Human Entities 2025: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Ninth edition Wed 14 May 2025, 6.30pm Artist Talk: Welcome to Jankspace, babesDaniel Felstead Content producer Jankspace is the leaking residual of the stack as it metabolises meatspace into hallucinogenic sludge. It’s the Uberdriver’s chaotically impressive multi-display setup of knotted cables, flashing screens and beeping notifications. It’s literally us and our gorgeously fucked-up, uncomputable bodies that we know aren’t qui...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 55 min
Human Entities 2025: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Ninth edition Thur 5 June 2025, 6.30pm; book-signing session at 6pm Planta Sapiens: Rethinking Intelligence in the Living World Paco Calvo Professor of Philosophy of Science, Principal Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory (MINT Lab) at the University of Murcia (Spain) Our conventional understanding of intelligence has long been shaped by human and animal models, leaving little room to consider the cognitive potenti...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 41 min
Human Entities 2025: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Ninth edition Wed 28 May 2025, 6.30pm Notes on ‘Content’ Caroline Busta Writer and editor As one-point perspective gives way to collective forms of knowing, media proliferates with no end, text is increasingly scanned and sensed more than read, and the myth of the individual-creative-genius is dissolved by the logic of swarm-trained LLMs, we are undergoing an epochal shift in human expression and reception. Surveying this communi...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 30 min
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 19 April 2023 Artist talk Mark Leckey Mark Leckey is one of the most influential artists working today. Since the late 1990s, his work has looked at the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. He works with sculpture, film, sound and performance – and sometimes all four at once. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me ...
Apr 05, 2025•1 hr 45 min
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Eighth edition, 15 May 2024 Plant consciousness Monica Gagliano Evolutionary ecologist, Research Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Southern Cross University, Australia Monica Gagliano PhD is an internationally award-winning research scientist, selected by Biohabitats as one of the 24 most Inspiring Women of Ecology, together with Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earl, and Terry Tempest Williams. She has been an invited lecturer...
Jun 18, 2024•2 hr 20 min
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Eighth edition, 5 June 2024 Solarpunk means dreaming green Jay Springett Strategist and writer Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” In our current age of popular dystopia, climate grief, and biosphere collapse, Solarpunk has become a ‘creative container‘ for more fertile fu...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Eighth edition , 29 May 2024 Artificial Intelligence Design and the Logic of Social Cooperation Matteo Pasquinelli Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice A conversation around the book “ The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence ” with the author Matteo Pasquinelli. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest “to solve intelligence” – a solution supposedly t...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Eighth edition, 22 May 2024 Pluralizing psychedelic experiences Giorgio Gristina PhD candidate, DANT (ICS-ULisboa), Systems Neuroscience Lab (Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown) Potential groundbreaking therapeutic applications are fuelling a resurgence of scientific and clinical interest towards psychedelic compounds. Growing media coverage is popularizing concepts such as “mystical experience” and “ego-dissolution”. Such terms...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 32 min
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 17 May 2023 Authorship, Agency, and Moral Obligation Joanna Bryson Professor of Ethics and Technology in the Centre for Digital Governance at Hertie School in Berlin How much of our individual human experience can we absorb into machine models when we use machine learning and a huge amount of data? Will AI become sentient? Sovereign? Ambitious? How will living with AI change our daily experience? This t...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 42 min
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 3 May 2023 Smart Power Orit Halpern Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently de...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 39 min
Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 26 April 2023 Rebooting democracy Manuel Arriaga + Pedro Magalhães Manuel Arriaga is a university professor and one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos; Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon Democracy is a technology of collective decision-making that aggregates intentions and defines a course of action. However, according to the diagnosis of man...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 52 min
Organized in partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts , University of Lisbon, Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts departments Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Canada 150 Chair in New Media, Director, Digital Democracies Institute In Discriminating Data [2021], Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity pol...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 33 min
Artist Talk Paola Torres Núñez del Prado Artist Somewhat similar to what it is commonly said about migrants, autonomous machines are taken to be a potential threat to some human labour. In military environments, these systems and their efficiency can, in fact, be more lethal than those controlled by people. This idea allows us to roll back to the core definition of intelligence which, since the Industrial Revolution has been deeply linked with efficiency-as-productivity, and subsequent avoidance...
Jul 29, 2022•1 hr 17 min
#NatureTruthPower: Política ambiental na era da pós-verdade e das plataformas digitais Bram Büscher Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what if their s...
