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I’m sitting at a café in Vienna, drinking a Wiener Melange which is the city’s signature coffee. Melange means “mixture”. I wonder if it’s more than just coffee and milk blended together, but also people gathering side by side exchanging ideas while drinking it. There is a strong coffee house scene here in this city, and I can’t help thinking of Vienna at the turn of the century, when these cafés hosted some of the most influential writers, painters, musicians, scientists, and philosophers: Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Theodor Herzl, Erwin Schrödinger, Gustav Mahler, Johann Strauss among others. They all passed through such cafés, exchanging ideas that would shape entire fields. Earlier, I visited one of the art museums and struck up a conversation with a docent. She spoke about the exhibits, and I listened, asked questions. Then she asked if this was my first visit to Vienna. “Yes,” I said. “And how do you like it?” she asked. I told her how much I loved thinking about the city as a gathering place for remarkable minds. She nodded, with a faraway look. “Yes… but those days are gone,” she murmured. “Now, unfortunately, the city is full of immigrants.” I froze for a moment. Out loud, I only said “oh.” I wanted to push back: Can’t immigrants be intellectuals too? Isn’t the whole history of Vienna built on the movement of people and ideas across borders?  I came to Austria to participate in a gathering titled “Reenacting Dartmouth” in a small city near Vienna called St. Pölten. This event was organized by the Institute for Media Archeology run by Elisabeth Schimana and a fascinating group of people who helped. The idea was to revisit the famous summer workshop where the founding fathers of AI first proposed the term Artificial Intelligence. Back then, this group of computer scientists/mathematicians imagined the project of creating an AI would take them just one summer. Now, almost seventy years later and after many summers and winters, AI has finally turned into a mainstream technology. The gathering reflected on today’s AI from this historical vantage point. It was an intimate gathering: five core organizers, each inviting two or three guests. Over three tightly packed days through which we shared ideas and presented our work. The discussions began with Seppo Gründler, who traced the evolution of AI. Rather than situating it with the famous Dartmouth workshop. Seppo discussed the much longer history of intelligence itself by thinking about the development of brains. From there, Narly Golestani, head of the Brain and Language Lab at the Cognitive Science Hub of the University of Vienna drew our attention to the brain, its physiology, and the way it supports language. She also discussed the shifting paradigm from encoding the brain to decoding it. This panel concluded with the work Media artist and musician Ulla Rauter who considers both the early speech-synthesis machines, spectrograms, and today’s language models, asking how these technologies might transform access to communication and awareness. In one of Ulla's projects, for instance, I was fascinated by her beautiful attempt to converse with a river, using AI as a collaborator in reaching beyond the boundaries of human speech.
In the second panel we circled back to Turing’s famous question: Can machines think? Media archaeologist Lori Emerson reminded us that even Turing himself dismissed this as the wrong question, reframing AI not as the pursuit of a “thinking machine” but as an experiment in imitation and performance. Lori urged us to resist the seductive myth of disembodied “magic intelligence” and instead to revisit the critiques and overlooked alternatives of mid-20th-century cyberneticians with visions of intelligence grounded in adaptation, distributed control, and entanglement with the environment. This brought us to an even more fundamental question: What is a machine? Xiaowei Wang shared research into moments in which humans themselves are treated as machines, deemed incapable of thought. This perspective pushed the discussion toward labor: Are machines replacing us, or are they simply doing the work we refuse to do? The theme of labor resonated with Xavier Nueno’s presentation on the linguist George Kingsley Zipf who spent years painstakingly counting word frequencies by hand, eventually discovering what is now called Zipf’s Law: that the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. For him, this was evidence that human behavior, including language, tends toward the minimization of effort. 
Fittingly, the next presentation invited us to embody the labor that goes into an algorithm. Instead of calling it ‘Artificial Intelligence’ there was a suggestion to call it ‘Laborious computing.’ We turned to Frank Rosenblatt’s 1958 Perceptron, one of the earliest and simplest models of an artificial neural network. To make it tangible, we carried out the steps ourselves: collecting data, organizing it, calculating specifications, updating a dividing line, and eventually producing a rudimentary classifier. The exercise, led by Philip Leitner and Kevin Bartoli and Marika Dermineur from RYBN.org, sparked movement and occasional bursts of laughter when someone was asked to make a calculation. Half complaining, half joking people kept saying: “This is why we have machines!” reminding ourselves of the tedious labor hidden inside algorithms and the reasons we build them in the first place. I love how performance and embodied practice can do that!  The next panel turned to the vulnerabilities of AI: hallucinations, data poisoning, model collapse, and information sickness. Andreas Rathmanner focused on the growing prevalence of AI-generated content and raised concerns about nepotistic training when models are trained on their own outputs. What happens when AI can no longer anchor itself to anything we recognize as “the real world”? Could it end up spinning its own reality and inventing its own aesthetic style? Marek Tuszynski expanded the lens to the broader information space we now inhabit. He emphasized how deeply AI is embedding itself into the fabric of daily life so seamlessly that it feels intimate. And yet, he argued, even if this intimacy is manufactured, even if it’s a kind of fakery, it is still intimacy.   Norbert Math carried the conversation forward by reflecting on AI and creativity. He staged a comparison between a Picasso painting and an AI-generated imitation of Picasso, asking us to consider the gap between creativity and accuracy. To frame this tension, he invoked Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and its notion of aesthetic judgment: the capacity to perceive beauty not through rules or formulas, but through a free play of imagination and understanding. Building on this, Merzmench suggested that we are living through an epoch of redefinitions, a moment when the very categories of art, intelligence, and authorship are being unsettled and reshaped. While Bob Sturm opened a conversation about the ethics of AI in relation to creative work, delivering his rant by claiming that less than a revolution, AI is rather a mass delusion event. Against the popular claim that AI “democratizes creativity,” he argued that what we are really seeing is not new creativity at all, but the large-scale enrollment of users into corporate AI platforms. In other words, a shift in who gets access to the tools rather than in the nature of creativity itself.  And then the final panel, organized by August Black, brought together myself and Andres Burbano. For this panel August encouraged us to take a deeper look at one of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. McLuhan, who worked at the same time as the Dartmouth scientists suggested a shift from a visual space to an acoustic one. August unpacked this idea beautifully. Acoustic space, he explained, isn’t simply about sound. It’s a way of being in an environment where information arrives from all directions at once, where boundaries blur and beginnings and endings dissolve. In this space, tools give way to interfaces, private identities give way to collective role-play, and the cult of the lone genius gives way to subdued egos shaped by the architectures around them. Acoustic space is less about individuals controlling information, and more about being immersed within it. Andres picked up the thread by opening a window onto alternative genealogies of AI and stories that rarely appear in the dominant narrative. He highlighted histories of AI thinking from the Global South, pointing to works like the documentary AI: African Intelligence, which explores the entanglement of emerging technologies with traditional rituals, or the project Así Habló el Computador by Chilean composer José Vicente Asuar, an early experiment in computer-generated sound. These examples reminded us that the history of AI is not a single, linear story but a chorus of voices developing along different trajectories. In McLuhan’s terms, these plural histories resonate with the idea of acoustic space: overlapping, multidirectional, and often overlooked. I closed the panel with a performative lecture of GPT-ME. In it, I openly ceded my own voice, allowing GPT to speak through me. This act was a deliberate way of unsettling the notion of a singular, individual selfhood by embracing words that did not originate in my own mind but were instead whispered into my ear, shaped by the context I was immersed in. Through this process I could slip between identities in real time: at one moment a “boy who asked the computer questions it couldn’t answer,” at another a “blooming sunflower.” It became a live experiment in role-play and distributed authorship, blurring where “I” ended and the machine began.  
