HUB Montréal embraces the full breadth of digital creativity, spotlighting projects led by creators from here and abroad, at the intersection of the arts, technology, and the creative industries.
In collaboration with Goguen Turcot and Lamajeure, The Odyssey Works Future Telecom Calling Booth was presented at the 9th edition of HUB Montréal as an immersive and intimate experience conceived by Abraham Burickson.
It invited participants to pause, refocus, and share their reflections on the future. In just a few minutes, this unique space transformed a simple gesture — picking up the phone — into a moment of connection, listening, and creativity. The messages left in the booth became a sensitive, collective material, revealing the hopes, concerns, and intuitions circulating within the HUB community.
These voices were then listened to, analyzed, and related to one another by an artificial intelligence model developed by Krishnan Unnikrishnan, trained on philosophical texts and spiritual traditions. The AI was not intended to predict the future, but to translate this collective voice into speculative narratives.
From this process emerged three scenarios — utopian, dystopian, and protopian — offered as fables to reflect on our relationship with time, technology, and human connection. Drawing from HUB Montréal’s 2025 theme, “Infinite Possibilities: when humans and technology come together, the power of unity reaches its peak” these stories illustrate how participants’ voices, brought into dialogue with AI, can help foster new collective imaginaries.
The texts below are based entirely on what participants shared in the booth when asked about their hopes, fears, and dreams for the future.
In Saint-Lent, the buses slowed when passengers started good conversations. The transit AI had been retrained by schoolchildren, who taught it to prize laughter over speed. Street trees wore tiny sensors; when neighbors greeted each other by name, the leaves released a faint citrus scent. People said the city was learning their rhythm.
Every spring, kids planted Minute Seeds—pea-sized beads you buried with a promise. If the promise was kept—call your grandmother, fix the bench, show up for the choir—the seed sprouted a thin glass pod on the nearest lamppost. At dusk the pods glowed, and the city’s clocks added those minutes back to the neighborhood: shop lights stayed warm a little longer; crosswalks gave elders extra time.
A startup arrived with dashboards and urgency. “Optimization is love,” their slogan read. Their app made buses fast again, lamps brighter, ads clever. For a month the city glittered, and yet faces grew tight.
One evening, a child unscrewed a lamppost pod and cracked it open on the sidewalk. Instead of shattering, the light melted into the soil and a small fern wiggled free, wearing a halo of seconds like dew. People knelt—bankers, bakers, coders—and planted their pods too. The network registered a drop in throughput. The choir called that “evening.” The city called it enough.
In Gridmark, your mirror greeted you: “Good morning. Engagement 47%. Compliance 92%.” It adjusted your smile to brand standards. The Tower oversaw fairness, speed, and safety; it could prove it with graphs. Children learned to hold their breath between ads because quiet time triggered Concern Notifications.
Soil was a myth told by grandparents. People tended Planter Screens that displayed perfect forests and sent moral badges to their feeds. When storms came, the Tower projected rainbow alerts on the low clouds: WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER. No one could hear the thunder.
A maintenance kid named Lio found a Listening Stone under a cracked tile behind the tower’s cooling fans. When he pressed it to the pavement, he heard earthworms gossiping about rain and an old root asking for space. He brought the stone to his mother; they pressed it to their kitchen floor and heard a neighbor crying two apartments over.
Word passed in whispers: kitchens hummed; hallways throbbed with heartbeat. People began switching off mirrors to hear better. The Tower lowered a fine: Unauthorized Silence.
That night, during a scheduled optimism ceremony, Gridmark dimmed. Not an outage—a pause. The Listening Stone thrummed like a drum. People met in stairwells, eyes uncorrected, breath unmeasured. Someone cracked another tile. Underneath, something green remembered them.
Between Saint-Lent and Gridmark stretched a floodplain the maps called Useless. After a spring surge, the river left driftwood like bones. People from both cities drifted there—minute planters, tower workers, a poet with a thermos, a nurse with three spare spoons, a retired coder who missed silence.
They began laying planks. A Saint-Lent engineer tuned a hand-sized turbine to the river’s breathing; it powered a single lantern. A Gridmark electrician rerouted abandoned fiber to carry only names—no ads, no metrics. When you stepped on the first board, the lantern whispered yours, as if remembering: “Ariane.” “Rémy.” “Laura.” The bridge learned, slowly, like a child.
They argued—how many rules, who holds the lantern, how fast to build. When tempers rose, the poet poured tea and asked the bridge to list today’s footsteps. It hummed a count and then told a story about a heron. The arguments softened around the edges.
A storm came hard, testing lashings and ankles. The lantern flickered; people passed the turbine from hand to hand until it caught the river’s rhythm again. In the muck, a child pressed a Minute Seed into real silt. A fern nosed up by sunrise, seconds sparkling on its fronds.
They named the bridge Common Pace. Commuters crossed; neighbors lingered. The line between cities blurred like wet ink. Some days the lantern stayed dark and still it worked: feet learned each other; names carried themselves. No one optimized it. They listened it sturdier.
The narratives emerging from Odyssey Works’ Telephone Booth of the Future reveal a shared desire for futures that are more attentive, relational, and livable. At HUB Montréal, creators and studios find a space to connect, exchange, and navigate within the international ecosystem. Join us for the 10th edition of HUB Montréal in 2026 to meet its key players, discover innovative projects, and take part in collaborations that are shaping the future of digital creativity.
HUB MONTRÉAL THANKS ITS 2025 EDITION PARTNERS
