(EN) Panel @ Entertain-AI 2025

Paths of Resistance: Shaping Artistic, Cultural & Technological Alternatives to the Current Toxic Imaginaries of AI

As part of my position at SAT and my involvement in the ArtIA project, I was invited to propose and moderate a panel at Entertain AI’s 2025 main event.

As this event gathered actors and stakeholders of the digital entertainment industry, and more generally of the “cultural and creative industry”, I wanted to remind our community at large of the power, and hence responsibility, that storytelling entails—especially at such a perilous time.

For this I gathered 3 collaborators and committed professionals from the artistic and academic world: Fenwick McKelvey (Machine Agencies Lab, Concordia University, Montreal), Sarah Mackenzie (MUTEK) and Arshia Sobhan (Metacreation Lab, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver).

Here is the presentation text of the panel.

Fascism is on the rise and taking power all over the world. Corporate overlords are building ecocidal AI infrastructures for the mere sake of convenience and conformity to a soul-crushing neoliberal order of things. As a result, our imaginaries are getting reduced to the endless repetition of a dystopian nightmare.

The panelists will discuss how, in this context, situated artistic experimentation could contribute to redefining both the technological approaches of Algorithmic Imitation (aka AI) and the imaginaries generated by and through the stories that we tell ourselves about it.

The panel was held on February 27, 2025, at Montreal’s Palais des Congrès—the conversation is in English, only the intro in French.