Philosophy, science and art should be a creative and critical counterbalance to technocratic and economizing tendencies of the contemporary world and contribute together with technological research and innovation to ensure that physical and spiritual, natural and cultural, scientific and artistic qualities of life are not suppressed. We believe that by including artificial intelligence (which is associated with many myths and fears) in the creative process, philosophy together with science and art can reflect on where this area of knowledge and co-creation of the world is heading.
The workshop Beyond Words: How to Create with Artificial Intelligence about the Inexpressible? opens a dialogue between matter, body and artificial intelligence, exploring the limits of language in the creative process. Through working with clay and guided meditation, participants translate bodily experiences into the world of synthetic media, where words become secondary and the sensory, intuitive dimension of creation comes to the forefront. The workshop offers space for discovering new creative approaches that not only use AI, but also maintain human agency at the core of this experimental process.
The workshop capacity is 20 people. It is ideal to bring a laptop. A laptop is not a condition for participation.
Lenka Hámošová is an artist, designer and expert on creative use of artificial intelligence. Over the past six years, she has been intensively engaged in research of synthetic media generated by AI, which she connects with active sharing of her knowledge through lectures, educational workshops and the development of educational materials. Her work is focused on supporting human creative contribution in the process of collaboration with artificial intelligence and on developing critical thinking towards this technology. Lenka is also co-founder of the Uroboros festival and is behind the organization of Creative AI Meet-ups in Prague, where she strives to build a community around the creative use of AI.
We will present a demo and a new approach to involve the public in debates about the future of artificial intelligence through performances that use AI agents. Through AI simulations based on language models, individuals and groups in the sandbox create their own AI agents, who then represent them in virtual discussions. The result is almost a theatrical performance where the public plays a dual role: not only as active participants who give their agents their own values, but also as an "ancient chorus" that experiences and comments on the clashes between the real and synthetic or generated world. Public AI simulations as a combination of ancient theater and famous public scientific experiments from the 18th century thus become a tool of socio-technical catharsis. The audience has the opportunity to experience firsthand the influence of AI technologies on social norms and personal decision-making and to look for new ways to create social consensus. Among the topics we addressed through AI agents in the sandbox were AI ethics, the legal status of AI, digital sovereignty or security, with the aim of enabling active shaping of a common AI future through discussions and interaction using these synthetic doubles.
Dr. Denisa Reshef Kera is an assistant professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where she founded the "Design and Policy Lab" as part of the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Studies program. This laboratory combines design and artistic approaches with public decision-making and regulatory processes. The result is experiments with new ways to involve the public in discussions about a common future and complex social challenges and to explore how new technologies affect the space for public debate and democratic participation, including technology regulation. The laboratory therefore focuses on participatory technologies and testing political scenarios that respond to rapid developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and the like. In her book "Algorithms and Automation: Governance over Rituals, Machines, and Prototypes, from Sundial to Blockchain", she examines in detail the topics of participation through prototypes and democratization of new technologies. As a substitute national expert for AI, appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, she regularly participates in consultation processes in the field of AI regulations. During the last decade, she has held academic positions at universities in Israel, Malta, Spain, Singapore, USA and the Czech Republic.
In my contribution, I will focus on doomerism, i.e., evoking existential fear of AI, as a manipulative strategy by which big players create influence on the regulation and future of the AI industry. Alongside this, I will present a critique of AI based on sociological and philosophical studies of science and technology, which typically places technology in a social and cultural context.
Palo Fabuš has a long-standing interest in the relationship between digital technology and the human condition. He studied computer science and media theory in Brno and sociology in Prague. In 2014-2015, he completed an internship at Ruhr Universität in Bochum, where he studied contemporary German media philosophy. In the past, he lectured regularly at FSS MU in Brno and was invited to give individual lectures at VUT FIT, FaVU, FF MU, AVU, UMPRUM and elsewhere. He currently works as an assistant professor at the Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU in Prague. Between 2011-2016, he worked as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Umělec. He has also published in Literární noviny, Flash Art, A2, Furtherfield, Vlna and Media Studies. Together with poet Luboš Svoboda, he is the author of *Lecture on Emergence* (Lačnit Press, 2017).