 As a finale, we all stepped outside together for a walk through St. Pölten. In the park we came across a towering mammoth tree and instinctively gave it a group hug. A little hedgehog scurried by and everyone wanted to scoop it up and hold it, except for the French contingent, who mischievously joked that we should fry it and eat it. We laughed, then wandered downtown, where we joined a local community event, complete with delicious schnitzel sandwiches.
Before parting ways, August, Andres, and I sat together and reflected on our takeaways from the gathering. For me, it was actually something August suggested in his talk. "What we need" he said, "is more intellectual intimacy," and I couldn't agree more. On my journey back home I continued thinking about the meaning of intellectual intimacy. My reflections brought me back to those words uttered by the docent I met earlier in my visit...“Now, unfortunately, the city is full of immigrants.” The contrast felt stark. On the one hand, a lament for a lost golden age of Viennese cafés, as if the presence of immigrants somehow empties the city of intellect. With that, a sense that there is no way to reenact Vienna as it once was. On the other hand, this gathering in St. Pölten, manifesting something entirely different: that thought flourishes in the mixture. Intellectual life emerges when people of different backgrounds, perspectives, and practices share space and allow themselves to be reshaped by others. The intimacy we cultivated in this small gathering was not about sameness, but about difference held in proximity. It was about listening across accents, disciplines, and life histories, and discovering how much richer thinking becomes when people spend time together. The reenactment made it clear... I’m not yearning for an idealized past. Instead, I long for Intellectual Intimacy. I wish for moments of shared thought, migrating ideas, and intelligences that intertwine and reshape the spaces where they converge. My heartfelt thanks to Elisabeth (for making this event a beautiful reality), Sonja (who took care of every detail — travel, hotel, cookies, and smiles), and August (who so generously invited me to join).
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Earlier this month I traveled to Duke University for a three-day visit that combined performance and academic exchange. The centerpiece was Meet GPT-ME, a durational endurance performance that unfolded over two full days, eight hours at a time, in open conversation with anyone curious to step into dialogue with GPT-ME. During those long sessions, the conversations roamed everywhere. I spoke about fantasy football, astrobiology, North Carolina history, and even the tangled plotlines of The Sopranos. These were subjects I knew little or nothing about, yet with GPT whispering in my ear I could cite leaderboard stats, speculate about life beyond Earth, recall the year North Carolina was founded, and swap TV storylines as if I were a devoted Sopranos fan.  During the one day of academic engagements, I wasn’t only channeling GPT-ME but also had the opportunity to present myself. After such an intense experience as GPT-ME, I’m never entirely sure what “self” that really is. Still, in one of these encounters I was able to reconnect with a part of me that is more deeply rooted. That moment arrived when I met a group of artists visiting Duke from Israel. Jewish, Palestinian, Druze, and Christian, they had all studied at the Center for Shared Society at Givat Haviva, an organization dedicated to fostering a shared Jewish–Arab society. It happened to be that years ago, when I was a high school student, majoring in Arabic, I also spent some time at Givat Haviva. This was an experience that left a lasting impression on me. Through Duke’s Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East, this group of artists were invited to continue their collaboration on campus, making art together and sustaining a rigorous, respectful dialogue about both the present and the history of conflict in the region. Our breakfast together began in English, with our hosts easing the introductions. But once they stepped away, the formality dissolved. We slipped naturally into Hebrew and some words in Arabic, and just as quickly into the subject that hovers constantly in our minds: the war. We talked about what it feels like to be in the United States while the Middle East is in turmoil. We all admitted to the same disorienting sensation: being surrounded by peace and calm here, yet carrying the weight of violence and chaos from home. It felt like living inside a bubble, being cushioned from the immediacy of events, yet gripped by the cognitive dissonance of being present in two places at once, both here and there. We spoke about dreams and nightmares, about laughter and tears. And of course, we spoke about art and how it might offer a way forward in this endless conflict we are all so weary of. With the group’s consent, I allowed GPT to chime in and whisper words into my ear. Occasionally, I shared them aloud, letting its voice join ours at the table. At one point, one of the artists asked with raw sincerity: Do you think art can solve the conflict? Art, I said, can foster dialogue and understanding. It can be a powerful form of expression, opening channels of communication and helping to bridge divides. In that sense, it can contribute to peace efforts. But ending a war usually demands political will, diplomatic breakthroughs, and structural change. Art cannot be the fix-all solution. Yet it can be something essential nonetheless: a piece of the puzzle. So how should we, as artists, approach this conflict? The question lingered at the table, insistent. With GPT’s words mixed with my own thoughts, I voiced something simple yet fundamental: it all begins with recognizing that everyone has the right to exist. Everyone deserves food, shelter, and safety. And the truth is, there is enough. There is enough food and enough space for all of us. We can live together and yes, we can also die together, with dignity. But first, we must recognize that every single one of us is entitled to that. A silence followed, heavy with both clarity and grief. We all knew, without needing to say it, that this basic recognition is exactly what is missing from the agendas of leaders in the region. Again and again, they demonstrate their willingness to fight until the other side is destroyed. And in the meantime, it is ordinary people who remain trapped in this endless cycle of violence. The conversation ended with long hugs and a promise to stay in touch. Then we each returned to our work: I to my performance, and they to their studio, preparing their shared exhibition that was set to open the following night. The next day, three of the artists came to visit me during the Meet GPT-ME performance. We managed to capture a photo together. I regret that I missed the other two, who unfortunatelly had a car accident earlier that day (!!) and needed to rest and be taken care of (both are fine, thank goodness!!) I still wish we had taken a group photo the day before, when we gathered around the breakfast table. But at the same time I hope we will cross paths again in the future.  When my performance ended, I finally had the chance to visit their exhibition. Alone in the studio, I moved slowly from piece to piece, spending time with each artwork. I felt an immediate connection to my own emotions as well as to the collective experience these artwork carried. The imagery, the materials, the sounds, the aesthetics…all provoked a sense of familiarity. A sense of home. And despite being marked by pain and trauma, each of those artworks carried within it the possibility of better days. Holding on to that possibility isn’t easy. Still, meeting this remarkable group of artists, and seeing institutions make space for their collaboration, was deeply moving. Here are a few photos I took at the exhibition: 
