topic

Artificial Present

How are digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) reshaping not only art, but the way we see, feel, and think?

TOPIC CONTENT:

Today, algorithms write, paint, curate, and even critique and thus blur the lines between artist and tool, author and audience. Yet while AI expands the field of creativity, it also exposes its fault lines: the biases hidden in datasets, the environmental cost of computation, the fragility of systems built on automation and prediction. Artists, theorists, and technologists respond in different tones and perspectives but all recognise that digital culture is not just a backdrop to contemporary life; it is the stage itself.

In this landscape, creativity becomes both experiment and resistance: a way to imagine new relations between humans and machines, to question who controls the code, and to re-enchant the digital with care, humour, and critical awareness.

Coming form the program of AIL this collection of entries weaves together multiple vantage points around digitalisation and AI with a common thread emerging: an inquiry into how digitalisation and artificial intelligence reshape the conditions, roles and meanings of creative practice, institutions and society.

Together they position AIL’s program at the junction of art, technology and society, recognising that AI and digitalisation are not just tools but forces that transform how we create, think and participate in the world. This is not a closed collection or complete program around the subject, but a loose archive, a source to give impulses and encourage critical reflection.

discussion

04 Dec 2025, 18:00

Languages of AI

M. Beatrice Fazi and Anna Longo in Conversation, Soundperformance by Dario Sanfilippo

Organized by Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures (part of M. Beatrice Fazi's fellowship and the Weibel Lectures series) in cooperation with the AIL

When machines process and produce language, what philosophical frameworks help us understand their operations?

Philosophers M. Beatrice Fazi and Anna Longo bring contemporary philosophical perspectives to AI, interrogating how computational systems construct meaning beyond human categories. This dialogue explores whether large language models constitute new semiotic agents, challenging anthropocentric assumptions about thinking and linguistic possibility.

Program

18.00 - 19:30

Presentations and conversation:

M. Beatrice Fazi & Anna Longo

20.00 - 20:30

Sound performance: Dario Sanfilippo

M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working on computation, technology, and media. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics, and on the automation of thought. She is Associate Professor at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), the author of Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (2018), and co-author of Digital Theory (2025).

Anna Longo is a philosopher affiliated to the University of Paris. Her research crosses the philosophy of technology, French post-structuralism and aesthetics. She is author of two books: The Game of Induction: Automatisation of Knowledge and Philosophical Reflection (Mimesis 2022) and Deleuze, A Philosophy of Multiplicity (Ellipses 2024).

Dario Sanfilippo is a composer, performer, audio programmer, and researcher specialised in musical complex adaptive systems. He has a PhD in Creative Music Practice from the University of Edinburgh and his artistic research focuses on the exploration of new music through artificial intelligence (in the broadest sense) and artificial life implemented via adaptive audio feedback networks. His work combines principles of agency, autopoiesis, evolvability, and radical constructivism to design systems that are deployed in live performance for human-machine interaction or autonomous music.

talk

11 Dec 2025, 18:00

What if?

A Speculative Prototyping Session with Laura Cugusi and S()fia Braga. A collaboration between Civa x transmediale festival Berlin, hosted by AIL and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

This event is curated and facilitated by Eva Fischer and Anna-Lena Panter

Civa Festival

transmediale festival Berlin

Everything is Computer –The Planned Obsolescence of the Future is an artistic-research project in the form of a playable video game that interrogates how dominant narratives, AI models, and game engines encode the future we are conditioned to imagine. Third Impact is a short film created in collaboration with AI systems, that explores counter-futures of coexistence between humans and non-humans.

Is there a difference between speculative prototyping and AI forecasting? What temporalities and modes of relation open up when we engage these technologies as collaborators rather than instruments? This session invites us to reflect on how we can engage with the tools and narratives we work with, and how we might still use them to generate counter-speculations.

The artists will be presenting their works and share insights into their general practice, followed by a roundtable conversation. Nada Zanhour will be joining online for the practice sharing part.

Filmstill: Everything is Computer c/o Laura Cugusi & machine yearning aka ncx3

Laura Cugusi

Laura’s work has been nomadic across languages, disciplines and media. Her research focuses on mapping media ecologies, tech literacies, governance infrastructures and institutional world-building strategies that shape and consolidate the imagination (or lack thereof) about the future.

Nada Zanhour (machine yearning)

machine yearning aka Nada Zanhour works across sound, video, 3D and interactive media. Her research focuses on online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, meme culture and digital militarism.

