The new AI-thoritarians
https://generativemedia.net/event/art-in-the-age-of-average
Conference
Tue, June 3, 17.30–21 and Wed, June 4, 12–19
at AdBK Munich, Akademiestraße 2, Central Lecture Hall, free admission
With: Gregory Chatonsky, Simon Denny, Navine G. Dossos,
!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mat Dryhurst, Constant Dullaart, Antonio Somaini
– Recording of the event in July/August on www.carrier-bag.net –
There is a strange disconnect in tech’s recent effects on politics and culture.
While culture and art feel constrained by data populism, scandal management and market opportunism, politics is on a rampage. Nothing seems impossible, from invading or selling Greenland or Gaza, abolishing central banks or food banks, to making Nazis great again.
AI plays a role in accelerating the advent of autocratic rule. It assists in making people and social systems redundant and superfluous; it AI-washes austerity with a “scientific” sheen, it creates tornados and wildfires by burning up natural resources in data centers, it generates Aryans with six superhuman fingers to advertise for German hard right party AfD.
AI industries provide tools for populists and autocrats to proceed like old school genius artists who defy taboos, laws and regulation to perform creative destruction. Their near monopoly industries have vast leverage over workers, markets and users alike and radicalize the chasm between rich and poor. AI tools are brushes, magic wands and chainsaws in the hands of libertarian strongmen.
In light of this cooptation – or shall we say couptation? – we ask, how artists can recapture any creative initiative, or some form of artistic freedom?
How do they/we escape mid-art, the midbrow mediocrity that comes with pimped and averaged mass data tweaked by partisan AI models? How to deal with the competition by full-on futurist performance art now operationalized by tech oligarchs, bureaucrats and incel imperialists?
What kind of tools – if any – are necessary to open up different possibilities for recent technology? Avoid, transform or oppose? Stall, stake or speed up? How to do art when its traditional forms have been culturally appropriated by multipolar dilettantes?
June 3, 2025
17.30 Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger: Introduction
18.00 Gregory Chatonsky: Vectofascism
19.00 Antonio Somaini: Politics of Latent Spaces
June 4, 2025
12.00 Navine G. Dossos: The Only Flowering Plant in the Ocean
13.00 Constant Dullaart: The hyperreal iconoclasm exploit
14.00 !Mediengruppe Bitnik: Unreal Data
15.00 Break
16.00 Simon Denny: Vibe-coding the Future
17.00 Students of Emergent Digital Media Class: mid- life mid- art mid- journey
18.00 Mat Dryhurst: Protocol Art
Moderation: Boris Čučković, Paul Feigelfeld, Francis Hunger, Hito Steyerl
Concept: Hito Steyerl, Francis Hunger
Abstracts
!Mediengruppe Bitnik: Unreal Data
With the shift to data-driven societies, automated data collection has become an intrinsic component of most technological systems and devices. The data we produce and our interactions with the systems are the fuel these systems operate on shaping the feeds we scroll, the news we read, the items we are recommended, the borders we are allowed to cross, the jobs we can successfully apply for.
Data is thus no longer just the unambiguous mark of an event or a state but has the ability to produce real effects and real world outcomes. Can data be used not just to describe the world but instead to strategically intervene in it? Can practices of Unreal Data – of generating specific data to trigger certain outcomes – offer ways to resist and regain agency when opting out is no longer an option?
Gregory Chatonsky: Vectofascism
Vectofascism overwhelms us, saturating the space with information that exhausts us. Hence the importance of defining it precisely, articulating it and distinguishing it from the fascisms of the last century. Latent space becomes an onto-political paradigm that enables to deal not with masses but with statistical vectors, and to industrialize the production of the differend (Lyotard), making all things ridiculous, equivalent by equidistance. We’ll be asking what kind of latent AI spaces vectofascists use to move from propaganda to propagation. We might also ask how to make life impossible for them.
Simon Denny: Vibe-coding the Future
Techno-optimist Manifesto and American Dynamism, VC Marc Andreesen’s forward-looking and influential texts, provide a shorthand for how his increasingly prominent community frames their thinking.
Andreessen: “I was inspired by a lot of prior manifestos, one in particular that I enjoyed tremendously, which is the Futurist Manifesto from the Italian Futurist Art Movement and maybe around 1910. So I don’t know that I hit the bar of the Futurist Manifesto, but that was kind of my inspirational starting point.“
Denny’s presentation contextualises the vibe of Andreessen’s pitch, revisiting Futurism through the Bronze-Age Deco AI spirit that has captured this community.
Constant Dullaart: The hyperreal iconoclasm exploit
The longstanding political and financial incentive to indiscernibly spoof representation has been empowered by synthetic opinions, images, news, and their automated generation. Private social media platforms openly facilitate this hijack by setting terms of engagement while allowing capital to manipulate visibility, faking relevance and consensus. This dynamic emboldens the vectorialist class, flooding discourse and drowning out legible signals in a state of hyperreality. The result is a new iconoclasm through instrumental overload, marking a broader semiotic shift where meaning collapses, symbols confuse, and sentiment overrides fact. Creating conditions where spectacle replaces discourse, stigmas shape communities, and unchecked power flourishes.
