About

Who we are

Cultural Transistor is a platform of scholars, artists and writers, working on the research and development of AI use across Hong Kong’s cultural sector.

A transistor is the elementary component of a chip. Its work is to switch, modulate and amplify a signal. We think culture needs such a component in the age of AI — something that sits between people and machines, between specialists and the public, between technique and idea, and that carries, tunes and amplifies what deserves to travel.

Where we stand

Society has long put solving first. In a world that prizes efficiency above all, a cast of mind preoccupied with posing problems can seem out of step with its time.

The arrival of AI turns that position around. It is precisely because such thinking is out of step that it is now needed. AI is good at solving problems; people are thereby freed to do the harder thing — to supply that capacity with the right problem, well posed.

And this is exactly where the gap opens. AI increasingly calls for humanistic judgement, while AI literacy across the cultural sector remains thin. One side has the need; the other is not yet connected. Cultural Transistor exists to open a space between them, and to make the exchange happen.

What we hold

The work of the humanities is to set the problem.

The present use of humanistic thinking is not, in our view, to solve the new problems AI brings with it — ethics review, drafting guidelines. That still returns the humanities to the position of answering. What matters in a humanities training is the opposite: posing the right problem.

In the Renaissance, mathematical works written in Latin were translated into the vernacular. Only then did that knowledge reach the merchants; only then did double-entry bookkeeping, and with it what Weber called the spirit of capitalism, become possible. Their real contribution was not the translation. It was seeing that knowledge locked with one class was the problem that mattered.

How we work

We take our method from Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, treating AI as a nonhuman actor — one that has already joined the networks in which cultural workers make their work.

We do not set out to teach people to use AI. We bring the two sides into contact, then trace and describe what forms in the encounter: the new associations between AI and cultural practice. What we distil from that, we pass on to a wider public.