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Artificial Intelligence: Its Cultural, Political and Philosophical Potentialities
Organized by (Re)Create Art Projects with Warren Neidich
June 24–27, 2026
(Re)Create Art Projects is pleased to announce Artificial Intelligence: Its Cultural, Political and Philosophical Potentialities, a symposium to be held online from Wednesday, June 24 until Saturday, June 27, 2026.
Curated by Warren Neidich, presenters include: Ada Ackerman, David W. Bates, Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Fontaine, Tariq Krim, Agnieszka Kurant, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anna Longo, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich, Martha Schwendener, and Hito Steyerl.
The presentation lectures will be freely streamed on YouTube and include Q+A at the end.
Program
All times are Central European Time/Paris.
June 24–27, 2026
(Re)Create Art Projects is pleased to announce Artificial Intelligence: Its Cultural, Political and Philosophical Potentialities, a symposium to be held online from Wednesday, June 24 until Saturday, June 27, 2026.
Curated by Warren Neidich, presenters include: Ada Ackerman, David W. Bates, Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Fontaine, Tariq Krim, Agnieszka Kurant, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anna Longo, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich, Martha Schwendener, and Hito Steyerl.
The presentation lectures will be freely streamed on YouTube and include Q+A at the end.
Program
All times are Central European Time/Paris.
Wednesday | June 24
6 pm | Opening remarks with Gale Elston
6:30–8:30 pm | Anna Longo: How LLMs Invite us to Rethink the Modern Subject, and Lynn Hershman Leeson: Agent Ruby's Revenge
Thursday | June 25
1–3 pm | Nicolas Bourriaud: Epimetheus and the Zombies: 21st Century Art in Front of the Automatic Alterity, and Agnieszka Kurant: Recursion
4–6 pm | Claire Fontaine: Al and General Intellect, and Tariq Krim: AI Treating Human Culture as Indigenous
Friday | June 26
1–3 pm | Ada Ackerman: AI, and Missing Images: Decolonial and Counterfactual Potentialities, and Warren Neidich: The Emancipation of the Neural-Epistemological Commons: Resisting Data and Intellectual Enclosures
4–6 pm | Yann Moulier Boutang: Political Economy of AI, and Martha Schwendener: Vilém Flusser and AI
Saturday | June 27
10 am–12 pm | David W. Bates: Political Bodies of the Cybernetic Age, and Hito Steyerl: Art in the Age of Authoritarian Chatbots
2–4 pm | Round Table discussion
6 pm | Opening remarks with Gale Elston
6:30–8:30 pm | Anna Longo: How LLMs Invite us to Rethink the Modern Subject, and Lynn Hershman Leeson: Agent Ruby's Revenge
Thursday | June 25
1–3 pm | Nicolas Bourriaud: Epimetheus and the Zombies: 21st Century Art in Front of the Automatic Alterity, and Agnieszka Kurant: Recursion
4–6 pm | Claire Fontaine: Al and General Intellect, and Tariq Krim: AI Treating Human Culture as Indigenous
Friday | June 26
1–3 pm | Ada Ackerman: AI, and Missing Images: Decolonial and Counterfactual Potentialities, and Warren Neidich: The Emancipation of the Neural-Epistemological Commons: Resisting Data and Intellectual Enclosures
4–6 pm | Yann Moulier Boutang: Political Economy of AI, and Martha Schwendener: Vilém Flusser and AI
Saturday | June 27
10 am–12 pm | David W. Bates: Political Bodies of the Cybernetic Age, and Hito Steyerl: Art in the Age of Authoritarian Chatbots
2–4 pm | Round Table discussion
“Technological escalation, in turn, is threatening to turn us all into artefacts – what I have called elsewhere “the becoming-black-of-the world” . . . As a repository of our desires and emotions, dreams, fears and fantasies, our mind and psychic life have become the main raw material which digital capitalism aims at capturing and commodifying.”
— Achille Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary” (2021)
— Achille Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary” (2021)
In cognitive capitalism, the brain and mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century. The proletariat physically laboring on the assembly line to create objects and things has been subsumed by the cognitariat, or mental laborer, transacting within the specialized universe that the screen reveals to produce data. This data not only generates consumer profiles and predictive shopping recommendations – driving brand loyalty and enhancing user experience – but can also have more insidious effects. Recently, a new kind of cognitariat has entered the labor market: the micro-laborer, who works for pennies in the Global South, often in refugee camps, creating what Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry call “data colonialism,” in which AI companies appropriate human life through data extraction and mining. In this sense, AI functions as a metaphor for an inorganic machinic collective intelligence.
With the introduction of analytic and generative AI, the effects of digitality have hypertrophied at an alarming rate and placed inordinate stress on subjective individuation in a process referred to by Bernard Stiegler as “proletarianization,” in which the hyper-industrial age becomes the era of systemic stupidity. A confluence of factors such as increased computational power, the acceleration of machine learning and deep learning techniques (including analytic and generative AI), and expanded access to data from varied sources such as social media platforms and the network effects they promulgate, has broadened AI’s influence, extending it into seemingly every nook and cranny of our worldwide political, social, and economic imagination. Never have the stakes been higher for a collective understanding of AI and its implications for the future of humankind.
