RISK and its RISK: My notes from SLSA 2025

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.