​​Join the upcoming conversation session where our Esoteric AI research lead Natalia Stanusch talks with Bogna Konior on AI, Angels and Female Erotic Mysticism.

​ABOUT THE SESSION

​This conversation will trouble and challenge the mainstream AI imaginary by inviting mysticism, cyberculture, and eroticism into the critical practice of sensing and sense-making of AI today. AI will be reframed by inviting the coupling of Christian female mysticism, cyberculture and media studies, philosophy of technology, divine and erotic, bodily and digital. Thus, this conversation will cover three main domains that Esoteric AI brings together – knowledge making, femininity and feminism, and nonhuman and non-rational ways of sensing and knowing. To do so, we are joined by Bogna Konior, who will share with us her wide-range expertise and stirring ideas.

​In rethinking AI and knowledge-making, we will consider how AI can act as a “gnostic” (knowledge-making) machine.  As Bogna Konior writes in one of her publications, we can indeed think of “AI as a ‘gnostic machine’ whose function is both epistemological and evolutionary: the production of new knowledge at the limit of human comprehension as a factor in the civilizational trajectory of our species” (91). By embracing the automated yet chaotic and illogical pattern finding of AI, perhaps we can consider AI as offering new (or wider) types of knowledge. To subvert the mainstream feminisation and mystification of AI, we will consider how the idea of an angel and a female is in fact very similar to a notion of a machine. Additionally, we will deep dive into the realm on female stigmatics and mystics and explore how they can considered as thinkers of the internet to come. Our bodies disassemble into the digital, and as our senses become extended and directed by AI technologies and logics, human experience of tactility is becoming dislocated into the realm of mysticism not afar from female stigmatics - as Bogna Konior’s work, and talk, will reveal.

​To imagine different AI, can we reclaim the vocabulary of enchantment and femininity without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism, objectification, and obfuscation?  We will approach this while avoiding the visions of utopian salvation or dystopian apocalypse that are perpetuated by Silicon Valley ideology and mainstream narratives of AI. Instead, with the guidance of Bogna, we will explore how AI binds eroticism and mysticism, Christianity and science fiction, femininity and technology, angels and machines, exterior and interior. This conversation will offer an alternative and provoking perspective on what AI could be, providing us with crucial historical, theoretical, and philosophical artifacts for the alchemy of Esoteric AI.

​ABOUT SLOW AI PROJECT

​​In this project, we will interrogate and publish critical AI discourse in a format that makes sense to us and our practices, namely zines and creative technology installations. Inspired by the counter-movements of slow fashion and slow food, this project will investigate three emerging AI counter-narratives –Small AI 🐜, Ancestral AI 🐚, and Esoteric AI 🔮 – and explore what it might look like to incorporate them in our everyday practice.

​​At project end we will publish an anthology – a hot compost pile of miro boards, zines, and art that we hope sparks new ways to think and talk about AI.

​​Follow this page to stay up-to-date on Slow AI. Slow AI is made possible by Stimuleringsfonds <3

​🔮 ESOTERIC AI w/ NATALIA

​​Natalia Stanusch is the research lead for the Esoteric AI stream. In her research, Natalia Stanusch is interested in studying digital media artifacts by way of critical theory. Stanusch wrote and presented on topics such as memes, algorithmic imaginaries and AI counter-imaginaries, datafication practices, algorithmic auditing, digital alienation, and the ontology of digital images. She is an author of book chapters, articles, and video essays which range in scope from methodological interventions to autoethnographic experimental pieces. Stanusch’s research foci meet at a crossing of critical data and algorithm studies, science and technology studies, digital visual culture, and art history. In her practice, Stanusch often brings together twentieth-century avant-garde legacies and media studies. Currently a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam, Stanusch has also been an academic coordinator for a non-profit DataEthics[dot]eu.

​🧚 GUEST: BOGNA KONIOR

​Bogna Konior is an Assistant Professor of IMA (Interactive Media Arts) at NYU Shanghai. She is also a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her work on digital culture, philosophy of new media, and posthumanism has been presented internationally, recently including the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, e-flux, and the Ljubljana Biennale. She is currently working on two projects concerned with long-term trajectories of technological development. Her current academic project is on Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem, and his neglected contribution to the theory of biotechnological evolution of autonomous reason. She is also conducting a multimedia research project on female Catholic mysticism as an early form of cybefeminism and a predictor of machine erotics, nonhuman personhood, and artificial reproduction. Together with Anna Greenspan and Benjamin Bratton, she is the editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 2024).

​ABOUT AIxDESIGN

​​AIxDESIGN (AIxD) is a global community of designers, researchers, creative technologists, and activists using AI in pursuit of creativity, justice and joy and living lab exploring participatory, slow, and more-than-corporate AI. Learn more at aixdesign.co.