The cultural debate has never been more critical as a means of critique and analysis. Artists and innovators alike confront AI’s role in usurping creative potential and emphasizing optimization and efficiency over contingency. The art world has reached a critical moment, especially since the advent of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and DALL·E, whose unlicensed scraping of images and texts during training – without artist consent – constitutes an infringement of rights. Other implications became apparent following the circulation of a widely criticized fifteen-second clip created by the AI program Seedance 2.0 depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting without their permission. On the other hand, as the exhibition The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume in Paris demonstrated, artists drawing on their own histories, mediums, and frameworks engage AI in idiosyncratic ways, using its latent spaces as opportunities for producing captivating works of art while also rendering visible AI’s dangers and suggesting forms of remediation within the reflective space of the museum.
The political debate centers on whether the recent acceleration of AI – along with its capacity to generate counterfactual histories, deep fakes, and speculative or synthetic archives – places truth at risk or instead provides an opportunity for historical renewal and a renegotiation of aporias and stereotypes, a practice termed archive activism. Are the potentials of AI in medicine, the military, and entertainment worth the loss of autonomy and privacy in what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism?
Philosophically speaking, AI represents the most recent manifestation of a coevolutionary process referred to as exosomatic organogenesis, in which technologies and the cerebral cortex mirror one another across human time. As Stiegler explains: “We submit that between these two ruptures, cortex and equipment are differentiated together, in one and the same movement. The issue is that of a singular process of structural coupling in exteriorization that we are calling an instrumental maieutics, a “mirror proto-stage” in the course of which the differentiation of the cortex is determined by the tool just as much as that of the tool by the cortex: a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process.”
If these technologies are also responsible for the Anthropocene, what does this imply for the brain and for consciousness? Is it possible to think sustainably? Furthermore, does the topology of latent spaces that characterizes AI provide a new structure for memory designated as a “fourth memory” or (building on Husserl and Stiegler) “quaternary retention”? These issues and many more will be explored by prominent artists, philosophers, curators, theorists and tech innovators who have professionally engaged with the subject.
— Warren Neidich
With the introduction of analytic and generative AI, the effects of digitality have hypertrophied at an alarming rate and placed inordinate stress on subjective individuation in a process referred to by Bernard Stiegler as “proletarianization,” in which the hyper-industrial age becomes the era of systemic stupidity. A confluence of factors such as increased computational power, the acceleration of machine learning and deep learning techniques (including analytic and generative AI), and expanded access to data from varied sources such as social media platforms and the network effects they promulgate, has broadened AI’s influence, extending it into seemingly every nook and cranny of our worldwide political, social, and economic imagination. Never have the stakes been higher for a collective understanding of AI and its implications for the future of humankind.
The cultural debate has never been more critical as a means of critique and analysis. Artists and innovators alike confront AI’s role in usurping creative potential and emphasizing optimization and efficiency over contingency. The art world has reached a critical moment, especially since the advent of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and DALL·E, whose unlicensed scraping of images and texts during training – without artist consent – constitutes an infringement of rights. Other implications became apparent following the circulation of a widely criticized fifteen-second clip created by the AI program Seedance 2.0 depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting without their permission. On the other hand, as the exhibition The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume in Paris demonstrated, artists drawing on their own histories, mediums, and frameworks engage AI in idiosyncratic ways, using its latent spaces as opportunities for producing captivating works of art while also rendering visible AI’s dangers and suggesting forms of remediation within the reflective space of the museum.
The political debate centers on whether the recent acceleration of AI – along with its capacity to generate counterfactual histories, deep fakes, and speculative or synthetic archives – places truth at risk or instead provides an opportunity for historical renewal and a renegotiation of aporias and stereotypes, a practice termed archive activism. Are the potentials of AI in medicine, the military, and entertainment worth the loss of autonomy and privacy in what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism?
Philosophically speaking, AI represents the most recent manifestation of a coevolutionary process referred to as exosomatic organogenesis, in which technologies and the cerebral cortex mirror one another across human time. As Stiegler explains: “We submit that between these two ruptures, cortex and equipment are differentiated together, in one and the same movement. The issue is that of a singular process of structural coupling in exteriorization that we are calling an instrumental maieutics, a “mirror proto-stage” in the course of which the differentiation of the cortex is determined by the tool just as much as that of the tool by the cortex: a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process.”
If these technologies are also responsible for the Anthropocene, what does this imply for the brain and for consciousness? Is it possible to think sustainably? Furthermore, does the topology of latent spaces that characterizes AI provide a new structure for memory designated as a “fourth memory” or (building on Husserl and Stiegler) “quaternary retention”? These issues and many more will be explored by prominent artists, philosophers, curators, theorists and tech innovators who have professionally engaged with the subject.
— Warren Neidich
(Re)Create Art Projects
Founded by Gale P. Elston in 2016, (Re)Create Art Projects is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting contemporary art and the critical discourses that surround it. (Re)Create began as a working residency program in Castelnuovo Calcea, near Asti, where artists were invited to work, experiment, write, and conduct research in the distinctive setting of Casa Bianca. Since 2025, (Re)Create Art Projects has expanded its scope, developing a more comprehensive program combining the production of artworks, publications, exhibitions, artist residencies, symposia, and related initiatives. Alongside this Artificial Intelligence symposium program and forthcoming publication (with Dario Cimorelli Editore), the organization is advancing new public presentations of site-specific art in Castelnuovo Calcea, as well as large-scale projects with Dennis Oppenheim and Carolee Schneemann. Additional artist residencies and future publications form part of its ongoing commitment to fostering artistic production, research, and critical dialogue.
