Human Entities 2025: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Ninth edition
Wed 14 May 2025, 6.30pm
Artist Talk: Welcome to Jankspace, babesDaniel FelsteadContent producer
Jankspace is the leaking residual of the stack as it metabolises meatspace into hallucinogenic sludge. It’s the Uberdriver’s chaotically impressive multi-display setup of knotted cables, flashing screens and beeping notifications. It’s literally us and our gorgeously fucked-up, uncomputable bodies that we know aren’t quite programmed right and no amount of optimization is going to fix. In this artist talk Daniel will use the concept of jankspace to explore some of the central themes of his practice, namely, the aesthetic derangement of everyday digital culture, our unhinged mediated bodies, and the idiotic delusions of transhumanism.
Daniel FelsteadDaniel Felstead is an academic and content producer whose practice focuses on the relationship between the body, technology, and culture. e is the course leader of MA Fashion Media & Communication at the London College of Fashion (UAL). Daniel has spoken and exhibited internationally including Architectural Association, Berlin Critics Week, Die Angewandte, Fundació Foto Colectania, Global Art Forum, MAPS, ICA, PAF, RCA, RISD, Shedhalle, Transmediale and V&A Museum. His PhD explored speculative modes of production, complex systems and the platform in relation to participatory art. Most recently Daniel has produced a series of critically acclaimed short film commissions that explore the myths, ideologies and realities of the metaverse, AI, biotech and neural media.
https://www.instagram.com/felstead.daniel
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale and Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
CADA is funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia.Art direction + graphic design: Emir KaryoPhotography: Renato ChorãoSound: Fernando Fadigas
Human Entities 2025: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Ninth edition
Thur 5 June 2025, 6.30pm; book-signing session at 6pm
Planta Sapiens: Rethinking Intelligence in the Living World
Paco Calvo
Professor of Philosophy of Science, Principal Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory (MINT Lab) at the University of Murcia (Spain)
Our conventional understanding of intelligence has long been shaped by human and animal models, leaving little room to consider the cognitive potential of plants. However, emerging research challenges this perspective, revealing that plants engage with their surroundings in ways that suggest problem-solving, flexible adaptation, and even anticipatory forms of behavior.In this talk, I will present key findings, exploring how plants process information, respond to stimuli, and coordinate their actions through sophisticated signaling mechanisms. Beyond the scientific discoveries, these insights prompt deeper philosophical questions. Why do we struggle to conceive of plants as more than passive organisms? What assumptions shape our tendency to separate the human from the nonhuman, intelligence from instinct, or agency from environment? Our conceptual and linguistic frameworks are often ill-equipped to accommodate the possibility that plants, too, participate in the web of cognition. By questioning these biases, we open the door to a more expansive and inclusive view of life; one that recognizes intelligence as a broader, more distributed phenomenon across biological systems. This shift in perspective not only deepens our understanding of plants but also challenges us to rethink fundamental ideas about mind, perception, and the interconnected nature of all living beings.
Paco Calvo
Professor of Philosophy of Science, Principal Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory (MINT Lab) at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on plant intelligence, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science, robotics and AI. He uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Journal of the Royal Society, Plant, Cell & Environment, Plant Signaling & Behavior, Scientific Reports, and Trends in Plant Science, among other journals. He is author of the popular science book Planta Sapiens ( 2023; with Natalie Lawrence).
https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/about/people/paco-calvo
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
CADA is funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa
Art direction + graphic design: Emir Karyo
Photography: Joana Linda
Sound: Diogo Melo
Human Entities 2025: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Ninth edition
Wed 28 May 2025, 6.30pm
Notes on ‘Content’
Caroline Busta
Writer and editor
As one-point perspective gives way to collective forms of knowing, media proliferates with no end, text is increasingly scanned and sensed more than read, and the myth of the individual-creative-genius is dissolved by the logic of swarm-trained LLMs, we are undergoing an epochal shift in human expression and reception. Surveying this communicational climate change, New Models co-founder Caroline Busta will examine the role of ‘content’ therein and some emergent frameworks of adaptation.
