Digital Art, AI and New Ecologies
In the shifting terrain of the posthuman, art dissolves the boundaries that once separated human, machine, and planet. Through data, bodies, and virtual matter, contemporary artists envision hybrid forms of life and perception, questioning agency, ethics, and evolution itself. This lesson traces how digital and ecological imaginaries converge to imagine futures where creativity emerges from entanglement rather than control.
.png&w=3840&q=75)
This lesson examines contemporary artistic practices at the intersection of digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and ecological thinking, highlighting how artists address the transformations of perception, identity, and environment in the posthuman era. Artists and theorists have paid close attention to extractionism, error and glitch, recursion, and contingency emerging from AI, the Internet, and other advanced technologies, applying these concepts to the sociocultural contexts of gender, race, politics, and ecology. Representative theoretical frameworks include Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI, Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, and Yuk Hui’s theory of Technodiversity, which share a critical awareness of identity and the presumed universality of technological culture. Lu Yang, Ian Cheng, and Refik Anadol’s practices investigate how technological media, virtual environments, avatars, and data-driven aesthetics articulate new modes of identity and existence. Meanwhile, the interest in advanced technologies has also led to an exploration of the ecological systems that both oppose and sustain them. Artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Otobong Nkanga, Anicka Yi, Tabita Rezaire, and Candice Lin employ installation, multimedia, and performative approaches to imagine sustainable futures while questioning extractive economies and human-centered paradigms.
April 18, 2026 - from 3 PM to 5 PM CET.
