“…  and one could also try to untrain oneself from all these bullshit beliefs about the inevitability of technological progress about nicely aligned AGIs and automated performance art by deliberately unhinged chatbots. Why should you really want to opt for this solution? Because the best thing about it is that you will not be required to lose your hair.”

– Hito Steyerl (2023)

The workshop organised as part of the Fotograf 2023 festival and the Uroboros 2023 festival programs takes a feral, performative approach to experimenting with the emerging AI aesthetics, using the National Gallery Prague as a site of inquiry. The workshop is open to creative creatures interested in feral, performative experimentations with more-than-human relations and AI. Technical knowledge of AI is not required to participate.

Through three hours of discussions, drifts (dérives), and other performative activities, participants will engage in a critical investigation of the often hidden, less visible, or yet to come ‘feral’ (wild, untamed, beyond human control) aspects of more-than-human co-creation, with a specific focus on artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the most debated other-than-human actors (re)shaping lives on a planetary scale. 

We will begin the workshop with a brief discussion about AI and collective experimentation with image-text generation using web-based technologies. Following this, our (re)generated prompts will guide a series of dérives through the more-than-human ecologies of the National Gallery Prague building and its diverse – visible and less visible – actors, such as the exhibited artifacts, surveillance cameras, humans, and other species. The workshop will end with a performative experiment enacting a human-artificial composition of digital images that capture our situated workshop experiences in relation to NGP as a more-than-human ecosystem.

Through a 3-hour cycle of co-creative questioning, prompting, drifting, and experimenting, we hope to ‘(re-)train’ or ‘(un)learn’ how we make sense of and become with our surroundings. Along the way, some of the questions that we might reflect on include the existing and imagined criteria on authorship, originality, and aesthetics of creative artifacts emerging from human-AI collaboration, and how they might be perceived and operate as ‘feral data’. These workshop activities will help us consider what it actually means to co-create knowledge and data with other-than-humans, such as algorithms in AI media synthesis; what comes about, and what gets lost on the way. 

As an inspiration for our performative more-than-human co-creation, we will engage with the ‘Helsinki Feral Data Artifacts’ – creative works produced by students of the Experimental Design course at Aalto University, Finland, and the ‘Feral Fragments of Lonjsko Polje’ produced by participants of the Feral Drifting with Lonjsko Polje wokshop organised at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the Croatian Pavilion’s discursive program.  

Participation is free of charge but registration is required. Please register here.