Caroline BustaCaroline Busta is a co-founder of the critical media channel New Models. She was previously EIC of Texte zur Kunst, and an Assoc. Editor of Artforum. She co-edited Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst’s survey catalogue, All Media is Training Data (2024, Serpentine/König) and her recent essay ‘Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content’ appears in the SS24 issue of Document journal.
https://studio.newmodels.io
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
CADA is funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa
Art direction + graphic design: Emir Karyo
Photography: Joana Linda
Sound: Diogo Melo
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 19 April 2023
Artist talk
Mark Leckey
Mark Leckey is one of the most influential artists working today. Since the late 1990s, his work has looked at the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. He works with sculpture, film, sound and performance – and sometimes all four at once. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the Turner Prize.
His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, in 2019, Serpentine Gallery, in 2011, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have been presented in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, in 2008. His works are held in the collections of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou.
https://markleckey.com
https://www.cabinet.uk.com/mark-leckey
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mark-leckey-6877/introducing-mark-leckey
https://www.youtube.com/@MrLeckey
https://www.instagram.com/mark.leckey
https://twitter.com/MarkLeckey
https://www.nts.live/shows/mark-leckey
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 15 May 2024
Plant consciousness
Monica Gagliano
Evolutionary ecologist, Research Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Southern Cross University, Australia
Monica Gagliano PhD is an internationally award-winning research scientist, selected by Biohabitats as one of the 24 most Inspiring Women of Ecology, together with Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earl, and Terry Tempest Williams. She has been an invited lecturer at the most prestigious universities, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth and Georgetown. Monica’s pioneering work has been widely featured by prominent media, such as The New York Times, Forbes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, National Geographic, and many others. Monica is Research Associate Professor (Adjunct) of evolutionary ecology based in Australia. She is currently Chief Scientist at Kaiāulu|Coherence Lab in Hawaii, and Research Associate at the Takiwasi Centre in Perú.
Monica has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, which for the first time, experimentally demonstrates that plants emit voices and detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. Her work has extended the concept of cognition in plants. By demonstrating experimentally that learning and memory are not the exclusive province of animals, Monica has reignited the discourse of plant subjectivity, as well as ethical and legal standing. Inspired by encounters with nature and indigenous elders from around the world, Monica applies an innovative and holistic approach to science, one that is comfortable engaging at the interface between areas as diverse as ecology, physics, law, anthropology, philosophy, literature, music, the arts, and spirituality. By re-kindling a sense of wonder for the beautiful place we call home, she is helping to create a new ecology of mind that inspires the emergence of revolutionary solutions toward human interactions with the world we co-inhabit.
Monica’s studies have led her to author numerous ground-breaking scientific articles and books, including Thus Spoke the Plant (2018) and The Mind of Plants (2021).
https://www.monicagagliano.com
https://www.instagram.com/_monicagagliano_
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Gagliano
https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/esploro/profile/monica_gagliano/overview
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale and Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Justin Jaeckle, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das ArtesSupport: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Urban Transitions Hub, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia
Design: Pedro Loureiro
Photography: Joana Linda
Sound: Diogo Melo
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 5 June 2024
Solarpunk means dreaming green
Jay Springett
Strategist and writer
Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”
In our current age of popular dystopia, climate grief, and biosphere collapse, Solarpunk has become a ‘creative container‘ for more fertile futures. Not one future singular, but many. Solarpunk encourages everyone to re-imagine what life might be like en-route to a better world. Our collective future will not be imposed upon us from above, but instead created bottom up by individuals in polyphony. A texture consisting of multiple simultaneous lines of independent melody.
The future never passively arrives fully formed, instead, it must be dreamed. Solarpunk is one such dream. In this talk Jay will cover the story of how solarpunk came to be and its attempts at inspiring people to ‘remake our present and future history’.
Jay Springett
Jay Springett is a strategist and writer from London.