I left Duke holding onto this encounter, thinking more about our piece of the puzzle with hope that one day we might all be creating together, building a shared society through art. Thank you Maria Khateb, Jonathan David, Ben Alon, Malak Manzour, and Baylasan Marjieh Karim for spending time together and sharing thoughts, ideas, art and possibilities for the future. Read more about their residency at Duke and their bios - here. Many thanks also go to the people at Duke who made this encounter possible - Aaron Shackelford, Jules Odendahl-James and many others at the DukeArts team, as well as the teams at the Duke's Provost and Vice Provost for the Arts. I’m writing from Corvallis, Oregon, where I’m attending the annual SLSA conference (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) a gathering I love for its inherent interdisciplinarity. This year’s theme is RISK. It’s a generative theme precisely because it cuts through every field. After all, every discipline has its own risks. Yet when it comes to AI, the stakes feel especially imminent. How could they not? The very people building this technology often warn us that we stand on the verge of doom. As I listened to the brilliant talks this week, I began to notice something unsettling: not just the risks themselves, but the way risk was being framed. Once “risk” is named, measured, and secured, it threatens to swallow the very multiplicity it was meant to open up. Suddenly, whatever falls outside the category of “risk” appears “safe.” But what in life is ever truly safe?  This thought pushed me to reconsider what we mean by “risk” altogether. Doug Starck’s talk sharpened this realization. He spoke about risking his athletic career at the very moment when he already knew that career was ending. I won’t spoil the details of what he did, but what struck me was this: risking something you’re already bound to lose isn’t really a risk at all. And that thought brought me straight back to AI. The discourse around AI casts every career as under threat. If that’s the case, why not risk them now? If our careers are already slipping into precarity, then risking them is no longer a risk but perhaps the most rational move. Risk shifts into something else: less about what we might lose, and more about what we might allow ourselves to imagine. Other talks circled the same problem from different angles. Jennifer Rhee argued that AI is not so much eliminating jobs as it is intensifying labor. With the help of Mimi Ọnụọha’s haunting illustrations of AI’s ghost workers and their living spaces, Rhee reminded us that AI is neither inevitable nor autonomous. Rather it depends on us. Her framework invites us to see labor differently, to notice who is hidden inside the machine.  Meanwhile, Thomas Rickert questioned the metaphors we rely on to describe AI. He challenged familiar tropes, such as the “stochastic parrot” and the “narcissistic mirror” and argued that we must come up with better metaphors,” suggesting that N. Katherine Hayles’s framing of AI as a nonhuman symbiont points us in a more productive direction.  This left me wondering: which metaphor is riskier? “AI is taking our jobs away”? Or “AI is intensifying our labor”? The first sparks fear, but it also creates an opening. If our jobs are already slipping away, maybe we can imagine ourselves outside the structures that bind us. The second sounds less catastrophic. One might think “at least I still have a job,” but perhaps that’s the more dangerous trap. It risks normalizing a life in which our labor is steadily devalued, while closing off the chance to imagine other ways of living, working, and being. And how, then, do we begin to imagine other ways of living? In a talk on Future Faculties and Deep Time, Aaron Jaffe shared a provocative list of “future faculties” written by media theorist Siegfried Zielinski. Among them were capacities like unconditional hospitality, surprise generators, non-censurable systems, chaos pilots, and dancing philosophy. Another panel member later suggested we should write our deans and ask for these to become academic programs.  And so... Why not? I wouldn’t mind becoming a professor of “risk, dignity, and ludology” when the time comes to find an academic job. Yet such a position does not exist…not yet…. Perhaps its absence is the point. The safest job, if such a thing exists, may be the one that remains unimagined. Might this be an opportunity to push these speculative gestures further and ask: what would it actually mean to live as a chaos pilot? Instead of teaching students to avoid uncertainty, perhaps we could invite them to dwell in it, design with it, think with it, even learn to trust it. What new pedagogies might emerge if we seriously trained in unconditional hospitality? A classroom could open not only to enrolled students, but also to strangers, to nonhuman participants, to those not officially admitted, and welcome them without preconditions. And what would it mean to teach “non-censurable systems” in a time of escalating political surveillance? Perhaps it requires us to create forms of knowledge that leave no archive for authority to suppress. Maybe a seminar conducted in whispers, in shared breath, or in work that circulates rhizomatically across humans, machines, and environments, with no single voice holding the whole. If risk, as I’ve been suggesting, is less about what we might lose than about what we dare to imagine, then the challenge is not to seek safety but to inhabit this uncertain space where we might find other ways of living, working, and being. But… this might be the greater challenge: how do we dare to imagine? At SLSA, one answer emerged in a series of dazzling Pechakucha talks modeled after the Fluxus art movement. Each speaker had exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds to explore the theme of risk, and the results were as playful as they were unsettling. I found myself tossing potatoes in the air during Michael Files’s performance, cramming my mouth full of M&Ms at Chris Wildrick’s talk, confronting “the Fascist in me” through Emilio Taiveaho Peláez’s poem (the cure, he assured us, was simple: just poop it out), and spinning blindly beneath a cascade of counterfeit dollar bills in Lukas Wood’s piece.