The lecture will deal with the thinking and work of the visionary after whom the project of the digital neural network Virtual Futurologist A°D°A is named. She was the mathematician, musician and gambler Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron, 1815-1852), whom many today consider to be the first programmer, although she did not create a computer program. She dealt with various sciences and arts, including the first digital computing machines, which she understood as universal computers capable of handling data of various natures in the future. She connected natural sciences with arts: especially with music and poetry, moving towards poetic science, a predecessor of contemporary transdisciplinarity as well as scientific-artistic or artistic-scientific research. She longed to explore the human mind and also dealt with the nature of imagination.
She studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava (1993). In 2003-2004, she completed a post-doctoral research stay at the Center for Theoretical Studies of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, where, together with Ivan M. Havel and Michal Ajvaz, she prepared the anthology Space and Its Human (Prague 2004). In 2015, she habilitated at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague, and in 2019, she was appointed professor. She has lectured at schools of architecture in Bratislava, Liberec and Prague. Currently, she works at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and at the Institute of Theory at the Faculty of Architecture of the Brno University of Technology. She focuses on the theory of architecture.
Even if the current large language models did not develop significantly further, which is unlikely, their current capabilities already greatly influence intellectual work of all kinds. The situation is to some extent similar to the industrial revolution, when machines replaced part of manual labor, but this analogy is useful only to a certain extent. We are largely entering unexplored territory. We will probably have to reassess which work is creative and which is not - no longer according to traditional criteria, but purely according to what can be automated with more difficulty and what easily. The outputs of language models do not necessarily have to be of the same quality as human work. For now, it will suffice if they are at least at the lower limit of acceptability, if they are also much cheaper. This economic argument is and will increasingly be decisive in introducing AI into a wide spectrum of activities.
Petr Koubský is an editor for science and technology at Deník N. Previously, he worked for computer magazines Software News and Inside, then as a freelance journalist and publicist. He studied at the University of Chemistry and Technology and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University, after graduating he worked as a software developer and as a research worker at the then Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. For many years, he taught externally at various universities (University of Economics Prague, Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University), currently teaching the subject Scientific Journalism at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc. He is the holder of the Ferdinand Peroutka Journalism Award for 2020.
The "Creative AI Workflows" workshop is for art school students who want to move their creation into dialogue with artificial intelligence while maintaining their authorial signature. In today's creative ecosystem, AI is becoming a key tool for experimentation and creative production, and understanding the principle of AI workflows is now more important than ever. In this workshop, we will explore how to connect various AI tools and models and prototype your own workflows. The workshop will also include an introduction to automation in the ComfyUI user environment, which opens up possibilities for complex and flexible integration of AI into your creative practice.
The workshop capacity is 25 people. It is ideal to bring a laptop. A laptop is not a condition for participation.
Lenka Hámošová is an artist, designer and expert on creative use of artificial intelligence. Over the past six years, she has been intensively engaged in research of synthetic media generated by AI, which she connects with active sharing of her knowledge through lectures, educational workshops and the development of educational materials. Her work is focused on supporting human creative contribution in the process of collaboration with artificial intelligence and on developing critical thinking towards this technology. Lenka is also co-founder of the Uroboros festival and is behind the organization of Creative AI Meet-ups in Prague, where she strives to build a community around the creative use of AI.
In my contribution, I will explain what futurology is and what it deals with, its very brief development and methods, especially the scenario planning method, its connection and implementation into the urban planning process and the innovative potential of using AI/LLM in their processes.
For this, I will also use examples of the application of the mentioned methods and their results from international urban workshops from the Dominican Republic and Japan.
At the same time, I will also briefly explain what the Creative Software Virtual Futurologist A°D°A is based on and builds upon, which we are developing as a consultation tool not only for the needs of design and urban planning in relation to the uncertainties of the future.
Architect, urban planner and futurologist Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková taught at the Faculty of Art and Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec (1999-2023). She led the ON THE EDGE studio (2014-2019), where she focused on futuristic and experimental urban projects and organized and led almost 30 international workshops focused on activism, public involvement and interdisciplinary cooperation. In Bratislava (2022) and Nagoya (2023-24), she dealt with futurology in urban planning, especially the adaptability of cities to climate change. Since 2023, she has been leading a project at the Faculty of Mechatronics and Interdisciplinary Studies. Since 2023, she has been leading the research project Virtual Futurologist A°D°A, which uses artificial intelligence to address future uncertainties in urban planning.