Navine G. Dossos: The Only Flowering Plant in the Ocean
How did we go from making digital work about drones and surveillance to making ceramic pots wrapped in seagrass?! James Bridle and I moved to a Greek island, started a collective studio called Vessel and we started building our own house. This talk charts how our thinking about technology, intelligence and the matrix of life-matter has evolved over the past five years from a deep engagement with an online world to now being committed to our bioregion and its ecological realities.
Mat Dryhurst: Protocol Art
Our contention is that the most consequential aesthetic and ideological debates today occur at the level of protocols, upstream of traditional media forms. Those who design the affordances, incentives, and structures of participation shape the conditions under which culture is produced and perceived. Yet this substrate remains largely invisible, uncritiqued and unchallenged. “Protocol Art” proposes a shift toward intervening at this foundational layer by designing new systems, social contracts, and rule sets that encode and execute values. Artists are challenged to engage in protocol design, not simply as commentary but as direct competition. In this light, art is alive and urgent.
Antonio Somaini: Politics of Latent Spaces
A theory of images and visual culture, today, needs a theory of latent spaces. In a historical phase in which images are more and more generated, modified, circulated, seen and described by or with the help of different kinds of AI models, we need to understand the crucial role played by an abstract, mathematical construct whose cultural and political implications could hardly be overestimated. Latent spaces play a crucial role in generative AI models, from GANs to the recent diffusion models. They also play a central role in the contemporary artistic practices that engage critically with AI, responding to its increasing presence in every aspect of culture, society, politics and economics. For a few years now, artists have developed different strategies to explore or modify the existing, dominant latent spaces, or to produce their own alternative, antagonist, counter-hegemonic ones. Considered together, these different strategies show the awareness with which the field of contemporary art is tackling the presence and the agency of this hidden layer of mathematical abstraction that participates in the shaping of cultural and political imaginaries.
Biographies
!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read – the not mediengruppe bitnik) work on and with the Internet. Their artistic practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally employing loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. They have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances to people at home, physically glitch a building, and unleash a bot on a three-month darknet shopping spree where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy and had them sent directly to the gallery space.
!Mediengruppe Bitnik regularly collaborate with other artists, curators and institutions. Recently, they curated programmes, exhibitions and conferences on Unreal Data and practices of collective action and resistance. They also launched a foundation to fund radically contemporary Internet art called Error 417 Expectation Failed.
Gregory Chatonsky is a franco-canadian artist who explores the tension between human finitude and technological excess. His work examines memory, extinction and resurrection. Founder of the Netart platform Incident.net (1994), he initially studied digital materiality as ruins and flows (2000s), before turning to AI (since 2009). His work has been exhibited in Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, MOCA Taipei, Museum of Moving Image, Hubei Wuhan Museum. His academic career includes teaching at Fresnoy, UQAM, EUR-Artec, and Musashino Art University.
Simon Denny is an artist born in Auckland, living in Berlin. He has made exhibtions at the New Zealand pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale; Serpentine Galleries, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Portikus, Frankfurt; MUMOK, Vienna; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; OCAT, Shenzhen amaong others. He cofounded the artist mentoring program BPA// Berlin Program for Artists and serves as professor of Time Based Media at the HFBK Hamburg.
Constant Dullaart’s (NL, 1979) practice explores how social and cultural values reverberate in tools and technology. Dullaart creates works to emphasise an enjoyable friction between old and new, manual and automated, online and offline, real or not. He deconstructs and analyses the specific human circumstances under which technological instruments are created, and how this influences the way the instruments are consequently used. His practice ranges from AI models, to start-ups, virtual armies and custom agents to websites, custom social media and conventional media. Constant is the founding professor of Networked Materialities at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg.
Navine G. Dossos is a visual artist living and working on the island of Aegina. She has lived in Greece for almost ten years, with five years spent in Athens and five years now on Aegina. Her work is primarily as a mural painter, but in recent years she has expanded into other areas of applied craft such as sewing and ceramics. Her work is often created through community workshops and she is interested in ways that artworks can be disseminated for free to the public, or benefit the public realm in a meaningful way.
Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst are artists renowned for their pioneering work in machine learning, software and music. They develop technical protocols that facilitate expansive artworks across media, but are proposed as artworks unto themselves.
In 2024 they presented the solo exhibition The Call at Serpentine Gallery, and took part in the Whitney Biennial. They co-founded Spawning, an organization building public domain AI models and data infrastructure. Their critically acclaimed musical works are released through 4AD and RVNG Intl. Holly holds a Ph.D in Computer Music from Stanford CCRMA, Mathew is largely self taught.
Antonio Somaini is professor of film, media, and visual culture theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), working on a research project on the impact of AI technologies on images, visual culture and contemporary artistic practices. He is the chief curator of the exhibition Le monde selon l’IA / The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris (11 April — 21 September 2025). Among his latest publications are the essays “Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture” (Grey Room 93, Fall 2023) and “A Theory of Latent Spaces” in the catalogue of the Jeu de Paume exhibition.