene in policy formation and contest dominant technological futures. This research reveals a recurring problem when treating AI primarily through the lens of industrial policy: the communities most affected by rapidly advancing technologies remain largely excluded from their development, meaning-making, and governance.

Teaching

My teaching combines theory and practice. Drawing on Postcolonial, Black, and Feminist Science and Technology Studies, I ask students to question the politics and imaginaries that bind sociotechnical entities together—and to situate themselves as researchers and practitioners within those relations.

Since so much contemporary research and creation is focused on mixing up, as Bruno Latour declared, “heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman,” my teaching explores concepts and practices that try to deal with this in-betweenness—messes, borders and trading zones, boundary objects, borderlands, cyborgs and monsters, apparatuses, imbroglios, and networks.

Drawing on Black feminist writer adrienne maree brown’s concept of emergent strategy, we build a toolkit of concepts and methods responsive to learners’ needs and interests—and to the subjects and tasks at hand. We also recognize that these may shift through collective study. Learning to navigate that instability is part of working within the in-between.

Central to my teaching is Computational Research-Creation, an approach I have developed through my work at Concordia’s Milieux Institute. It bridges creative expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation to foster critical inquiry and speculative thinking—treating making and unmaking as ways of knowing.

I apply these methods in courses and curricula such as Creative Intelligence (Winter 2027), Exploring Research-Creation as Method (2022), and the Critical AI Studies (2022) directed study. I also regularly deliver guest lectures at institutions including the University of Toronto Scarborough, Keio University in Tokyo, and Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Arts.