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The Probable and the Possible. On AI, Artifice and Criticality.

Semester
Autumn 2025
Year
2025
Dates

Time: 09:00 - 20:00 o'clock

CW 43: 22 - 23 October 2025

 

Interested students of other study programmes can register from 30 June - 02 July 2025 by email to: studium.dfa@zhdk.ch. You will be informed until the end of calendar week 29 about a possible participation.

ECTS
3
Kunsthochschule
Universität / Haute École
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste
Teacher
Felix Stalder, Arif Kornweitz, Judith Welter
Contact email
for student applications
Content description

Artists working with AI face an acute paradox. In a practice that constantly challenges classification, how do we engage with AI – a technology that is problematically efficient at classifying artefacts and generating similar ones?

This year’s Master’s Symposium invites participants to share critical and productive ways of working with this contradiction. How can artistic practices open up the possible, against the imposition of the probable?

The symposium proposes thinking about AI in relation to the term artifice: a well-crafted and cunning imitation of nature, and a deceptive strategy of making. As AI becomes an increasingly efficient, mimetic machine that imitates natural and cognitive processes in order to produce deceptive artifices, categories and hierarchies, how do artists deal with these these dispositions in their own practice?

The symposium brings together artists and researchers to consider how artistic practice(s) engage with AI in ways that defy normative representation and hegemonic projects. How can we critically engage with technologies such as AI, by refusing reductive notions of creativity, authorship, meaning and existence? And how can we use and refuse AI by questioning the histories and realities it represents and reproduces?

In the symposium's contributions and workshops, we will reflect on and discuss artistic practices that engage with AI by questioning its deceptive nature – but also by using artificiality to generate possibilities and critically encounter the probable?

A detailed programme will be released at the beginning of the term.

 

About the lecturers:

Felix Stalder is a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, teaching in the Department of Fine Arts. His work focuses on the intersection of cultural, political and technological dynamics, in particular on new modes of commons-based production, copyright, datafication, AI, and transformation of subjectivity. He not only works as an academic, but also as a cultural producer, as long-time moderator of , a crucial nexus of critical net culture, first for the email list, now for its node in the fediverse. He is a member of the World Information Institute and the Technopolitics Working Group, both based in Vienna.

Arif Kornweitz researches the history of conflict prediction and the application of machine learning in the humanitarian sector, as part of the AI Forensics Consortium project. His curatorial and artistic practice focuses on music and sound. Until recently, he has served as the head of a Master’s program at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, focusing on fine arts practices that engage with music, performance and AI.

Judith Welter (*1980) is a curator. She studied art history, Spanish literature and religious studies at the University of Bern. In 2014 she completed her doctorate on the role of rumours and anecdotes in contemporary art. From 2015 to 2021 she was director of the Kunsthaus Glarus. From 2004 to 2015 she worked at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, where she has been curator of the collection since 2012. Since 2015 she is co-editor of the online magazine for art criticism Brand-New-Life. Recent solo exhibitions she has curated include Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) (2021), Caroline Bachmann, Jan Vorisek (2020), Marta Riniker-Radich (2018), Birgit Megerle (2017).

 

Learning objectives / competences:

- Reflect on and discuss artistic practices that engage with AI
- Critically use and refuse AI by questioning the histories and realities it represents and reproduces
- Discuss with peers and invited guests in workshop as well as in plenary discussion

Course language: English