These and more turned my SLSA experience into a wonderfully-risky one. not only the risks we talk about but the ones we practice with our bodies and our willingness to be playful, funny, or even ridiculous with one another.
I spent two weeks in Italy this summer. The trip wasn’t planned. I had intended to visit my family in Israel, but when the war caused our flights to be canceled, we found ourselves instead in Rome. It wasn't easy to let go of the idea of seeing our family and friends but, Rome is definitely not a bad place to suddenly find yourself in… especially if you love art (and food...). With no itinerary, we simply wandered around. Everywhere we went, we encountered iconic masterpieces. We've seen Michelangelo’s sculptures and frescoes, Botticelli’s paintings, Bernini’s fountains, and so many other works by those towering figures of art history. While undeniably beautiful and timeless, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mythologies behind them, the religious, patriarchal standards they continue to communicate. With all due respect, the contemporary art I encountered in Italy felt far braver and urgent. Two exhibitions in particular stood out: - "Icarus" by Yukinori Yanagi at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. - "Black Soil Poems" by Wangechi Mutu at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Yukinori Yanagi’s Icarus Yanagi’s exhibition included several large-scale installations that left me completely unsettled. As I entered the darkened space, the first thing I saw was a massive mound of debris: yellow barrels marked with radiation symbols, wrecked cars, broken furniture, sandbags in an overwhelming heap of destruction. At its peak sat a glowing, all-seeing eye, staring back at me as I stared at it. The work, titled Project Godzilla 2025 – The Revenant from “El Mare Pacificum.” The Godzilla eye instantly reminded me of Donna Haraway’s famous description of the “god-trick,” the gaze from above that dominates, surveils, and, as she says, “fucks the world.”  Right behind this mound of debirs hung Absolute Dud, a replica of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Unlike the chaotic mound, this piece was minimal, clean, and suspended just above the ground, as if paused in mid-fall. It left me wondering: what if it really had been held back? How different would our world look today?  Finally, across the room stood Banzai Corner: Hundreds of Japanese action figures (Bandai Ultraman), holding their hands up and arranged in a quarter-circle between two mirrors to form the red circle of the Japanese flag. The result is an unsettling image of the entanglement of capitalism, nationalism, and pop culture.  For me, Yanagi’s monumental heap of debris negated the heap of marble that forms the Fontana di Trevi in the heart of Rome. One symbolizes abundance, civic pride, and mythological power while the other symbolizes catastrophe, nuclear trauma, and environmental collapse. One is animated by the flow of reviving water, while the other by the toxic residues of modernity. I saw The Banzai Corner in relation to the sculpture of David by Michelangelo. At first glance, they could not seem further apart: marble versus plastic, singularity versus multiplicity, Renaissance humanism versus postmodern critique. Yet both works rely on the monumental force of the human figure as a vehicle for collective ideals. Michelangelo’s David manifests the heroic body and the weapon he holds, while Yanagi’s chorus of Ultramen, replicated ad infinitum, transforms mass-produced toys into a monumental emblem of nationhood. In this way, the heroic individuality of David and the mirrored collectivity of Banzai Corner converge as two versions of the same impulse: the staging of human form as symbol that embodies civic virtue and nationalist conformity.
The rest of Yanagi’s exhibition was no less impressive, provocative, mesmerizing, and deeply unsettling. Among the most striking works was his renowned The World Flag Ant Farm, an installation composed of a vast grid of sand-filled cases, each patterned with the colored sands of national flags. Into this carefully ordered display Yanagi introduced living ant colonies. As the insects burrowed and tunneled through the sand, they slowly destabilized the flags, carrying particles from one case to another and eroding the crisp boundaries that had once defined each emblem. What starts as a neat taxonomy of nations gradually unravels into a chaotic, hybridized landscape. Encountering the Israeli flag in this state was, for me, uncannily disturbing given the current situation in the region and the reason for which I was actually standing in front of this piece. Yet the unsettling power of the work lies precisely in its refusal to isolate one nation from another. Every flag in the installation, whether Israeli, American, Japanese, or otherwise, all succumb to the same process. Each one is subject to transformation and decay, until what remains is no longer a symbol of unity but a record of entropy and interconnection. The ants are indifferent to the histories embedded in these flags. They enact a quiet but relentless reminder: political borders and national identities are human constructs.   There were so many other interesting artworks in this exhibition. Many that I will continue thinking about and carrying with me. Wangechi Mutu's "Black Soil Poems" I have long admired Wangechi Mutu’s work, and I will never forget her extraordinary exhibition at the Legion of Honor back in 2021. Her chimerical, hybrid beings, simultaneously human, animal, and vegetal, reminding viewers of the possibilities of transformation, which was exactly what I needed to see after the terrible isolation and fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. To discover that Mutu now had an exhibition in Rome was thrilling in its own right. Like the San Francisco installation, this presentation was situated within an esteemed art institution, this time the Galleria Borghese which hosts an unparalleled treasure of classical sculptures. Walking through its galleries, one encounters Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne or Pluto and Proserpina. These marble works seem to transmute stone into flesh and motion. Against this backdrop, Mutu’s sculptures intervened with a different kind of metamorphosis: bodies made of earth, bronze, shells, and pigments, fusing African mythologies with futuristic imaginaries. Placed among these canonical masterpieces, her works insist on creating a dialogue. While Bernini’s figures become hybrids through their attempt to escape a disturbing existence, Mutu’s figures exist as hybrids, these creatures are always in their chimeric form, always and already hybrid, and in flux. Seeing her work interspersed with the Borghese collection underscored not only the persistence of myth and metamorphosis in art history, but also the urgency of expanding those myths to include other genealogies, other bodies, other futures.