S()fia Braga

S()fia Braga is a New Media artist and pioneer in AI-driven cinematic storytelling based in Vienna. Her artistic practice explores emerging technologies to create speculative fabulations about counter-futures, engaging with themes such as human–machine collaboration, non-human agency, and transhumanism. In parallel, Braga’s research examines the concepts of Interveillance and Platform Workshipping, uncovering the hidden power dynamics embedded in the operational structures of centralized social media platforms and their sociological implications.

video

To watch: AI & Creativity

Diversity and freedom of cultural expression in post-digital societies. Talk in English from Oct 2025

Presented by the Austrian Commission for UNESCO in coop. with AIL, EDUCULT and the Research Area Cultural Studies of the Diplomatic Academy Vienna

How can the diversity and freedom of cultural expression be protected in post-digital societies, and how can transparency and access be strengthened? Should attributes such as creativity, self-determination and freedom be ascribed exclusively to (specific) human beings?

The conference provides a common space for thought for actors from art, culture, science and activism and attempts to decode existing power relations and find collective approaches to change them.

This conference uses the 20th anniversary of the Austrian Commission for UNESCO as an opportunity to discuss the importance of the diversity of cultural expression in the digital environment for democratic societies and to raise awareness for their protection in the context of artificial intelligence.

Program (EN)

18:00

Welcome

Anke Schad Spindler, Educult, Alexandra Graupner, AIL, Martin Fritz, ÖUK

18:15

Magdalena Reiter, network policy expert and cultural worker, in conversation with Clemens Apprich; Vice-Rector and Head of the Department of Media Theory and the Peter Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna

19:00–20:30

Discussion with Carina Zehetmair, Ali Nikrang, Eva Fischer and Sofia Braga
Moderation: Giulia Pelillo

The digital revolution has the potential to unlearn anthropocentrism and reorganize power relations. In reality, things look different: The market-dominating platforms have privatized the sum of global creative content and siphoned it off for the development of ‘new’ systems. Dead celebrities are supposedly brought back to life post mortem by generative AI - AI-generated likenesses create deceptively real images of people and thus manipulate realities.The panel ‘Hybrid Realities’ focuses on the possibility of in-between spaces and poses the question of how creativity in the face of digital technologies can lead to new visions of alternative, democratic futures.

About the series ‘(Re)imagining freedom of expression in postdigital societies’

This event series brings together academics, artists, cultural practitioners and activists to discuss freedom of expression in the context of digitalization. At a historical moment when private technology companies have become key players in reshaping public space and discourse, it is important to collectively reflect on the values, goals and boundaries of freedom of expression.

With financial support from the City of Vienna and the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport

video

The Dark Sides of Digital Humanism

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Claus Pias and McKenzie Wark – in conversation with Clemens Apprich (from Apr 2024, in English)

Presented by the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

Humanity has always been digital. Practices of counting, calculating, and writing are all digital, and define the ‘human’ as much as supposedly analog techniques such as painting, doing philosophy, or making music. Considering recent attempts to reintegrate human values into the digital, in order to build, regulate and develop future technologies, we will explore what the human in digitality could mean.

Bringing together international scholars in critical media studies, we will discuss central topics of digital humanism.

How can we define digital humanism? What are its dark sides? And what role can the humanities and arts play in shaping the debate?

video

AI in Art: Exploration of AI-generated Art

From the Media Art Nexus Studio, talk in English from May 2022

Artistic duo Ina Conradi and Mark Chavez about their current work – A cooperation with the department of Digital Arts

About Media Art Nexus

Artistic duo Ina Conradi (USA, SG) and Mark Chavez (USA, SG), based in Singapore and Los Angeles, have collaborated on numerous art and new media projects for the last 20 years. They both hold a Master of Fine Arts Degree from UCLA. For their experimental animation, Ina and Mark are awarded the Hollywood Advanced Imaging Society's 2018 Lumiere Award and 2017 Lumiere Award Europe Chapter. The artist duo has shown their work at the Ars Electronica Festival, most recently with 2021 Nocturne a large-scale, immersive installation that combines interactive and audio-reactive visuals with emotive-abstraction animation, and real-time flow of a dance performance. Their art-sci inspired immersive installation Quantum Logos (vision serpent) premiered for the 40th Anniversary of Ars Electronica Festival at the Deep Space 8k. The work, done in collaboration with science producers from Germany and Austria, was featured on the Austrian Academy of Sciences website of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, as well as the CERN Social Media Network OriginPhysics. The film has received VFX award from the 2020 Raw Science Film Festival Los Angeles. Ina and Mark have exhibited and presented at the Beyond Festival ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Germany (2013-till present) Ars Electronica (2010 till present), UCLA Art|Sci Center+Lab 2018, Media Architecture Biennial Beijing 2018, Singapore Inside Out Tokyo 2017, Web 3D Art Gallery Brisbane 2017, PISAF Korea and Visualisation Matters 2017, Siggraph Asia 2014, and ISEA among many others. Mark and Ina are the founding faculty of the School of Art Design and Media at the Nanyang technological University Singapore.