The presentation deals with the possibilities of joint creation of human and artificial intelligence in art and explores how we can creatively collaborate with non-human entities, such as artificial intelligence algorithms. The mentioned artistic research project and participatory workshops revealed how embodied communication with tactile materials, such as clay, opens new paths for complex interactions with AI. When translating complex human experiences into the synthetic sphere, part of the meaning is lost, but this process also reveals new knowledge. The contribution will focus on the ethical and aesthetic aspects of more than human co-creation with AI and will address questions of how we can meaningfully develop our creative practices with AI while keeping them rooted in their context. Examples from research and practice will illustrate what human and non-human creation of shared knowledge might look, sound and feel like in an artistic context. Lenka Hámošová is an artist, designer and expert on creative use of artificial intelligence. Over the past six years, she has been intensively engaged in research of synthetic media generated by AI, which she connects with active sharing of her knowledge through lectures, educational workshops and the development of educational materials. Her work is focused on supporting human creative contribution in the process of collaboration with artificial intelligence and on developing critical thinking towards this technology. Lenka is also co-founder of the Uroboros festival and is behind the organization of Creative AI Meet-ups in Prague, where she strives to build a community around the creative use of AI.
We live in a time of massive acceleration of machine data generation. Technologies and algorithms are constantly speeding up and facilitating the processing and analysis of information. In this context, Dušan Marcinko will present a series of generative "tools" that have practical use today. These tools focus mainly on automating the processes of visual data production, which opens up new possibilities for creative and industrial applications. The lecture will offer not only a view of current trends in the field of generative design, but also specific examples of applications that can transform our approaches to visual communication.
AI specialist Dušan Marcinko, originally an architect by profession, graduated from the Czech Technical University in Eduard Schleger's studio. Already during his studies, he began to take an interest in graphic design and digital creation, which he currently teaches at the Czech Technical University and the Academy of Fine Arts. In his work, he collaborates with both the commercial and artistic spheres, where he often experiments with the latest technologies. He applies a wide spectrum of knowledge from various fields to his visual creation, such as 3D visualization, augmented and virtual reality, programming, film, animation and game engines. Since the community diffusion models were made available to the public in 2022, he has been working with image generative AI, which he is currently integrating within the VFX studio Magiclab and in other areas of the film industry.
The project titled Garden me Tender aims to reflect recent cases of granting legal personality to natural entities and at the same time respond to the temporality and fragility of residual land, often referred to as "vague terrains" (R. Haluzík, 2020), "délaissé" (G. Clément, 2005) or simply classified as "other areas" in real estate registers.
Using an artificial intelligence model (Stable Diffusion) retrained on the database of Czech flora and vegetation Pladias.cz) and sensitive sensors that measure light, humidity and temperature, the collected data was connected with a digitized environment in the form of artificially generated images. The artificial intelligence model used data from sensors as input data ("prompts") for generating images, which were then sent back to the server and displayed on the monitor via a Raspberry Pi minicomputer. The resulting images represent fictional versions of plants that "could grow" in specific places under certain conditions, as the numerical values sent to the server were a conversion of the nine-point scale of preferences of European plants, which was developed by H. Ellenberg.
Lucia Bergamaschi (1987) is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno (2024). Her previous education in law (University of Bologna, 2012) and art (IUAV University in Venice, 2019) allows her to explore the intersections between law and visual art. In her research, she is interested in legal personality, which she perceives as a product of society in a given historical period, and questions its fictional construction through artistic practice.
The education of future artists, architects, urban planners and landscape designers oriented in the dynamics of natural and cultural and artistic systems requires both information and data literacy and creative approaches to them. Creative Software Virtual Futurologist A°D°A is a tool that will enable not only easier access and orientation in relevant digital data, but will also help with sorting and hierarchizing available information within a complex system, such as contemporary cities. Philosophical, scientific and artistic questions associated with artificial intelligence form another dimension of this research.
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