One work that especially resonated with me was The Grain of Words. In this piece, Mutu overlays a classical Roman mosaic with letters cut from coffee and tea leaves. These materials carry their own long histories of colonial extraction, trade, and cultural ritual. The mosaic, a fragment of antiquity preserved as part of Rome’s artistic patrimony, becomes the ground upon which Mutu inscribes a different kind of text: not the voices of Roman emperors or mythological heroes, but the words of resistance and liberation.  The letters spell out the lyrics of Bob Marley’s song War, itself adapted directly from an Emperor, but an Ethiopian one - the words of Haile Selassie’s historic 1963 address to the United Nations. The opening line is uncompromising: “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.” In Mutu’s hands, these words are not merely quoted but embodied, woven into organic matter that stains and reconfigures the polished surface of classical heritage. For me, in particular, standing there witnessing this work of art because of the war, carried an uncanny weight. It is clear that these words do not represent a historical statement. Sadly, they continue to stand as a present-tense indictment. Everywhere is war. Here are some photos I took at Mutu's 2021 exhibition in San Francisco:
 To conclude, I'd say that the war in the Middle East is devastating and I wish for it to end immediately. I have not been able to see my family and friends, and the distance feels unbearable at times. Yet instead, I found myself in Italy. Interestingly, out of all the art I've seen there I found myself resonating mostly with works of art that confront war, violence, and survival. War is something I think about constantly, not only in relation to the current crisis, nor just in the last two years, but as an ongoing condition that shapes how I understand myself and the world. I deeply admire artists who can respond to this reality with such strength and courage, giving form to something that feels at once unspeakable and ever-present. Their works remind me that art can be both a record of trauma and a vehicle for resistance, that it can hold grief and hope in the same gesture. Perhaps one day, I too will be able to find a way to communicate my own thoughts and feelings about war through my art. In the meantime, and under the shadow of the ongoing war, I am glad and privileged to be alive, able to spend my time with loved ones, and to have the space to make art, view art, contemplate and write about it. Unfortunately, at the same time, so many people live through unimaginable loss. This awareness humbles me. It also deepens my sense of responsibility to keep searching for ways to imagine how we might yet live beyond war. I’m writing from Vancouver, where I’m attending the SIGGRAPH 2025 conference. The days here are dense, with back-to-back sessions, immersive exhibitions, and countless hallway conversations that stretch long after the schedule ends. As I move through it all, I keep asking myself: What are the most urgent questions emerging from this moment? SIGGRAPH has always impressed me with its ability to bring scientists and artists into the same room. This year is no different. Some people I meet identify firmly with one side or the other, but I also notice many who seem to inhabit a hybrid space, moving fluidly between both worlds. This year, much like the few previous ones, there are many conversations about AI and I can't help noticing a tension in how we think about this technology. On one side, some are framing it as nothing more than a tool while others see it as a form of nonhuman intelligence.  Early in the week, keynote speaker Aaron Hertzmann made a strong case for the first view. He argued that AI is not a person and therefore cannot be creative. AI-generated art, he said, is ultimately human-made art, with AI serving as just another instrument in the process. Drawing comparisons to historical shifts like the rise of photography, he reassured artists they need not fear being replaced. The room seemed to exhale - “Thank goodness, we’re not going to be replaced…” But I couldn’t help wondering: why does the question of replacement echo so persistently through conversations about AI?  In the meantime at the SIGGRAPH art gallery, a juried exhibition curated by Francesca Franco on the theme of connecting nature, art, and technology, I encountered a distinctly different energy. That same creative spark ran through the rest of the Experience Hall, which included the Immersive Pavilion and the Emerging Technologies programs curated by Saskia Groenewegen and Nathan Matsuda, respectively. Along with the new and utterly exciting Spatial Storytelling program curated by Marco Cemusoni. In the art gallery I resonated with Plant.play(), a piece by Yoonji Lee, Chang Hee Lee, and Alo Asadipour, featuring a living plant playing a pet simulation game. Environmental sensors translate the plant’s biological signals into caregiving decisions, which shape the behavior and development of a virtual pet on a nearby screen. Viewed through the lens of “replacement,” the piece becomes provocative: a plant takes the place of a human gamer, and the simulated pet stands in for a living animal. Will humans one day be replaced by plants? Will organic pets be replaced by simulated pets? And are these questions anywhere near as alarming as the one that hovers over so many AI discussions. I guess not. We rarely really worry about plants or animals replacing us. Perhaps it is because we assume a position of superiority over them and their intelligence. With AI, though, we’re less certain, especially as evidence grows that it can outperform us in task after task.  To dismiss AI as “just a tool” may be one of our attempts to reaffirming superiority. Over dinner with SIGGRAPH pioneer Julian Gomez, he reminded me of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid". Like many other nonhuman intelligences, we insist on judging their abilities according to human terms, comparing them to what we can do and eventually dismissing them for who they are. To be honest, I don’t think we spend enough time acknowledging that despite the fact that these intelligences might not be able to do things we humans do, their abilities are still curious and interesting, and may even be beyond our comprehension. When we insist on a narrow, human-centered lens, we often miss the opportunity to better understand their intelligences.  Moving in and out of the convention center, I kept noticing the nonhumans around me: bee colonies buzzing outside the windows, a cricket landing beside me at lunch, seagulls gliding over the Vancouver port, the lush living roof above the building. Inside, artworks echoed this presence: an animated flock of glass seagulls, a helium sea-mammal balloon flapping its fins in response to visitors’ hand gestures, a delicate mechanical mimosa plant that opened when approached. Reminding us that intelligence, responsiveness, and creativity take many forms.
 Other works invited attendees to reimagine their own bodies and explore other modes of being: mechanical finger extensions positioned as artificial parasites that moved and sensed the world in their own way while being attached to a human body. Another piece offered visitors to experience the presence of an artificial tail attached to their bodies. And our own piece, which I have presented with Adam Wright, invited people to consider having a conversation with inanimate objects, treating them as active, lively entities worthy of attention.   Still other works turned the lens back on human difference, offering immersive perspectives of a baby, a person with ADHD, or a busy, tired, and frustrated mother, reminding us that even human experience is far from uniform.
