The Data CARE Festival returns in 2027 under the theme Building the Library of the Incalculable. The Festival brings together researchers, artists, activists, policymakers, technologists, and practitioners to explore what is left out when human value is reduced to what can be measured, predicted, and optimized. We ask what AI does not, cannot, and should not calculate: care, belonging, humour, solidarity, cultural difference, moral imagination, and the many forms of human life that do not fit our quantification regimes. Drawing on Majority World perspectives and diverse forms of knowledge, the Festival creates a space to challenge extractive models of technology while imagining more relational, caring, and hope-oriented digital futures. It is a space not simply to diagnose what is wrong with AI, but to explore what becomes possible when we leverage AI to democratize existing social institutions while investing in building guardrails to mitigate harms and risks.

Across five days, the Festival will bring this inquiry into conversation through four parallel themes: Trust, AI Safety & Security; Creative AI, Innovation & Cultural Value; Language Models, Literacy & Learning; and Sovereign AI, Democracy & Ecosystem Thinking. As part of the Data CARE Festival, we are proud to launch the Inclusive AI Summer School, a joint venture creating a dedicated space for PhDs, Postdocs, researchers, and practitioners across the cultural and creative industries, technology, government, the civic sector, and beyond. The Summer School brings North–South and South–South perspectives into genuine exchange through slow conferencing, while bridging the humanities and computational sciences. It moves away from the usual talking shop, and has been formatted to carve out creative workshops to encounter real-world cases, pioneer AI-enabled methods for studying global societies, get out of your comfort zones by engaging across disciplines and sectors, and strengthen the ability to translate research insights into societal impact. The invitation is to leave disciplinary silos, stay with complexity, engage openly across difference, and become part of a global community working to make inclusion common sense.