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

For the past five years Media Art Nexus Studio has been creating content for a large-scale LED platform at Nanyang Technological University Singapore where artists, scientists and engineers meet, exchange ideas and collaborate. Our talk will elaborate on a series of creative research initiatives ongoing from this project. From artworks that inform the casual audience of aspects of quantum mechanics with cultural archetypes, to cutting edge animated, co-immersive spaces the work is viewed by hundreds if not thousands of people at the university daily. Our most recent works explore the unique artistic potential of AI and Machine Learning, investigating how can we apply this technique to the creative process for both inspiration and as a final medium of expression. This collaboration with machine learning facilitates the creation of new landscapes where artists, poets, musicians, scientists and philosophers are more easily able to actuate incredible imaginary worlds.

video

Katharina Klappheck: The Joy of Being an Error

Lecture by Katharina Klappheck followed by a dialogue with Katta Spiel from Jan 2023 in German

The argument will be that disability is a condition of possibility for AI.

Part of the series Decolonizing Technology

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as digital infrastructure raises the question of its mode of production:

Who is creating seemingly invisible technologies? What are the material foundations? Who is paying for their service?

Katharina Klappheck want to explore these and other questions in their lecture from a disabled perspective.

The argument will be that disability is a condition of possibility for AI.

This can be traced back to the beginnings of scientific disciplines and their contemporary configurations.

Accordingly, disability represents the limits of AI. It symbolizes its failings as well as its supposed achievements as a transhuman artefact.

This ambivalence results in moments of oppression, but it also holds subversive potential. The chance of a different world is a critical point of refuge for reflections on alternative design and politics of digital infrastructures.

Katharina Klappheck, M.A., is a disabled political scientist. Their research interests include disability, queerness and AI as well as the politics of design. Katharina Klappheck completed her Master's dissertation on the gender binary and automated facial recognition systems under the supervision of Professor Barbara Prainsack at the University of Vienna.

They previously worked at the German Hygiene Museum as part of an interdisciplinary research team, analyzing accessibility and knowledge hierarchies regarding AI. At the Technical University of Dresden, Katharina Klappheck came up with a playful concept for a hackathon which envisioned the democratic digitalization of university administration.

They then went on to work on political equality issues, such as digitalization in terms of gender equality, at the German Bundestag. Currently, Katharina Klappheck is Head of Feminist Internet Policy at the Gunda Werner Institute at the Heinrich Böll Foundation where they are creating a Crippled Low Tech Lab.

Katta Spiel research marginalised perspectives on technology. Their work informs design and engineering in critical ways to support the development of technologies that account for the diverse realities they operate in. The research is situated at the intersection of Computer Science, Design and Cultural Studies. Drawing on methods from (Critical) Participatory Design and Action Research, Katta Spiel collaborates with neurodivergent and/or nonbinary peers in conducting explorations of novel potentials for designs, methodological contributions to Human-Computer Interaction and innovative technological artefacts.

video

Rewatch: In Terms of Media…

On Data Materialism, Techno Poetics, Atmospheres of Conflict, and Planetary Interfaces. Presented by The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

Symposium in English from Nov 2024

With its 2024 symposium, the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures continues its ongoing examination of the logics of digital cultures. The symposium takes on current debates and integrates them with(in) other fields of research, cultural practices, and the arts.

Our present is heavily influenced by machine learning processes, technological infrastructures, newly emerging data worlds as well as their material paradigms. In turn, this urges us to rethink the agency we are afforded as we navigate these techno-social systems and ecologies.

What are the conditions, potentials, and limits defining media environments and digital cultures today? What are the current conditions that technological agents produce and are produced by? And how do they relate to concepts such as data materialism, techno aesthetics and poetics, infrastructures of conflict, and planetary interfaces?

With a commitment to ongoing discourse, social and environmental matters, our discussions will explore how digital cultures are evolving beyond the limitations of current data-centric paradigms.

In line with the ‘Terms of Media’-project organised by Leuphana University & Brown University, the symposium aims to re-examine fundamental questions in media theory and history while integrating them in the interdisciplinary research conducted at the Weibel Institute.