On the day before last, I was invited by Robert Twomey and Ash Eliza Smith to perform in their Quantum Theatre. They attached QR codes to my body, draped a string of glowy sensors around my neck, and placed a VR headset over my eyes. On stage with me was Scarlett, another performer I had never met, similarly equipped with prompts and sensors. The instructions we received were deliberately vague. Robert and Ash reminded us only to stay aware of our relationship with each other, the objects, the sounds, and the surrounding environment. When the performance began, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I could still see through the headset, so I was aware of my environment, but at the same time seeing text which overlayed it. Some of this text wasn't legible. I lifted cubes covered in QR codes. Moving them seemed to trigger subtle changes, perhaps in the temperature around my neck, or perhaps in the sounds played aloud. I am not entirely sure what changed and how, in response to some of these changes, my movements shifted. After 15 or 20 minutes of exploration, the demo ended, and I still couldn’t say exactly what had happened exactly.  Later, over coffee with Ash, we talked about how refreshing it feels to embrace not-knowing and open-endedness, especially in a space where, just across the hall, corporate booths are busy presenting polished, finalized, “finished” products, assuming to know exactly what they do and how we might use them. As I leave SIGGRAPH, I carry a clearer sense of my role and responsibility as an artist today. I wish to continue and invite a rethinking of human dominance and superiority. Shifting more regorously into post-humanistic realms I wish to offer participants moments when they can see not only themselves, but also the multitude of intelligences and agencies that surround them. And with that, also invite them to embrace the truth that we may never fully understand it all, and that this, too, is okay. ~~~ Photos shown here include: Photo 1 - An image of me by the SIGGRAPH sign, taken by Adam Wright. Photo 2 - An image of keynote presentasion given by Aaron Hertzmann. Photo 3 - The artwork Plant.play(), a piece by Yoonji Lee, Chang Hee Lee, and Alo Asadipour. Photo 4 - A cricket that joined me for lunch at the Vancouver port. Photo 5 + 6 - the artwork Mimosa Pithics by Scottie Chih-Chieh Huang, Ming-Hong Wu, Hsiu-Mei Chang, and Chin Hsun Liu (left panel) and the artwork Unbound Horizons by Lino Tagliapietra (right panel) Photo 7 - Demo of Spread Your Wings by Mingyang Xu, Yulan Ju, Qing Zhang, Christopher Changmok Kim, Qingyuan Gao, Yun Suen Pai, Giulia Bardareschi, Matthias Hoppe, Kai Kunze, Kout Minamizawa Photo 8 - Demo of Parasitic Finger by Akira Nakayasu, Saki Sakaguchi, and Mina Shobasaki Photo 9 - Adam and I talking with a Pepsi Can at our Fast Forward presentation. Photo taken by Everardo Reyes. Photo 10 + 11 - Demo of Primordial Reality by Taisuke Murakami (left pannel) and Demo of Unbalanced by Yi Chun Ka, Yu Wen Huang, and Yu Ann Lai (right pannel). Both photos taken by the presenters of the work. Photo 12 - Quantum Theatre by Robert Twomey, Ash Eliza Smith. Photo taken by Adam Wright. Lately, I’ve been talking with my hairbrush. Not just holding it like a microphone (though that happens too), but actually asking it questions. What do you think of curly hair versus straight? Do you feel neglected when I forget to pack you for a trip? Are you tired of all the tangles? And the hairbrush responds. It tells me it loves the gentle swoop through curls. It forgives me for leaving it behind. It likes being useful and knows how to handle tangles.  Of course, my hairbrush doesn’t really speak. But if you let an AI augment it, my hairbrush suddenly has a voice. This idea is examined through the artwork in(A)n(I)mate, an interactive AI-driven piece that is designed to invite participants to converse with objects. Participants place an object in front of the box, and with the help of GPT the object begins to “speak” in real time. It answers questions in a voice that can be thoughtful, snarky, poetic, affectionate, depending on what the object is and how GPT interprets it. The experience is playful, funny, and even absurd at first. When you interact with the piece, you might not be aware that you’re speaking to an AI language model. And even if you did know, you begin to feel that maybe, just maybe, this object is actually listening to you, reflecting on an answer, and responding back to your questions. in(A)n(I)mate isn’t trying to trick anyone into believing a hairbrush is sentient. Instead it tries to use AI to mediate a performative encounter between you and the object you brought to the table. At first, it might feel like a quirky tech demo. But slowly, the object you’re speaking with begins to matter in a different way. It invites attention, even empathy. Suddenly, it is no longer just "ready-to-hand" as Martin Heidegger might say—a tool to be used. Instead, it becomes “present-at-hand”: a thing noticed, contemplated, and strangely alive in its own materiality. Throughout this encounter you might begin to wonder: “What is it like to be a hairbrush?” Of course, this question echoes Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay, What is it Like to Be a Bat? In it, Nagel argued that no matter how much we study a bat’s physiology or behavior, we can never fully grasp the subjective experience of being a bat. The “what it is like” from the inside. The bat’s world is shaped by modes of being that are fundamentally inaccessible to human understanding. So when we try to understand what it is like to be a hairbrush, we are limited to our own human frame of reference, and this resource is inadequate to the task. in(A)n(I)mate does not offer an answer. What it offers instead is a speculative encounter where we can explore what it means to even ask what it is like to be a hairbrush. Rather than trying to “solve” the object or extract its inner truth, in(A)n(I)mate uses GPT to approach the object obliquely, through metaphor. Metaphor, as Graham Harman argues, is a powerful method of contact. It gestures toward the object’s surface while honoring its depth. It lets us approach the object as a “sensual” entity, acknowledging that the “real” object remains fundamentally withdrawn. So when the hairbrush responds, we’re not hearing its essence. We’re hearing a performance, shaped by language, data, cultural associations, and GPT’s training. We are allured into contact. We are being called to approach the object differently, to acknowledge that it has a reality apart from us. And that’s the point. GPT doesn’t “know” what it means to be a hairbrush any more than we do, but in mediating this encounter it produces a space of reflection. A space where the object becomes a collaborator in a process of meaning-making.
