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

June 29 – July 4

“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.”
—Achille Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary” (2021)

“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.”
—Antonio Somaini, The World Through AI (2025)

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 consider artistic and aesthetic countermeasures.

The phrase the “fog of the digital” is reminiscent of the earlier concept “fog of war” (generally attributed to the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz) to describe the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the theater of war. The term highlights the difficulty of gathering accurate and timely information in a dynamic, unpredictable, and unsteady immersive environments, and points to the visually obscuring effects of billowing clouds of smoke and the associated cacophony of discordant sounds emanating from the bombardment surrounding the individual soldier and affecting their corporal senses and clarity of thought.

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 proletariats physically working on the assembly line have been transformed into cognitariats and micro-laborers working in front of screens producing data. This data is not simply passively collected in order to induce psycho-ergonomic consumerism, but has active and sometimes lethal effects. If the fog of early digitality wasn’t enough, the addition of AI has added more ammunition to the causes of disorientation.

The fog of the digital is accentuated by information overload, fake news and deep fakes, the attention (and inattention) economy, deep surveillance and the production of new forms of automation that have added to precarity and diffuse anxiety and may even replace human agency. As we enter the late phase of cognitive capitalism, the brain and its neural commons, its neural plasticity, have become the focus of capitalistic adventurism and exploitation. Advanced artificial intelligence (AI), 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) create a material and immaterial cocktail with both potential and real paralyzing effects, overwhelming our somatic empatho-mnemotechnical systems that control reason and creativity with political consequences.

More ominous still are reports seen in the academic context. A recent article, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task” by Nathalie Kosmyna and others, shows how using large language models (LLM) for writing essays results in cognitive offloading which may increase cognitive atrophy through excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions, possibly challenging our capacity to think freely and autonomously. In fact, in this group, the frontal lobes may have switched from generating content to supervising AI-driven content. Has Bernard Stiegler’s premonition in Automatic Society, Volume 1: The Future of Work (2016) that an effect of the externalization and outsourcing of our cognitive abilities to artificial technics has “led hyper-industrial societies towards a new stage of proletarianization – through which the hyper-industrial age becomes the era of systemic [and functional] stupidity” proved true?

With AI permeating our lives more and more, “In the Fog of the Digital” seeks to understand how this has come to play in governmentalized arenas. Right-wing governments in concert with Big Tech and Big Data, especially in China and the United States, have embraced bio-technological power to formulate techno-ergonomically neural normativity as an inducer of an easily governed constituency. In other words, human cognitive abilities and processes are exploited by the cognitive machines of large language models such as ChatGPT to induce a complicit human-digital wetware, the lifeblood of digital capitalism. We will explore the power of art to create strategies of resistance that produce heterogenous neural diversity; a multiplicity made up of singularities each having a unique free will. Individualized latent spaces and disruptive psycho-cerebral technologies, such as the liberatory potential of dizziness and ceremonial serotonergic psychedelic interventions, will be explored as antidotes to the dopaminergic spectacle-laced theatrics of twenty-first century digitally mediated capitalism.

—Warren Neidich, founder/director