Jul 29, 2022•2 hr 5 min
Sensing Smart Forests Jennifer Gabrys Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge Forests are increasingly sensorized environments. Whether in the form of camera traps to monitor organisms or the Internet of Things to detect wildfires, there are an array of sensor technologies that observe and constitute forests in relation to scientific inquiry, Indigenous land claims, environmental governance, and disaster prevention and mitigation. This pres...
Nov 19, 2021•1 hr
Artist talk Alexandre Estrela, Artist A conversation about the parallel communication (or the lack of it) between Art and Science in the context of the work of Alexandre Estrela. This includes the collaboration with Moita Lab from the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, the Company Orange and the Human Language Technology Laboratory INESC-ID/IST. Bio Alexandre Estrela’s work is an investigation into the essence of images that expands spatially and temporally through different media. In his vide...
Nov 19, 2021•1 hr 19 min
The European Union’s regulatory framework for Artificial Intelligence Inês Cisneiros Lawyer On her appointment as President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen made regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) a top priority. In her view legislation is fundamental to safeguard the European Union’s citizens’ fundamental rights and encourage investment in safe innovation and technological development. As a result, in April 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal which when ap...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 29 min
Green growth or Degrowth: climate action and human prosperity Julia Steinberger Professor of Ecological Economics, University of Lausanne Lisbon, 26 November 2020 New research from ecological economics shows that we need to rapidly physically degrow our economies to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. Green growth might have been at best a dream, at worst a narrative designed to delay action. What does this mean for human well-being and political action? Julia Steinberger Prof. Julia S...
Dec 05, 2020•1 hr 15 min
On minds and machines Joe Paton Computational neuroscientist, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, Lisbon Lisbon, 19 November 2020 Brains and computers both perform computations, yet for the most part, their similarity ends there. Nervous systems have evolved over the last several hundred million years to support the survival of organisms in which they are situated. Man made computers exist due to theoretical and technical innovations of the 20th century, and are powerless withou...
Dec 05, 2020•1 hr 46 min
River systems and the molecular body Margarida Mendes Curator, researcher and activist Lisbon, 12 November 2020 Can we actually trace the exact perimeter of a river’s molecular cartography and the extent of the consequences that these systems of catalytic flux have within and outside living bodies? River systems and their surrounding infrastructures are enormous hydrogeological, chemical and electromagnetic systems that connect their surrounding inhabitants and ecosystems through an irreverent f...
Dec 05, 2020•53 min
navigating the urban fog: on urban adaptation Andrea Pavoni Research fellow at DINÂMIA’CET, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Lisbon, 4 November 2020 The talk dives into the impalpable atmosphere of everyday urban life, through which we breathe, experience, and feel the city. In times of aesthetic capitalism, politics of fear, ubiquitous computing, and airborne diseases, this inconspicuous background has become the battleground of urban politics. Digital technologies, branded imaginaries and nor...
Dec 05, 2020•1 hr 26 min
Other Intelligences James Bridle Artist and writer Lisbon, 27 March 2019 We have spent the last hundred years attempting to master the world with calculation, with mathematics, physics, and digital technologies. We have come to believe that the world can be reduced to data – and only data matters. And yet the world still teems with life and our algorithms seem incapable of capturing its complexities; our supposedly logical worldview seems to lead us to fear, distrust, and polarisation, and the c...
Nov 20, 2019•1 hr 22 min
Facing Up to Biometrics Stephanie Hare Researcher and broadcaster Lisbon, 17 April 2019 Our face, voice, DNA, fingerprints and other data about our bodies (also known as our biometrics) are increasingly being used by governments and companies to identify and monitor us, and to analyse, predict and control our behaviour. The risk to our privacy, our civil liberties and our democracies is so grave that even technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon are asking for regulation. What role – ...
Nov 20, 2019•2 hr 17 min
Alice Benessia Do we really want and need to be smart? Can we? The imaginaries of the Internet of Things and their inherent contradictions Emergent information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), constantly redefine the texture of our culture, society and lifestyle, raising a number of fundamental epistemic, normative and ethical issues, in a constant co-evolution. These technologies are constructed, named, offered, and ultimately regulated, acco...
Jul 06, 2016•1 hr 57 min
Artists’ group !Mediengruppe Bitnik will present recent works exploring internet subculture, surveillance and bots. They will talk about their recently completed work Random Darknet Shopper which directly connected art spaces with the darknet via an automated online shopping bot. With a weekly budget of $100 in Bitcoins, the bot went shopping on the deep web where it randomly chose and purchased one item and had it mailed directly to the exhibition space, creating a landscape of traded goods fro...
May 09, 2016•1 hr 18 min
