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7.5 hours
Stony Brook University, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics
Free Tickets Available
Fri, 24 Oct, 2025 at 10:30 am to 06:00 pm (GMT-04:00)
Stony Brook University, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics
100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook, United States
The Future Histories Studio at Stony Brook University, in collaboration with Guggenheim New York, present a day-long symposium on October 24 at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. Unsettling Intelligences: The Politics of Reason through Art and AI explores urgent questions at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the human, and is co-organized by Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator at Guggenheim New York.
The event examines the profound transformations brought by automation—how AI compels us to rethink cognition, agency, and the conditions of reason itself. As these systems become ever more embedded in daily life—largely invisible yet deeply consequential—they challenge the very foundations of subjectivity and governance. This emerging terrain invites us to consider cognitive plurality, where biological and technological intelligences generate new categories, concepts, and understandings. Once unique to humans—art, authorship, judgment, invention—are now co-articulated with systems of computation and planetary-scale infrastructure. The symposium brings together artists, scholars, and technologists to probe the cultural, philosophical, and ecological implications of this entanglement.
Keynote speaker Joanna Zylinska asks what makes human creativity distinctive in an era of recursive machine collaboration, while Keynote speaker Louis Chude-Sokei traces how slavery, patent law, and cultural histories of otherness shape our encounters with algorithmic beings.
Artist presentations include Hito Steyerl who reveals the specter of servitude at the core of machine learning. Trevor Paglen examines how AI exploits human perception, linking it to chaos magic and military psyops. Kader Attia proposes art as a mnemonic fold between human and artificial intelligence, while Zainab Aliyu reframes computation through Yorùbá divination systems and the overlooked labor of women in early computing. Sougwen Chung explores embodied collaboration—robotics, biosensing, silk circuitry—where human, machine, and environment co-choreograph open forms of sense-making.
These perspectives are complemented by the technical and philosophical dialogue between Moontae Lee and Stephanie Dinkins, who move beyond the binary of “genuine creativity” versus “stochastic parroting” (In machine learning, the term stochastic parrot is a metaphor, introduced by Emily M. Bender and colleagues in a 2021 paper, that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding) to unpack the complex space where generative AI reshapes our understanding of creative processes.
Kate Crawford’s notes on model collapse trace how synthetic data and extractive infrastructures destabilize AI systems and ecosystems alike. Her call reminds us that the futures of intelligence—human or machine—cannot be separated from the planetary and political conditions that sustain them.
The day concludes with Manthia Diawara. The Filmmaker and theorist (AI: African Intelligence, 2023) will close the symposium with oracle-like reflections on the final sessions. Drawing on ritual, memory, and intuition, he will situate the day’s concluding talks within a broader planetary horizon, opening the symposium onto a more generous mode of thought—one that embraces a plurality of intelligences and affirms the coexistence of multiple ways of sensing, knowing, and creating.
Together, these contributions trace an arc: from the histories that haunt our technologies, through experimental practices that reimagine them, toward the planetary consequences of their proliferation. The symposium asks: what new forms of thought, creativity, and responsibility emerge when art and AI converge in a world of expanding technodiversity?
Info: This talk reimagines art and authorship for a time when creativity is increasingly co-articulated with computation. It also raises questions of responsibility and meaning for humans and machines. At stake here is not just the future of creative labor or the ethics of automation, but a deeper philosophical problem about our human modes of making things in the world--and making sense of the world. Can a novel form of human thinking emerge as concept and image, author and system, converge within recursive loops of production?
Info: As we begin to collectively face a world where human becoming and technological transformations are ever more intimate processes—as organic selves become machinic others and virtual entities become intimate members of our social worlds—it’s necessary to see exactly how this future has been socially and culturally mapped. In other words, it’s important to see how previous relationships with cultural and social others have and will shape imminent relationships with a range of new others birthed by new technologies.
This talk presents a slice from Chude-Sokei’s collaborative work with algorithmic entities in the world of sound alongside his ongoing work producing a cultural history of our interactions with inhuman othernesses. It will focus specifically on patent laws as they apply to enslaved persons and current attempts to gain patent protections for algorithms and artificial beings.
Info: Machine-learning systems are changing the daily practice of historians. Indecipherable script can be decoded, fragments aligned. But this history can also pertain to artificial systems themselves and reveal the spectre of serfdom at their core.
Info: Paglen will speak about his ongoing work thinking about the ways that AI interfaces and outputs are predatory on the quirks of human perception, and will speak about how chaos magic, UFO and military psyops are relevant to this conversation.
Info: “Death as a Moment of Radical Continuity" draws functional and aesthetic parallels between early computer memory and the opele divination chain, a form of ancestral memory in Yorùbá Nigerian lineage, to explore how cultural value systems are embedded in the objects we build and the mythologies they generate. This talk foregrounds the overlooked contributions of women in early computing, shaped by gendered divisions of labor, while challenging Western capitalist doctrines of linear time and future-oriented “progress.”
Info: Chung's practice explores embodied frameworks of human–machine collaboration, as a means of reorienting the relationship between living systems and technological forms. Through drawing, performance, and sculpture interwoven with robotics, machine learning, biosensing, Chung frames collaboration as an evolving coaesthetic system in which human, machine, and environment shape open choreographies of sensing and meaning. In their presentation at the symposium, Sougwen will introduce their current research in silk circuitry, part of an evolving body of work on meta-embodiment through meditation, machine gestures, and organic computation.
Info: To the question “what is artificial intelligence?”, philosopher Bernard Stiegler answered to a journalist: “all intelligences are artificial”. It was on a public radio broadcast, where the audience is neither data scientist nor philosopher or cognitive scientist academic, just a large audience, whose attention was hooked through a stream of news that any 24-hours news channel maintains to keep you listening. With such a comprehensive answer, Stiegler brought us back to the main point of a permanent reflection on artificial intelligence: what both binds and separates us from artificial intelligence? There are many ways to find out. Art, actually art as a practice, tangible or intangible, could open this in-between space of mnemonic traces that articulates a fold: the elasticity of teknè, a porous space/time of a permanent encounter and separation
Info: A conversation between Stephanie Dinkins, Kusama Endowed Professor of Art, Stony Brook University, and computer scientist Moontae Lee, Vice President of LG AI Research, that explores creativity, thinking/reasoning, and the generative capacities of AI. Together, they explore what it means to think and create with machines — challenging notions of authorship, rationality, and tracing new contours of human and machine imagination.
Info: The mass production of synthetic data is destabilizing AI models, creating a world of distorted outputs. Meanwhile, the infrastructure supporting the demands of generative AI is polluting ecosystems and threatening economies—ushering in the era of AI slop. In this talk, Professor Crawford will explore the multiple collapses driven by planetary-scale AI.
Info: In his film AI, African Intelligence (2023), Diawara presents Africa as the first site of convergence between humans and technology—the birthplace of both people and their machines, such as the Dogon god Amma, who taught the first inhabitants to farm, speak, sing, and play. From then on, human intelligence drew on intuition, impulses, empathy, art, and the poetics of unknowability to relate to the environment and build solidarities with human and nonhuman beings. Today, artificial intelligence and machine learning mark a new phase in this history, raising questions about how humans may again be reshaped—or even dominated—by their technologies.
Also check out other Arts events in Stony Brook, Fine Arts events in Stony Brook.
Tickets for Unsettling Intelligences: The Politics of Reason through Art and AI can be booked here.
| Ticket type | Ticket price |
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| General Admission | Free |
