2nd MishMash Conference / 9th Annual Artistic Research Conference – AR@K27

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AI as Environment

The 9th Annual Artistic Research at Kristiania Symposium (AR@K27) & the 2nd MishMash Conference.

Co-organised with AI Ecologies Research Group, Kristiania AI Centre (KAI), and Atelier Nord.

13–14 April 2027 Kristiania University of Applied Sciences, Oslo, Norway

With the distinguished keynote speakers: Tiziana Terranova · Kyle Stine · Orit Halpern · and the Spring 2027 Atelier Nord/MishMash Artist-in-Residence.

Tiziana Terranova is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, where she co-founded the Centre for the Study of Transnational Technocultures (CRiTT). In 2020, she co-founded the Critical Computation Bureau (CCB) with Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Luciana Parisi and Oana Parvan. A leading theorist of digital networks and network cultures, her work examines the political and cultural implications of information technologies, platform capitalism, and computational infrastructures. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004) and After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (2022), with a forthcoming book Network Social: On the Return of the Social in the Post-Digital Age (Minnesota University Press). Terranova’s research explores the intersection of digital technologies, media and cultural studies, and political economy, with recent work addressing technoliberalism and the network social, recursive colonialism, and the potential for post-capitalist networked commons.

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor of Digital Culture at Technische Universität Dresden. A historian of science and media, her research examines the intersections of technology, cognition, and governance, particularly how computational infrastructures shape contemporary understandings of ecology, economy, and planetary management. She is the author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (2014) and co-author of Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope (2021). Halpern’s work critically interrogates how concepts like resilience, smartness, and optimization have transformed environmental thought and practice, tracing the genealogies of computational approaches to ecological crisis and their implications for futurity and planetary inhabitation.

Kyle Stine is an associate teaching professor and the director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His research examines the material and technical forms of media, with particular focus on computational hardware. He has a book in progress titled Of Seashells and Silicon: An Inquiry into the Ends of Human Design that investigates the cultural history of semiconductor chips and microprocessors, asking how the design and manufacture of hardware have shaped the development of multimedia computing and, more recently, artificial intelligence. His writings on cinema, media, art, and technology have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Discourse, Grey Room, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, October, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-editor of Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).

The Spring 2027 Atelier Nord/MishMash Artist-in-Residence is part of a residency programme developed in collaboration between Atelier Nord, MishMash–Centre for AI and Creativity, the Kristiania AI Centre (KAI) at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences, and Talent Norway. The programme supports artistic practices engaging critically and experimentally with artificial intelligence. The selected Spring 2027 artist will participate in AI as Environment as an artist keynote, bringing perspectives from their artistic practice into the conference programme.

Call for Contributions

Artificial intelligence is often treated as a single technology. AI as Environment proposes a different point of departure. It approaches artificial intelligence as a complex environment: a series of interwoven material, energetic and algorithmic systems that configure and co-determine cultural knowledge production and planetary life. Rather than asking only what AI does, or what artists and other practitioners can do with it, this perspective asks how AI reorganises the conditions under which perception, knowledge, cultural production and action take place.

The proposition draws on ecological and process-oriented approaches to media and technology, developed and applied in the AI Ecologies research group’s project Kunstens co-pilot: Kunst og KI i et prosessøkologisk perspektiv, funded by Kulturrådet (2026–2028). Félix Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ (1989/2000), the interrelation of environmental, mental and social ecologies, provides a point of departure for thinking across domains that are too often treated separately. Feminist posthumanism and Indigenous and decolonial scholarship (Braidotti 2022; Tuhiwai Smith 2021) further foreground situated knowledge, extraction and differential inclusion, asking whose knowledge and cultural practices are represented, transformed or excluded by AI systems. In the context of contemporary machine-learning systems, we reformulate these relations through three interconnected ecological registers: infrastructural, epistemic and operational ecologies.

Read the full call for contributions (PDF)

Submission

The Programme Committee will select approximately 20–25 presentations for inclusion in a curated programme. Selection criteria include conceptual and artistic rigour, engagement with the conference framework, the contribution of artistic practice to research and knowledge production, and the potential to contribute to the conference’s wider discussion. Registration fees and other details will follow closer to the conference.

Registration fees and other details will follow closer to the conference.

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