Symposium Program:

21–22 Nov, 15:00–19:00

Opening: 20 Nov, 18:00

Wednesday

18:00 Welcome w/ Clemens Apprich
19:00 Live Performance: Ghost in the Cog w/ Kenneth Constance Loe/Moritz Nahold (Subletvis)
20:00 Live Performance: EXTC w/ Joanna Coleman/Martina Moro

Thursday

Techno-Poetics (15:00—16:30)

15:00—15:15 Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
15:15—15:30 DeForrest Brown Jr.
15:30—15:45 Margarida Mendes
15:45—16:30 Q&A moderated by Nelly Y. Pinkrah

Data Materialism (17:00—18:30)

17:00—17:15 Orit Halpern
17:15—17:30 Elisa Giardina Papa
17:30—17:45 Luciana Parisi
17:45—18:30 Q&A moderated by Clemens Apprich

19:30—20:30 Performance w/ Speaker Music

Friday

Planetary Interfaces (15:00—16:30)

15:00—15:15 Thomas Lamarre
15:15—15:30 Patricia Reed
15:30—15:45 Lukáš Likavčan
15:45—16:30 Q&A moderated by Sophie Publig

Atmospheres of Conflict (17:00—18:30)

17:00—17:15 Alex Quicho
17:15—17:30 Steve Goodman
17:30—17:45 Asia Bazdyrieva
17:45—18:30 Q&A moderated by Lisa Stuckey

talk

05 May 2025, 17:00

Model Collapse: The Cascading Failures of Algorithms, Ecosystems, and Economies

Keynote by Kate Crawford. Followed by a discussion with Clemens Apprich and Wendy Chun, moderated by Nadim Samman

Vienna Digital Cultures is a new festival jointly organised by Foto Arsenal Wien and Kunsthalle Wien

Vienna Digital Cultures

Vienna Digital Cultures 2025 contributes to discourse around machine learning, culture and politics through a programme of talks. The festival kicks off with a keynote by Kate Crawford – author of the international bestseller ‘Atlas of AI’ – exploring the multiple collapses driven by planetary-scale AI. The mass production of synthetic data is destabilizing AI models, creating a world of distorted outputs. Meanwhile, the infrastructure supporting the demands of generative AI is polluting our ecosystems and threatening economies – ushering in the era of AI slop.

Crawford is a leading scholar of AI and its impacts. A professor at USC, Senior Principal Researcher at MSR, and the director of the interdisciplinary lab ‘Knowing Machines’. Her work is focused on understanding large scale data systems, machine learning and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labour, and the environment. She's also an artist whose works are in the permanent collections of in MoMA, Victoria and Albert Museum and the Design Museum in London.

Her work ‘Calculating Empires’ (2024) with Vladan Joler will be part of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz.

The mass production of synthetic data is destabilizing AI models, creating a world of distorted outputs. Meanwhile, the infrastructure supporting the demands of generative AI is polluting our ecosystems and threatening economies—ushering in the era of AI slop. In this talk, we will explore the multiple collapses driven by planetary-scale AI.

Kate Crawford

born in Sydney, Australia, is a leading scholar of AI and its impacts. Her work is focused on understanding large scale data systems, machine learning and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labour, and the environment. She is a Professor at the University of Southern California in LA, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She founded multiple research centers around the world, and leads the interdisciplinary lab called Knowing Machines. Her book, Atlas of AI, has been translated into twelve languages, won three international prizes, and was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times and New Scientist. In addition to her scholarly work, Crawford is an artist whose works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and the Design Museum in London. Her most recent work, Vienna Digital Cultures 3 Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500 will be shown at the 2025 Venice Biennale. Kate Crawford lives and works in New York.

Clemens Apprich

is head of the Department of Media Theory and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he has been Professor of Media Theory and History since 2021. He is also Vice-Rector for Research and Digitality at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and transforms in her research on digital media. She has authored numerous books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press).

Individual events: € 5
Festival pass: € 25
Free entry to all events with the Kunsthalle Wien annual pass for € 29

All tickets via Kunsthalle

After the Keynote the festival will open at KUNSTHALLE WIEN KARLSPLATZ

19:00–21:00

WITH SPEECHES BY

Veronica Kaup-Hasler, Executive City Councillor for Cultural Affairs and Science
Michelle Cotton, Artistic Director Kunsthalle Wien
Felix Hoffmann, Artistic Director FOTO ARSENAL WIEN
Nadim Samman, Curator Model Collapse

FOLLOWED BY
DJ-Set by Inou Ki Endo (Unsafe+Sounds) at Kunsthalle Karlsplatz

Vienna Digital Cultures is a new festival jointly organised by Foto Arsenal Wien and Kunsthalle Wien that takes place between 5–18 May. It consolidates both institutions’ commitment to exploring how new technologies impact culture, via a two-week programme of art, performance and discourse. Curated by Nadim Samman, the theme of the 2025 edition is ‘Model Collapse’.

The festival’s physical exhibition takes place at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz and features five international artists known for probing the intersection of politics and digital culture. In the public area around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, an Augmented Reality (AR) installation by Vienna-based artists Belma Bešlić-Gál, Catherine Spet and Markus Wintersberger is presented under the title //ONTOLOGICAL_GLITCH:// – in collaboration with Kultur 1. Two evenings at REAKTOR showcase artist videos that explore generative AI in both form and content, shining cinematic light on some of the darker corners of our latent reality.