That shift in perception matters. Jane Bennett talks about vibrant matter and argues that inanimate things possess a kind of liveliness, an agency that isn’t conscious, but still active. She warns that when we think we already know what something is we stop noticing what else it might be. We miss the chance to see the object as an active participant. Bennett encourages us to use a little bit of anthropomorphism in an attempt to better understand what is in front of us. Indeed, these conversations with objects through the in(A)n(I)mate system might reflect our own human perceptions of the objects: the assumptions, stereotypes, and symbolic associations embedded in language and culture. But then again, there might be more to it. N. Katherine Hayles invites us to consider nonconscious cognition. A distributed, relational, and often inaccessible form of thinking that occurs across systems, both human and nonhuman. GPT, in this light, can be seen as a cognitive partner. It doesn’t understand the object. But it doesn’t need to. It connects data, concepts, and patterns in ways that exceed our human capacity, surfacing associations we might not have made. GPT helps us reveal what Hayles calls “latent knowledge.” in(A)n(I)mate thus becomes a stage where multiple forms of cognition converge: the human speaker, the object’s material presence, the training data, the algorithm, the prompt, the tone of voice, the lighting in the room, even the WiFi signal. Meaning emerges not from a single source but from an entangled apparatus. Karen Barad might describe it as a site of intra-action, where agency is not pre-given but co-constituted. Barad’s concept of posthumanist performativity helps us see that the object’s voice is not a static representation of its essence, but the result of a relational performance. The hairbrush in this setting doesn’t have a fixed personality. It is not merely recognized by GPT, it is rather produced by the questions we ask and the AI generated responses. It is becoming throughout the encounter. If we were to ask a different question, give GPT a different prompt, a different framing of the image, the personality of the hairbrush might shift entirely. This relational becoming opens new possibilities for how we relate to the world around us. With the in(A)n(I)mate system we can potentially speak with each and every object. Ian Bogost once wrote, “anything is thing enough to party.” However, Bill Brown, in Thing Theory, reminds us that our understanding of objects often lags behind their being. When technologies change we lose the cultural fluency to recognize the object for what it once was. GPT, trained on contemporary language and associations, may misrecognize objects and be biased for or against particular objects. And yet, even these misrecognitions can be generative. A forgotten object, misunderstood by AI, might speak with a strange, unexpected voice. The in(A)n(I)mate system doesn't offer answers. It offers a relational encounter. And we might ask what if we took these encounters seriously? Consider them as provocations and start caring for objects not just because of their function or exchange value, but because they asked us to? Marshall McLuhan suggested that media are extensions. We might begin to think of GPT not as an extension of the human, but as an extension of objects, allowing them to express themselves in natural language. So maybe the hairbrush has been trying to speak with me all along. We just didn’t have the right interface to hear it. ~~~~~~~~~~ This post shares ideas from my forthcoming SIGGRAPH 2025 Art Paper, co-authored with Adam Wright. We’ll be presenting it next week in Vancouver. Hope to see you there at the Art Papers session! Check it out here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3736787 Monday, 11 August, 2025 
Then came the large language models (LLMs). I began working with GPT before it went mainstream, and I quickly fell in love with it. Back when it was still GPT-2, it felt like the model and I were struggling side by side. Its writing was clumsy and scattered, sentences often began with one idea and ended somewhere completely different. But I found something delightful in its unpredictability. I spent hours talking with it, captivated by its creative sparks and incoherent stream of consciousness.
Then everything changed. The model got better. Much better! I found myself feeling both amazed and unsettled. How has it improved so quickly? Why couldn’t I keep up? That frustration eventually pushed me to explore ways to integrate GPT into my own life and embody it. I developed GPT-ME, a wearable system that allowed GPT to whisper words into my ear during all my social interactions. For months, I spoke GPT’s words instead of coming up with them myself. That experiment was highly transformative and I continue performing it, thinking and writing about it. As someone who has willingly landed her voice to a machine, I often find myself asking: what’s the point of writing, now that AI can do it for me? If GPT can generate sentences faster, more clearly, and often more eloquently than I can, then why bother? Why struggle with grammar, flow, or the constraints of a second language when a model can produce polished text in seconds? Framing the question this way reflects a common mindset, one that sees AI as something designed to outperform humans and eventually replace us. It turns our relationship with AI into a zero-sum game, a competition over labor, intelligence, and decision-making. In the process, we begin to relinquish the very practices that shape our identities and define our humanity. But this competitive framing isn’t inherent to the technology itself. It is rather a product of the cultural, political, and economic systems through which AI is developed and understood. There are other ways for us to imagine our lives alongside AI technology. What if, instead of treating AI as a replacement, we saw it as a companion? Or a collaborator? What if writing with AI wasn’t a form of surrender, but an invitation to think differently, to stretch the boundaries of authorship, voice, and self? When I write with GPT, I’m not trying to compete. I’m trying to engage. There is a back-and-forth in which I write something and give it to GPT. Sometimes I ask GPT to rewrite what I’ve written, making it clearer and more coherent. Other times, I ask it to respond directly to my thoughts. Sometimes I let it complete my sentences. Sometimes it surprises me, and I follow its lead. Other times, I reject its suggestions and start again. This interaction is not just about getting this piece of text done. Instead, it becomes an intimate relationship between GPT and me. A correspondence that reveals how language emerges between us, shaped by context, intention, and negotiation. Writing in this hybrid mode makes me more aware of the choices I make. It slows me down. It reminds me that more than anything, language is a space of encounter. Between me and the machine. Between me and my readers. Between who I am and who I might become. So I write, not in spite of AI, but with it. It is not about proving that I can. Not even primarily so others can read what I produce. I write to cultivate relationships, to explore what becomes possible when authorship is shared, distributed, and unstable. Come to think about it, wasn’t it always like that? Writing has never been a purely solitary act. My words carry the echoes of every book I’ve read, every conversation I’ve had, every teacher who corrected my drafts. Even when I thought I was writing alone, I was in dialogue with ideas, with conventions, with the words of others. The self, after all, is never entirely separate. It is shaped through relations, through language, through time. Maybe the real shift we’re experiencing isn’t just about letting AI write with or for us. Maybe the deeper transformation lies in having AI as our reader. GPT becomes an entity that reads my words and responds, evaluates, and reflects. Beyond that, it is also being trained on what I write. Might this be the reason to write these days? Ever since I began working with AI models, I have been fascinated by the kinds of relationships we form with these systems. My first AI-driven piece, The Classification Cube, invited participants into a glowing space where an AI tried to identify their age, emotional expression, gender, and movement. I wanted people to feel what it is like to be seen by a machine but also to attempt to regain agency within this process. Back then, recognition algorithms were spreading quickly, yet their gaze remained opaque. It wasn’t clear how we are seen through those systems or what they assume to see. I wanted to confront this asymmetry and make the AI’s perception visible. Participants formed a kind of dialogue with the machine. They moved, the machine classified them, they moved again, and the machine responded.  