In the Fog of the Digital: AI and Neural-Digital Entanglement in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2026 | Berlin

June 29 – July 4

Faculty include Nora Al-Badri, Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond, Kader Attia, David W. Bates, Grégory Chatonsky, Sergio Edelsztein, Claire Fontaine, Agnieszka Kurant, Liz Magic Laser, Yuk Hui, Anna Longo, David Joselit, Warren Neidich (founder/director), Matteo Pasquinelli, Martha Schwendener, and Antonio Somaini.

“Technological escalation, in turn, is threatening to turn us all into artefacts – what I have called elsewhere ‘the becoming-black-of-the world’ . . . As a repository of our desires and emotions, dreams, fears and fantasies, our mind and psychic life have become the main raw material which digital capitalism aims at capturing and commodifying.”¹ —Achille Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary” (2021)

“As you are falling, your sense of orientation may start to play additional tricks on you. The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries. . . . Traditional modes of seeing and feeling are shattered. Any sense of balance is disrupted. Perspectives are twisted and multiplied. New types of visuality arise.”² —Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall” (2011)

For its sixteenth iteration (and fifth in Berlin), Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2026, “In the Fog of the Digital: AI and the Neural-Digital Entanglement in Cognitive Capitalism,” will focus on the effects of the acceleration of digital technologies (especially AI) on the process of individuation of the contemporary subject and its repercussions for thought and understanding, as well as artistic and aesthetic countermoves.³

The phrase “fog of the digital” is reminiscent of the earlier concept of the “fog of war” (generally attributed to the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz), used to describe the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the theater of war. The term highlights the difficulty of gathering accurate and timely information in dynamic, unpredictable, and unstable immersive environments, and points to the visually obscuring effects of billowing clouds of smoke and the associated cacophony of discordant sounds emanating from surrounding bombardment, all of which affect the individual soldier’s corporal senses and clarity of thought. War disables both body and mind, leaving in its wake amputated body parts associated with phantom limb sensations, as well as trauma to the material brain that can lead to PTSD.

Today, this concept serves as an apt metaphor to describe the fog of the digital (or digital fog) that results from the explosive transformation of industrial capitalism into cognitive capitalism, in which the proletariat physically working on the assembly line has been transformed into the cognitariat working in front of screens producing data. If the fog of early digitality wasn’t enough, the addition of AI has added more ammunition to the causes of disorientation. This data is not simply passively collected in order to induce continued consumerism, but has active – and sometimes lethal – effects. As Hito Steyerl shows in her recent work Mechanical Kurds (2025), data collected from micro-laborers to build datasets for latent spaces ultimately finds its way into algorithms used in drone attacks, sometimes contributing to their own demise. As curator Antonio Somaini states in The World Through AI (2025): “As AI models become more and more pervasive, and as internet contents keep growing exponentially, latent spaces become a way of ordering, processing, and activating a hypertrophic accumulation of cultural memory that has become unmanageable and disorienting.”⁴

Early cognitive capitalism is defined by precariousness, 24/7 temporal effects, connections to platform consumerism, a compulsion for achievement, roving software proliferation, algorithmic governmentality, and omnipresent digital surveillance. These technologies produce new forms of immersive environments that cloud reason and understanding, potentially incapacitating the subject. Online, we are all cognitariats, using our phones, laptops, and iPads to work nonstop. The fog of the digital is further accentuated by information overload, fake news and deepfakes, the attention (and inattention) economy, deep surveillance, and the production of new forms of automation that have the potential to replace human agency entirely. More importantly, as we spend increasing amounts of time with our screens, this new mixology of stimuli – calling upon the brain’s neural plasticity and sculpting its neural networks – creates new alien forms of disruptive individuation, creating new psychopathologies such as ADHD and panic.⁵ According to Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics (2017), we have become solitary, auto-exploiting laborers of our own enterprises, in which the individual becomes both master and slave at once.⁶ Bernard Stiegler similarly points to another insidious consequence of the externalization and outsourcing of cognitive abilities to artificial technics within digital immersion: “proletarianization – through which the hyperindustrial age becomes the era of systemic stupidity.”⁷

As we enter this late phase of cognitive capitalism, the brain and its neural commons – its neural plasticity have become the focus of capitalist adventurism and exploitation. The relation between early- and late-stage cognitive capitalism is fluid, and the digital fog can be a product of both. Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) is being used, along with an assortment of neural-based technologies already present and on the horizon (such as machine vision and its non-human visual gaze, brain–computer interfaces, the dopamine industrial complex, and optogenetics) to create a material and immaterial cocktail with both potential and real paralyzing effects. These developments overwhelm our somatic empatho-mnemotechnical systems that control reason and creativity, with significant political consequences, especially visible in the United States.

It is no coincidence that the structure of neural networks forms the basis for modeling deep-learning artificial neural networks. Such is the case with convolutional neural networks used in facial recognition, modeled on the ventral stream, or occipitotemporal pathway, responsible for object recognition. More ominous still are reports emerging in academic contexts. A recent article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Tasks,” by Nathalie Kosmyna and others, shows how using large language models (LLMs) for essay writing results in lower connectivity profiles and attenuated intensity and scope of neural network communication, especially in the executive frontal lobe. In other words, cognitive offloading may increase cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions, potentially challenging our capacity to think freely and autonomously.⁸

We have entered the Iliggocene, or Age of Dizziness! In cognitive neuroscience, enactment suggests that cognition arises through an interplay between the environment and the brain in, and through, deep time. When that environment is digitally and AI-produced, we must remain alert to its possible consequences. In the recent exhibition The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume, Paris (curated by Antonio Somaini), a number of artistic interventions using both analytic and generative forms of AI (by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Trevor Paglen, Agnieszka Kurant, Hito Steyerl, and Gregory Chatonsky) unveil AI’s political pitfalls while also constructing alternative, antagonistic, counter-hegemonic latent spaces.⁹ Additionally, Ruth Anderwald and Leonhard Grond’s groundbreaking research project “Getting Dizzy” uncovers the liberatory potential of dizziness within somatic architectures.¹⁰  In this way, the Iliggocene functions as a pharmakon: on the one hand, a poison producing dizziness, disequilibrium, and cognitive dissonance; on the other, a condition that informs artistic and spiritual practices (such as Sufi whirling) that generate new poetic somatic-cognitive tools for renewal and emancipatory consciousness.

Warren Neidich, founding director
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art