He is known as a leading voice in the speculative genre of Solarpunk, which described in 2019 as a ‘memetic engine’ – a tool to power the ‘refuturing’ of our collective imagination. In 2020 his Solarpunk short story ‘In The Storm, A Fire’ was long listed for the BSFA Award for Short Fiction. Jay is a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts in London and was selected as one of WeAreEurope’s 64 Faces of Europe in 2019. He is currently an instructor at The New Centre and speaks regularly about the future, technology and culture at events around the world. He currently hosts two podcasts: PermanentlyMoved.Online, a 301 second long personal journal and Experience.Computer, an interview show about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination.
Jay has been writing online at http://www.thejaymo.net since 2010.
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale and Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Justin Jaeckle, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Urban Transitions Hub, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia
Design: Pedro Loureiro
Photography: Joana Linda
Sound: Diogo Melo
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 29 May 2024
Artificial Intelligence Design and the Logic of Social Cooperation
Matteo Pasquinelli
Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice
A conversation around the book “The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence” with the author Matteo Pasquinelli.
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest “to solve intelligence” – a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. Pasquinelli’s book The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage’s “calculating engines” of the industrial age as well as in the recent Large Language Models such as ChatGPT.
Matteo Pasquinelli
Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice where he is coordinating the ERC project AI MODELS.
http://matteopasquinelli.com
https://pric.unive.it/projects/ai-models/home
https://www.versobooks.com/products/735-the-eye-of-the-master
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale and Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Justin Jaeckle, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Urban Transitions Hub, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia Design: Pedro Loureiro Photography: Joana Linda Sound: Diogo Melo
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 22 May 2024
Pluralizing psychedelic experiences
Giorgio Gristina
PhD candidate, DANT (ICS-ULisboa), Systems Neuroscience Lab (Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown)
Potential groundbreaking therapeutic applications are fuelling a resurgence of scientific and clinical interest towards psychedelic compounds. Growing media coverage is popularizing concepts such as “mystical experience” and “ego-dissolution”. Such terms are used in most scientific studies to describe the complex subjective experiences elicited by these substances, possibly playing a role in their therapeutic outcomes. But what’s the history behind these categories? And are there other ways of interpreting the peculiar effects of these substances?
The mystical framework has been dominant in western scientific approaches to altered states of consciousness, and was thus adopted by psychedelic research since its inception. However, I argue that it is not the only possible interpretation of psychedelics’ effects. Ethnographic data and anecdotal evidence show that other communities have approached psychedelics through other epistemologies, and that their effects vary considerably across different settings. To widen our understanding of these substances’ effects and their therapeutic applications, scientific approaches to psychedelics should attempt to include a broader diversity of experiences, contexts and methods.
Giorgio Gristina
Giorgio Gristina holds a BA in Intercultural Communication and a MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology, both from the University of Torino (Italy). He also got a diploma in Sound Engineering from the school APM (Italy), having collaborated to numerous artistic / audiovisual projects along the years. He is currently PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences (ULisboa), with a research project co-hosted by the System Neuroscience Laboratory (Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown). His PhD investigation employs qualitative methods to unravel the historical and cultural frameworks underlying contemporary scientific research and clinical practice with psychedelic drugs, with focus on the Portuguese scenario and its role in the context of the “psychedelic renaissance”. His work explores the socialities emerging around the use and circulation of drugs, and the way scientific discourses shape western conceptions of self, mind and mental health. He has conducted fieldwork in Israel and in different sites in Europe.
https://doutoramento.antropologia.ulisboa.pt/estudantes/giorgio-gristina
Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale and Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Justin Jaeckle, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.
Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
Support: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Urban Transitions Hub, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia
Design: Pedro Loureiro
Photography: Joana Linda
Sound: Diogo Melo
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 17 May 2023
Authorship, Agency, and Moral Obligation
Joanna Bryson
Professor of Ethics and Technology in the Centre for Digital Governance at Hertie School in Berlin
How much of our individual human experience can we absorb into machine models when we use machine learning and a huge amount of data? Will AI become sentient? Sovereign? Ambitious? How will living with AI change our daily experience? This talk reflects natural, social, and computing sciences, describing both human and artificial intelligence, then governance, justice, and creativity. What we do matters, and we are obliged to ourselves and our planet to create and maintain good governance of all artefacts of our species.