Model Collapse is generously supported by Autotelic Foundation, a key partner of the 2025 Vienna Digital Cultures festival.

video

The Wetness of Hacking

Transhacking Feminist Perspectives from Wetlab Barcelona

Artist Talk by Gaia Leandra and Ce Quimera in English from 2022

About Wetlab

Gaia Leandra and Ce Quimera, currently artists in residence at Hangar’s wetlab in Barcelona, will present their artistic work and the projects developed at the well-known bioart laboratory.

Since 2021 they have been carrying out Bioxeno, a project that aims to generate new narratives at the intersection of science and art, using different tools, techniques, disciplines and practices. They understand bioart as a place of strength, taking a critical point of view to the movement of knowledge and its scientific production. The project was inspired by Lynn Margullis, who studied microorganisms in the ecosystem of the Catalunya territory for several years. By establishing interspecies relations with bacterial communities, specifically the cyanobacteria of the Ebro Delta (Catalunya, Spain), and by taking into account our human limitations and the need for technology to mediate interspecies relations, the outset of their research questions will be:

Which artistic formats could show/translate this type of link without reproducing anthropocentric or colonial views? How to account for biodiversity and the extractivism present in the ecosystems we inhabit? In what ways do we think of the bio as life? How do we think of our lives? Or rather, how do we live them?

The three guests of the artist talk | Image by ©

The research into bioart is closely linked to Hangar’s wetlab. Based on a transhackfeminist vision, wetlab is a space where hybrid interactions take place that disrupt the boundaries generally established between art and science, while also informing a critical revision of science as an institution. Workshops, presentations, research residences, collective work processes and discussions are carried out at the lab. In the context of the current ecological debacle, we want to promote projects that are propositive and offer alternative perspectives in order to rethink possible futures. The wetlab space is currently coordinated by resident artists Gaia Leandra + Ce Quimera.

Gaia Leandra holds a degree in biology. She worked at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (IMM) of the Italian National Research Council CNR. After university, one of her first artistic collaborations was with Paula Pin as part of the project »Fotosintetika«. She participates in the Maker Faire (Rome). She exhibited sound work at the Flussi media arts festival in Avellino. She also collaborates with the collective »Riot Studio« on DIY biology workshops and works with Mary Magicc’s project »Hormons«. Together with the artist Oskar Martin, she offers workshops on sound biology and electronics. She is part of the Italian collective »Merda Elettronica«. She teaches DIY synth workshops together with artist Corazón de Robota. She curates independent music festivals such as FTS, Multiversal, Ràdio Black Out and TPA I 76A Napolitan squatt. From 2020 until 2022, she is part of the art collective residing at Hangar’s Wetlab in Barcelona.

Ce Quimera is Artist and researcher, born in Argentina and resident in Europe since 2000, living between Barcelona and Bourges. She studied Social Anthropology in Buenos Aires while doing internships in the performing arts field.
In 2008, she created the lab Quimera Rosa together with Kina Madno. From this point on, she focused her corporal and investigative work on post-identity gender policies and corporal, identity and technoscience experiments with a trans*feminist perspective.
Her work currently focuses on the development of performances, transdisciplinary projects and interactive installations as well as elaborate devices that function through corporal activity and experimentation in biohacking. Her work is characterized by long periods of research/experimentation, generally as part of residencies. In 2016, she began working with Quimera Rosa on the project Trans*Plant, carried out and produced by Ars Electrónica and the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE), Hangar and the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), the University of California in Davis and L'Antre Peaux. In 2019, she participated in Acá soy la que se fue: relatos sudakas en la Europa fortaleza, a pioneer collection of real stories of and for migrants arriving in Europe from Abya Yala and the Caribbean. She is artist in residence at the Hangar Wetlab, together with Gaia Leandra (2020/2022), where she carries out investigative and experimental projects in art and science with a transhackfeminist vision. Most of her work is collaborative and free of patents and ownership codes and has been presented in streets, galleries, universities, freelance spaces, okupas, art centres, festivals and museums.

SUPPORTERS: Institut ramon llull, Government of Catalonia (Delegation to Central Europe)

Bioxeno project has had the support of the “Premios Barcelona 2020” Grants from the Barcelona City Council and with the support of Hangar.org for our two-year residency at the wetlab (Gaia Leandra + Ce Quimera 2020-2022).

