CAPIm Speculative Workshop

Join CAPIm for a workshop exploring the role of coding, and AI in art practices and artistic research. To what extent is the code and algorithmic constraints determining our aesthetic and political imaginary? In what way does AI represent a paradigmatic shift, akin to the emergence of photography, reconfiguring perceptive models beyond the medium? Wherein lies the inherent potentials within the code and which are the collaborative and technological conditions for its commoning?

CAPIm invites artists, researchers, and technologists to participate in an open workshop addressing the intersections of algorithmic aesthetics, coding practices, and artistic expression at the brink of singularity. This afternoon event offers a unique space to think technology’s role in artistic practice and research.

Drawing on the unique approaches of two artistic research practices, the workshop explores critical potentials within AI, Virtual Reality and coding:

Palle Torsson, artist and lecturer at Konstfack. His VR project “Ada Research: a Meta-Quest into the World of Algorithms” explores the role of algorithms in our daily lives through the creation of a gaming world in virtual reality.

Dr. Sasha Anikina is currently IASPIS resident and Senior Lecturer at Rodehampton. She works as an artist and media theorist on feminist and decolonial imaginaries of AI, drawing on theoretical intersections of AI, aesthetics, and critical scholarship.

Participants are invited to engage in speculative thinking, collaborative coding, and critical discussions to explore how algorithms and networks, often used for privatization, surveillance, and militarization, can be repurposed to foster artistic expression.

Together, we will comment on current cultural expressions and reference internet communities rooted in queer kinship that critique technocapitalist enclosures. Embracing open-source ethics the workshop invites collaborative thinking on the conditions for making art beyond the logics of private property and extractive technologies.

Programme

13.00-13.15 Introduction by Michele Masucci
13.15-14.00 Dr Alexandra Anikina: Procedural Animism & The Labour of Bots: No Ghost, Just a Shell 

In this short talk I will share some reflections on the publicly accessible “digital human” and “character creator” apps, AI avatar generators and virtual presenter apps. In particular, I’m curious how they create specific neoliberal aesthetics of mimicry and neutralization. Their gendered and racial representations follow particular ideas of what is considered “approachable”, “authority-projecting” or “service-oriented”. I see these as symptoms of “hollowing out” of representation and the capture of particular aesthetics by the affective infrastructures of corporate websites, professional social media networks and advertising avenues. This case study is a chapter of a book I’m writing called “I have been a good bot: Procedural Animism and AI Imaginaries” so in the talk I’m going to do two things: introduce the case study and connect it to the larger context of imagining non-life or technology and automated labour.

14.00-14.15 Short brake

14.15-15.00 Palle Torsson: Notes from the VR project “Ada Research: a Meta-Quest into the World of Algorithms”

Ada Research creates a VR gaming world to explore the role of algorithms in our daily lives. Through a captivating landscape of geometry and algorithms, the project highlights how algorithms influence our creativity and subjectivity. By examining mathematical structures, including randomness and generative reality, the project generates new gaming elements and spaces that range from basic algorithmic concepts to advanced challenges. At the core of the research is how algorithms can convey queer ideas and make them visible in the world.

15.00-16.00 Blender coding workshop with ChatGPT and DeepSeek.