Joanna Bryson
Joanna J Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, is an academic recognised for broad expertise on intelligence, its nature, and its consequences. She advises governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs globally, particularly in AI policy. She holds two degrees each in psychology and AI (BA Chicago, MSc & MPhil Edinburgh, PhD MIT). Her work has appeared in venues ranging from reddit to the journal Science. She continues to research both the systems engineering of AI and the cognitive science of intelligence, with present focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and new models of governance for AI and ICT.
https://www.joannajbryson.org
https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com
https://twitter.com/j2bryson
Organised by CADA in partnership with Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 3 May 2023
Smart Power
Orit Halpern
Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden
Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and ‘crisis’. From large scale computer simulations of the weather, to smart cities and infrastructures, to geo-engineering projects, to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, we have arguably transformed the planet into a test-bed and experiment for computational technologies. The penetration of almost every part of life by digital technologies has transformed how we understand nature, culture, and time. But what futures are we imagining, or foreclosing through these planetary ‘experiments’? How have we come to see human survival as fundamentally dependent on computational networks? This talk maps the rise of this ‘smartness mandate’. Tracing genealogies from artificial intelligence, finance, architecture, and art I will develop an account of how ubiquitous computing has become one of the dominant governing logics of our present (and possibly our future) and to what effects.
Orit Halpern
Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of intelligence and evolution; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her latest book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press January 2023) The Smartness Mandate, is a theory and history of the concept of ‘smartness’, that interrogates the relationship between computation, population, economy, and governmentality.
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 26 April 2023
Rebooting democracy
Manuel Arriaga + Pedro Magalhães
Manuel Arriaga is a university professor and one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos; Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon
Democracy is a technology of collective decision-making that aggregates intentions and defines a course of action. However, according to the diagnosis of many, it’s a technology ‘in crisis’. An important part of the contemporary experience of ‘democratic frustration’ seems to result from the contrast between the stagnation of ways of doing politics and the rapid evolution of digital technology. As consumers, we have long learned to expect – and demand – innovation. Yet, as citizens, we regularly confront ourselves with the immutability of mechanisms of governance.
In representative democracy, who is effectively represented? How, and to what extent, are the interests and preferences of people – and different people – converted into policies? With regard to the issue of the environment and climate change, in every election cycle there seems to be a kind of myopia, or short-sightedness, which exclusively focuses on the articulation and resolution of (some) short-term problems.
To what extent can forms of ‘democratic innovation’, especially those that serve to create greater opportunities for political participation, serve to address long-term problems, in particular the climate crisis? What is the potential of other forms of political organisation as a complement, or even alternative, to representative democracy?
This discussion will be moderated by Catherine Moury, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the PhD programme, Political Studies Department, NOVA University of Lisbon.
Manuel Arriaga
Manuel Arriaga is a university professor, author of Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos and, more recently, one of the driving forces behind the political party (still non-existent) FUTURO.
https://www.rebootdemocracy.org
https://www.forumdoscidadaos.pt
https://www.futurodemocratico.pt
Pedro Magalhães
Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, where he develops research in the area of public opinion and political attitudes, in particular attitudes towards democracy.
https://www.pedro-magalhaes.org/
https://twitter.com/PCMagalhaes
Organized in partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts departments
Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Canada 150 Chair in New Media, Director, Digital Democracies Institute
In Discriminating Data [2021], Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
In this conversation, Chun will discuss the themes of her book with Andrea Pavoni, assistant research professor at DINAMIA’CET and then take questions from the audience.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and leads the Digital Democracies Institute. She studied Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines in her current work on digital media, and is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016) and, more recently, Discriminating Data (2021).
https://www.sfu.ca/communication/team/faculty/wendy-chun.html
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/discriminating-data
https://twitter.com/whkchun
Human Entities is a public programme of talks organised by CADA.