PARTNERS: Mz* Baltazar´s Laboratory

Images: Martina Lajczak

video

Sonia Bernac: The Influencing Machine: Latent Moods, Emergent Bias and Distributed Ontologies

Talk in English from April 2025, with Monika Halkort

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’, curated by the School for Transformation

This talk examines the problem of synthetic emergence: how AI generators, even when guided by loosely defined objectives, tend to produce commonsensical associations, aesthetic stereotypes, and familiar patterns of meaning. Rather than enabling radical experimentation, these systems often resolve into a ‘canny valley’ – a zone of overfamiliar coherence. Though bias, synthetic ‘moods,’ and aesthetics are not embedded in advance but emerge through systemic operations, their emergence is frequently steered toward a telos of the familiar. Without reducing the issue to flawed datasets or dismissing AI as a merely regurgitative ‘stochastic parrot,’ the talk explores the potential of synthetic intelligence and AI media generators as instruments of poietic praxis – requiring careful attunement to the novel patterns that arise through their experimentation. It emphasises the importance of distinguishing between different forms of the unknown within these systems, particularly the differences between randomness, undecidability, and noncomputability – each implying distinct artistic strategies. The ideas presented are practice-led, discussed through the experimental architecture of Polymorphs – a collaborative series of artworks and a complex generative AI system developed at the Artificial and Distributed Intelligence Lab, Royal College of Art, London.

Sonia Bernac

is an artist, writer, and technologist. Her research investigates the ontological tensions of old and new materialisms, synthetic teratologies, intuitions of science-fiction, and pre-Enlightenment systems of knowledge. Framed as a bestiary of distributed intelligence, her work makes sense of hallucinations in generative AI, latent spaces, and emergent moods within synthetic environments. Without equating the non-human with the inhumane, she pays particular attention to the emergence of pathological systemic formations – exclusionary, compulsive, or sadistic imaginaries. Most recently, she was a senior researcher at Antikythera and the Artificial and Distributed Intelligence Lab at the Royal College of Art.

Monika Halkort

is assistant professor and head of the Art x Science School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research and teaching focus on the political ecology of transformation processes, emphasising, in particular, the role of bio/geo-chemical substances and materials in mediating historical (in)justice and change.

video

Digital Emotions

Katharina Gsöllpointner in Conversation with Robert Trappl & Adam Miklosi (I), Eva Hudlicka & Helmut Leder (II) about Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Talk Series in English from 2018

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently are experiencing a powerful renaissance of scientific and public attention. We believe that the advance of these technologies will have an enormous impact on our ways of living, working, learning, communicating, travelling, caressing, curing, and even dying.

However, there still remain two big issues to be solved in order to allow for a fruitful human–machine–interaction: In order to become trustworthy to humans, how can machines develop emotional behavior, and how do they have to look like?

In the lecture series four international experts from AI, robotics, and biology discuss the state of the art in their respective research fields.

Idea, concept & moderation: Katharina Gsöllpointner

Dr. Katharina Gsöllpointner is a media and art theoretician with a habilitiation in media studies. Her focus is on the crossover of media aesthetics, digital technologies, and the cybernetics of art, and she has a passion for inter-, trans- and crossdisciplinarity. Beside working as a university lecturer and researcher at the Department Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, since 2017 she also is a staff member of the Department Cross-Disciplinary Strategies where she teaches Artistic Strategies from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

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In Conversation with Clemens Apprich on ‘Decolonizing Technology’

About media technology and its political implications in terms of identity politics and the importance of critical thinking in digital cultures. What does it mean to ‘decolonize’ technology, and how can it be that technology generates a ‘colonizing’ practice in the first place?

Clemens Apprich is head of the department of Media Theory, which co-hosts AIL’s Talk Series on the topic of ‘Decolonizing Technology’

Clemens Apprich

is full professor and head of the department of Media Theory at Angewandte. His current research focuses on filter algorithms and their use in data analysis procedures as well as machine learning methods. He is author of Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and co-editor of the book Pattern Discrimination together with Hito Steyerl, Florian Cramer and Wendy Chun (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)

Elisabeth Falkensteiner (Curator and Co-Head of AIL) talked to Clemens Apprich about media technology and its political implications in terms of identity politics and the importance of critical thinking in digital cultures.

Elisabeth Falkensteiner (EF)

In recent times, the political visions or, rather, the naïve utopian dream of a fundamental democratization of the internet has been dulled just as the hope has faded that artificial intelligence and machine learning will develop ‘neutral’ digital worlds.

In fact, new technologies are even more likely to entrench inequality, reinforce racist and sexist tendencies and promote reactionary identity politics – which will have consequences in virtual space as well as in real life. After all, most 90s online cultures had their roots in activism and subcultures.

Where did we go wrong?