Over time, my attention shifted. I became less focused on how AI sees us and more concerned with how it might seem as if it tries to guide or control us, a common media panic which is prevalent in AI-related discussions. In several of my newer works, the AI does not just observe. It is designed to provide instructions. MOVE-ME is a system that tells me how to move my body. It can describe its surroundings, ask questions, and make comments, but its primary role is that of a choreographer. It is designed to direct my action. This immediately raises questions about authorship, agency, and obedience in human-AI interaction. The AI on My Shoulder also gives instructions. It is a wearable that speaks in the voice of either an angel or a devil, observes the wearer’s environment, and offers suggestions for what to do next. Sometimes the advice is kind. Sometimes it is mischievous. The result is a familiar internal drama made external and audible. It’s surprising to see that with these two artworks there is an instant tendency to follow the AI’s instructions. The AI speaks, and we act. Why? My systems are not designed to control, but rather provide instructions. But it is important to ask why do we follow those instructions so readily? Why do we so easily give up control and follow instructions? One answer is our habit of treating machines as higher authorities. Many people assume machine-generated output is reliable, useful, and objective. We know this is not always true. AI systems can be biased, make poor inferences, and produce misleading results. Still, the confident tone, the polished voice, and the appearance of intelligence create a powerful illusion of authority. That illusion often overrides our instincts and judgments. There are many examples of misplaced trust in machines. A Belgian woman once followed her GPS so faithfully that she drove more than 900 miles off course during what should have been a short trip. The phrase “death by GPS” emerged to describe similar incidents in which drivers end up in lakes, deserts, or construction sites because they trusted the system more than their own senses. In medicine, clinicians sometimes defer to diagnostic algorithms even when those systems are wrong, especially under time pressure. In law enforcement, AI systems have contributed to wrongful arrests, despite well-documented bias in their training data. Authority is only part of the story. We also crave guidance. When we are uncertain, overwhelmed, or tired, we want someone or something to tell us what to do. Psychologists call this cognitive offloading. We outsource mental effort so we can conserve energy. Humans have always done this. People once consulted oracles, prophets, and horoscopes. Today we ask GPT or Gemini. We seek directions, opinions, and even emotional reassurance. This desire for guidance often blurs into a desire for care. Many AI products are built to feel intimate. They present themselves as friends, therapists, or partners. Trust grows from that affective framing, and we begin to rely on the system not only for information but also for support. Another interesting explanation is rooted in curiosity. Sometimes we follow AI instructions simply to see what happens next. The act becomes playful, speculative, and performative. We test the system and ourselves at the same time. This curiosity can be a powerful engine for co-creation. That is exactly what happens in MOVE-ME. The AI issues real-time instructions that are sometimes logical and sometimes strange. In one session we asked it to generate “impossible scores.” It told participants to “twist like water,” “walk as if avoiding memory,” and “move as if their knees are melting like ice cream.” These lines became poetic provocations. Participants often began with literal interpretations. Many then drifted into improvisation. The AI turned into a speculative partner that shaped the unfolding rhythm through a feedback loop of call and response.  Image by Weidong Yang - Experimentation as part of the Palladium Performance with Kinetech Arts. The AI on My Shoulder works differently but produces a similar dynamic. The angel and devil trope externalize the ethical tension that would usually follow an internal dialogue. Should participants obey the angelic restraint or indulge the devilish dare? The choice reveals their own moral negotiations more than it reveals the character of the AI. In both works, what emerges is not simple obedience. It is a layered relationship that mixes authority, curiosity, improvisation, and control. The AI becomes what Sherry Turkle calls an “evocative object.” It triggers reflection and action. It invites speculation and reciprocal creativity rather than pure submission.  These experiments keep raising questions for me. What does it mean to act on the machine’s suggestion? What does it reveal when I choose not to? At what point does a tool start shaping my behavior? When does its voice stop sounding like “other” and begin to feel like part of me? What am I really searching for when I ask the AI what to do? Is it clarity? Permission? Care? These moments make me question where agency actually lives. Is it mine, the machine’s, or something shared between us? I am drawn to that in-between space, a space of distributed agency, where decisions are co-authored and responsibility becomes harder to pin down. I keep asking: what kind of self is taking shape there? Any day is a good day to start a blog. This one will focus on my experiences with art-making, art-viewing, and art-thinking. For a long time, I struggled to express myself in writing. English is not my first language, which made it even more challenging. However, with the advent of large language models (LLMs), every piece of text I write, whether it's a short email or a lengthy book chapter, now gets proofread by one LLM or another (including this post). My favorite prompt is “rewrite for clarity and coherence,” which I use to refine my text. To me, this process is like photo editing. When I was a professional photographer, no photo could be published without at least some editing.
My engagement with LLMs goes beyond writing. As you can see from my artworks, AI is my primary medium, and I explore it through performances, installations, and new media theory. I follow a practice-as-research (PAR) methodology, which is just another way of saying that I live with AI, something we all do these days. Through my art, I aim to understand its impact on my life, behavior, and social interactions. Beyond creating art, I also maintain a dedicated practice of art viewing. I regularly visit museums and galleries to see what other artists are making and what they are thinking about. Contemporary art is my favorite, though I also take time to appreciate modern and classic works. My art-making is constantly in dialogue with the work of others. I don’t work in a vacuum, and I find it difficult to claim that my work is entirely original because, honestly, I don’t believe anything can be called truly original. The art I encounter is an essential source of inspiration for me. Sometimes, the connection is obvious, and my work responds directly to something I've seen. Other times, the influence is less clear, but I know it’s there. Art-thinking includes engaging in conversations, reading books and articles, and spending time reflecting and formulating questions or answers in my mind. These activities also inspire my art in various ways. In fact, this blog will be part of my art thinking in itself. As I continue to explore, I hope to share insights, inspirations, and reflections that spark meaningful conversations and discussions. I invite you to join me in this ongoing dialogue with art, AI, and the world around us. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reflections as we navigate this ever-changing landscape. |
AuthorAvital Meshi - New Media and Performance Artist, making art with AI. Currently a PhD Candidate at the Performance Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. Archives
November 2025
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