Artist Talk
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Artist
Somewhat similar to what it is commonly said about migrants, autonomous machines are taken to be a potential threat to some human labour. In military environments, these systems and their efficiency can, in fact, be more lethal than those controlled by people. This idea allows us to roll back to the core definition of intelligence which, since the Industrial Revolution has been deeply linked with efficiency-as-productivity, and subsequent avoidance of errors. This definition which is the heir of a type of rationality, with origins in the Enlightenment, is placed at the top of a hierarchy above all other human thought systems. Problems linked to managing the natural environment, where other later ‘non-rational’ human cultures are encountered, have been solved through domination and even annihilation. We can now see that some AI systems continue this legacy.
In this context, AIELSON [a machine learning model Torres trained to generate spoken-word poetry] reflects upon the zeitgeist, incorporating a complex critique where the system is seen to be connected to humanity (as a reflection) since imperfections are not discarded but embraced. Consequently this contradicts the notion of intelligence as the epitome of flawless efficiency and perfection. Hence, Torres proposes that we should now discuss machine creativity, and how creativity informs human imagination. Her work asks the question: Can we envision another future of possible cooperation between humans and machines, where the natural world is no longer seen as a territory to conquer?
Bio
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado departs from the exploration of the limits of the senses to examine the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, reflecting on the mediated sensorial experiences that (re)construct our perceived reality and that in turn serve to establish a cultural hegemony within the history of technology and the arts. Recently, she received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica for AIELSON, a system developed during her residence on Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program 2019-20.
Her performances and her artworks, which are also part of the collections of Malmo Art Museum and the Public Art Agency of Sweden, have been presented in several countries of the Americas, Central Europe, and Scandinavia, where she is currently based.
https://autodios.github.io
http://www.singingtextiles.com
https://twitter.com/autodios
#NatureTruthPower: Política ambiental na era da pós-verdade e das plataformas digitais
Bram Büscher
Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University
How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous?
In this presentation, Bram Büscher traces how environmental action is transformed through the political economy of digital platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Building on a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, he shows how environmental actors mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingency of environmental issues in particular places. Key in understanding this mediation is a reconfiguration of the relations between nature, truth and power in the 21st century. Its upshot is the need for an environmental politics that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power.
Bio
Bram Büscher is Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University and is a visiting professor at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies at the University of Johannesburg. His research and writing revolve around the political economy of environment and development with specific interests in biodiversity, conservation, new media, digitalization and violence. He developed the concept of Nature 2.0, which focuses on the political economy of new media and its implications for participation in nature conservation. He is the author of Transforming the Frontier: Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (2013), co-author, with Robert Fletcher, of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (2020) and author of The Truth About Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism (2021). This talk was followed by a Q&A session.
https://brambuscher.com
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520371453/the-truth-about-nature
https://twitter.com/brambuscher
Sensing Smart Forests
Jennifer Gabrys
Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
Forests are increasingly sensorized environments. Whether in the form of camera traps to monitor organisms or the Internet of Things to detect wildfires, there are an array of sensor technologies that observe and constitute forests in relation to scientific inquiry, Indigenous land claims, environmental governance, and disaster prevention and mitigation.
This presentation will investigate the sensory arrangements that Smart Forests generate. It will ask how sensory infrastructures materialize as distributions of power and governance, while considering the sensory practices that transform and potentially re-constitute dominant regimes of perception toward other inhabitations and milieus.
Bio
Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. She also leads the Citizen Sense and AirKit projects, which have both received funding from the ERC (European Research Council).
She writes on digital technologies, environments and social life, with recent publications including How to Do Things with Sensors (2019) and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (2016).
Links:
https://smartforests.net
https://planetarypraxis.org
https://www.jennifergabrys.net
Jennifer Gabrys was online with a live connection to the venue. Her talk was followed by a Q&A session.