Clemens Apprich (CA)

Many technologies that constitute what we call the online world were created in the 90s – at a time when the future of the internet was still undecided and subject of passionate debates. The mass distribution of so-called web 2.0 applications, building on the initial internet infrastructure and known as ‘social media’ platforms today, has led to a shift in the balance of power: away from public, social and artistic positions towards commercial interests. The use of these new media platforms has also led to a staggering increase in digital data. However, an enormous amount of computational power is required to generate ‘valuable’ information from this data, something only global corporations can afford these days.

And these automated pattern recognition systems are anything but impartial. On the contrary, algorithms learn from our data and therefore adopt everything that is part of it, including our racist, sexist, classist and ableist prejudices as well as heteronormative concepts. We are thus confronted with self-fulfilling prophecies, which are then relabeled as objective decision-making processes.

One of these prophecies is the assumption that any proximity between data points is ‘significant’ as such. This homophilic premise, which translates as ‘birds of a feather flock together’, is based in the US-history of segregated housing.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who will give a talk as part of our lecture series, reminds us in her new book that it is precisely this principle of segregation that continues to govern our online world.

Every time Amazon, Facebook, TikTok or Tinder recommend and suggest new products, friends, content or lovers, we come across homophilic clusters that fuel the toxic online-climate today. However, instead of being inherent to the technology, the issue of data bias and algorithmic discrimination concerns the logics these technologies are made to implement and establish; logics that come from retrograde – not to say reactionary – identity politics, and a cancel culture actually deserving that name, which blocks all non-identitarian content, eventually filtering out all we prefer not to see.

In summary one can therefore say basic technologies are driven by a capitalist logic and hegemonic politics. Which current alternative methods and systems promote anti-discriminatory behavior?

Is there a way out of this mess?

CA

At the heart of machine learning, which mostly catches our eye in the form of algorithmic recommender systems, is the simple logic of sifting through big chunks of data and turning them into information. This requires a particular logic or pattern that reflects our social behavior. After all, it is not the technologies that are male and white but the ideas they are fed. And this might be an opening for us: if we think about technologies as being a part of us, as reflections of ourselves, then we can finally engage with them properly.

Hito Steyerl’s work is certainly a prime example in this regard: she does not concern herself with technical solutions or simply downplays the technological conditions we live in; instead she focuses on the beliefs, myths and concrete ideological interests that are portrayed and adopted by these technologies.

Her narrative and visual language reject the glossy aesthetics of most digital art. Instead of reviewing the latest computer hardware or software, she presents ‘poor images’ that stir and enable discussions about digital technologies – ranging from social media and virtual worlds to recent AI applications.

Obviously, no technological innovation will be able to solve our social problems.

You simply cannot fight racism by using better data or algorithms. It is a political fight which requires political organization; online media can only ever play a supportive role here. This also applies to any critique of techno-capitalism, which needs to take place in a political context.

Big digital corporations must play by the rules of society – especially in terms of taxation and collective data management (‘data trusts’) – and need internal reorganization. And the solutions to meet these challenges are as old as the algorithms themselves. This can be best illustrated by the unionization of Amazon workers on Staten Island, New York, an event taking place while their boss, Jeff Bezos, was busy exploring outer space. One of the richest men on earth tries to escape this planet, while his workers unionize and fight for its and their survival. This is a poignant, almost cartoonish depiction of our current situation.

Can art or media art and interdisciplinary practices assist in decolonizing technology? What role can art play?

CA

I think we need to be careful when using context-specific terminology and concepts – especially when they are derived from certain historical contexts that range from the Haitian Revolution to the struggles for independence after the Second World War.

After all, the ‘decolonization of technology’ seems to be a conflicting term, not least because decolonization describes the retrieval of stolen land, whereas in the case of technology our concern is with the understanding of our own cultural practices.

In an extended sense, though, we might speak of a decentralization of this knowledge by analyzing the – oftentimes violent – origins of technology.

There are several good examples, such as Luiza Prado de O Martins’ work, which focuses on alternative forms of knowledge and modern technology’s divergent points of origin – covering not only digital media but also other areas of interest like birth control.
And then there are also the artworks of Simon Denny, which render visible and thereby discuss the material conditions of our online world. His project ‘Mine’, for example, illustrates the nexus between the mining data and minerals – since both are integral to the functioning of our digital culture.

Especially the way artistic practices can engage with the production processes of our digital culture makes them viable to transcend current debates – which are mostly concerned with better data or better models – and create new technological visions.

In my opinion, Ramon Amaro, who will give a talk in early December, together with Tiara Roxanne, is one of few people who have truly accepted this challenge. Referencing theories by Frantz Fanon and Gilbert Simondon, he demands a radical break in the relationship with our technologies.

With a background in mechanical engineering as well as art history, he interprets technological systems, and especially AI, as reflections of ourselves with all the problems that come with it. His upcoming book, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being, focuses on the highly problematic and mostly racist history and logic of modern statistics, which form the basis of today’s machine learning systems. His demands therefore do not stop at improving these processes but press for an epistemological break, so as to be able to create something new.

When we look at social media and its news feed algorithms, which do not only fuel the attention economy of its users but also divide them into separate bubbles, we can see it losing its utopian and emancipatory potential. The pandemic and the surrounding debate have instead underlined how social media contributes to social divisiveness. Still, what were the initial principles and ideas of social networks?

CA

In the early 2000s, the media theorist Tiziana Terranova already emphasised the significance of ‘free labour’ in digital societies. Her analysis has become even more relevant with social media platforms: on and with these platforms we produce a digital economy and profits that only benefit a few instead of the many. Sadly, we do this in the belief of ‘authenticity’;

everyone is convinced they are being creative, while in fact being caught in the behavioral patterns and restrictions imposed by tech companies. Bernard Stiegler once called this the ‘systemic stupidity’ of our digital culture.

However, what I like about Tiziana Terranova’s work is that she never tires to stress the ‘social’ in social media. As a matter of fact, social media algorithms are not interested in the individual person – their holiday photos or music collections – but rather in the relationships to other individuals in a given network; this ever-changing trans-individuality is still an important, yet underrated fact which we need to take into account when critiquing our capitalist digital society.

Generally, all technologies are no more than cristallisations of our social relations. For this reason, we also need to find new ways to engage with them. The theoretical field of Disability Studies could be an interesting point of departure, as it traditionally focuses on scrutinizing what we perceive as ‘normal’ in our culture.

As part of our lecture series, Katharina Klappheck will talk about machine learning processes in terms of disability and the unruly. And in March, Tung-Hui Hu will speak to us in a similar way about non-Western concepts of digital cultures in his lecture on analogue internet culture.

If we want to counter the divisive potential of these technologies, we should not – even in the face of justified criticism of our excessive mediated society – submit to any kind of cultural pessimism or technophobia. For there is always a playful approach to deal with our neuroses and technological dependencies.

Thank you Clemens Apprich for the Interview!

video

Ramon Amaro: The Trouble with Visibility

Lecture in English from 2022

Accompanied by a Dialogue with Tiara Roxanne, moderated by Nelly Y. Pinkrah

About the Series ‘Decolonizing Technology’

Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis provide a clear (and often sudden) grasp of the complex relationship between race and machine learning.

Amaro juxtaposes a practical analysis of machine learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro offers a continuous contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

Ramon Amaro’s writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computation reason. He draws on Frantz Fanon’s theory of sociogenic alienation to problematise the de-localisation of the Black psyché in contemporary computational systems, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.

His recent book The Black Technical Objectaims to introduce the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis – a system of racism amenable to scientific explanation – into machine learning research as an act of impairing the racial ordering of the world.

While machine learning – computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning – provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience.

Tiara Roxanne is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Data & Society in NYC. They are a Tarascan Mestiza scholar and artist based in Berlin. Their research and artistic practice investigates the encounter between Indigeneity and AI by interrogating colonial structures embedded within machine learning systems. As a performance artist and practitioner, Roxanne works between the digital and the material using textile. Currently their work is mediated through the color red.

Roxanne has presented at Images Festival (Toronto), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center (NY), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), Tech Open Air (Berlin), AMOQA (Athens), Zurich University of the Arts (Zurich), Autonomous Intercultural Indigenous University (Columbia), Utrecht University (NL), University of California (San Diego), Münchener Kammerspiele (Munich), Laboratorio Arte Alameda, (Mexico City), among others.

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a cultural and media theorist and political activist, mainly involved in anti-racist, empowerment, and community-building projects. Areas of interest: (digital) media and technology, black studies & black feminist theory, political thoughts and practices, and cultural history.

video

Julia Voss: The Digitalization and Evolution of Art

Talk in German from 2016

Is there one distinctive style of the early 21st century? And what does the aesthetic dimension reveal about society?

The third revolution has brought about new art forms. The best known might be Post-internet Art, created by a generation of artists who grew up with the internet and have naturally made digital techniques part of their artistic repertoire. Post-internet Art has been widely successful at many art fairs over the last few years, especially at the Biennale in Venice and in Berlin. However, changes in the art world due to digitalization are more extensive than one might think. This lecture will present a taxonomy of new art forms, while it also compares the latest developments with changes in the art system of the 19th century, an epoch of two differing styles: the art of the Paris Salon and Modern Art.

Is there one distinctive style of the early 21st century? What is its distinctive quality? And what does the aesthetic dimension reveal about society?

Julia Voss is currently a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. She is deputy editor in chief of the arts and culture supplement at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her dissertation on Darwin’s images was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2007 and was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize by the German Academy for Language and Literature in 2009. She is honorary professor at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.