Artist talk
Alexandre Estrela, Artist
A conversation about the parallel communication (or the lack of it) between Art and Science in the context of the work of Alexandre Estrela. This includes the collaboration with Moita Lab from the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, the Company Orange and the Human Language Technology Laboratory INESC-ID/IST.
Bio
Alexandre Estrela’s work is an investigation into the essence of images that expands spatially and temporally through different media. In his videos and installations Estrela examines the subject’s psychological reactions to images in their interaction with matter. Each piece brings together synaesthetic experiences, visual and sound illusions, aural and chromatic sensations that function as perceptual traps, leading the subject towards conceptual levels. With this strategy Estrela constantly splits vision into further sensible dimensions towards the unseen and the unheard.
Recent solo exhibitions include All and Everything, Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, 2020, Métal Hurlant, Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris, 2019, Cápsulas de silencio, Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, 2016, Roda Lume, M HKA, Antwerp, 2016, Meio Concreto, Serralves Museum, Porto, 2013, among others. His next show, Flat Bells, will be shown at MoMA, New York, in 2022.
Alexandre Estrela was in conversation with Jared Hawkey and Sofia Oliveira.
The European Union’s regulatory framework for Artificial Intelligence
Inês Cisneiros
Lawyer
On her appointment as President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen made regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) a top priority. In her view legislation is fundamental to safeguard the European Union’s citizens’ fundamental rights and encourage investment in safe innovation and technological development. As a result, in April 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal which when approved would prohibit harmful AI practices and impose restrictions on high-risk AI systems.
This ethical stance will position the EU against the lack of regulation in the US and state control in China. From Cambridge Analytica to the recent Project Pegasus, from facial recognition to social credit system, it is increasingly apparent that the abusive use of digital computation compromises human rights.
So, how would this regulation protect citizens in the context of a globalized society? Could the European strategy influence worldwide adoption of good AI practices? How does this proposal relate to the General Data Protection Regulation?
A conversation on what will be solved and what remains to be answered by this proposal includes the participation of Eduardo Santos (D3 – Associação dos Direitos Digitais, a Portuguese digital rights association) and João Leite (NOVA LINCS, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, NOVA University Lisbon).
Bio
Inês Cisneiros is a practising lawyer at Miranda e Associados and an elected member of the deliberative body of the Portuguese green party LIVRE. She holds post-graduate qualifications in Intellectual Property, Information Society, Data Protection and Bioethics and is currently completing a Master’s degree in Political Philosophy, at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University Lisbon (FCSH-UNL).
She studied issues regarding artificial moral agency and the need for responsible design for the Master’s Practical Ethics seminar. Her Master’s dissertation will focus on issues regarding democratic engagement across generations, touching on the political impacts of technology.
Links:
http://linkedin.com/in/inês-cisneiros-0707862a
https://twitter.com/inescisneiros
Green growth or Degrowth: climate action and human prosperity
Julia Steinberger
Professor of Ecological Economics, University of Lausanne
Lisbon, 26 November 2020
New research from ecological economics shows that we need to rapidly physically degrow our economies to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. Green growth might have been at best a dream, at worst a narrative designed to delay action. What does this mean for human well-being and political action?
Julia Steinberger Prof. Julia Steinberger researches and teaches in the interdisciplinary areas of Ecological Economics and Industrial Ecology at the University of Lausanne (previously University of Leeds). Her research examines the connections between resource use (energy and materials, greenhouse gas emissions) and societal performance (economic activity and human wellbeing). She is interested in quantifying the current and historical linkages between resource use and socioeconomic parameters, and identifying alternative development pathways to guide the necessary transition to a low carbon society. She is the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for her research project 'Living Well Within Limits' investigating how universal human well-being might be achieved within planetary boundaries. She is Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report with Working Group 3.
https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/see/staff/1553/professor-julia-steinberger
https://profjuliasteinberger.wordpress.com
https://medium.com/@JKSteinberger
https://twitter.com/JKSteinberger
Organised by CADA