In the Fog of the Digital: AI and Neural-Digital Entanglement in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2026 | Berlin
June 29 – July 4
Faculty Bios
Nora Al-Badri is a multidisciplinary conceptual media artist with a German-Iraqi background. Her work is research-based, paradisciplinary, and postcolonial. She graduated in Political Sciences from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and is a lecturer at ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich). Her practice explores the politics and emancipatory potential of emerging technologies such as machine intelligence and data sculpting. Al-Badri’s artistic material is a speculative archaeology from fossils to artefacts, as well as performative interventions in museums and public spaces that respond to inherent power structures. In 2025, she was a fellow and artist-in-residence at both the Max Planck Institute for Humans and Computers and Freie Universität Berlin. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Applied Arts Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, Design Biennial Istanbul, ZKM Karlsruhe, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Science Gallery in Dublin, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Jeu de Paume in Paris, European Media Art Festival, Transmediale, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Ars Electronica, and REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), among others. She lives and works in Berlin.
Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond have conducted artistic research on dizziness for over fifteen years. They led the research projects Dizziness – A Resource (2014–2017) and Navigating Dizziness Together (2020–2024). From 2021 to 2024, they served as professors in the PhD in Art programme and were guest professors at ARC mdw in 2025. Since 1999, they have worked as an artist duo, exhibiting at renowned institutions including Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Himalayas Art Museum (Shanghai), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). Together with Katrin Bucher Trantow, they co-curated exhibitions on dizziness at CCA Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw) and Kunsthaus Graz. They also co-curated the exhibition and event cycle Iliggocene – The Age of Dizziness (2026) with Sergio Edelsztein, presented at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Videoart at Midnight (VAM), the Berlin Museum of Medical History at Charité, in Berlin, and Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Their publications include the edited volumes Dizziness – A Resource (2019, Sternberg Press/MIT Press) and The Arts of Resistance (2025, Verlag für Moderne Kunst), as well as the artist novel and essay Der Abgrund braucht (2026), co-authored with A. Kim and L. Grond. Additionally, they produced the podcast series On Certain Groundlessness (2024) with Sergio Edelsztein, featuring contributions by Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, Tim Etchells, Trevor Paglen, Ben Spatz, among others. The series has reached audiences in over fifty countries. More information is available at http://www.on-dizziness.com and https://culture-of-resistance.eu/.
Kader Attia is a multidisciplinary artist who draws upon the lived experiences of two disparate cultural identities: Algerian and French. From this place of cultural intermediacy, Attia’s practice interrogates sociopolitical complexities rooted in histories of colonialism and cultural obfuscation. Recent solo exhibitions include Le Paradis Perdu at CAAC, Seville (2025); A Descent into Paradise at MUAC, Mexico City, and Amparo Museum, Puebla (2025); Urgency of Existence at Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok (2024); J’Accuse ! at Berlinische Galerie (2024); On Silence at Mathaf, Doha (2021); Remembering the Future at Kunsthaus Zürich (2020); and The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery, London (2019). Earlier presentations include major exhibitions at MMK Frankfurt, Whitechapel Gallery, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His work has appeared in international exhibitions including the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025), the 13th Gwangju Biennial (2020), dOCUMENTA (13), and presentations at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Attia’s work is held in major public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Tate, Museo Jumex, and MoMA. He was curator of the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022) and has received numerous awards, including the Joan Miró Prize (2017), Yanghyun Prize (2017), and Prix Marcel Duchamp (2016). He lives and works between Berlin and Paris.
David W. Bates is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society and previously served as Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He received his PhD in European History from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between technology and cognition, as well as the history of political and legal thought. His book An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age was published by the University of Chicago Press (2024). He is the author of Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell University Press, 2002) and States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (Columbia University Press, 2011). He also co-edited (with Nima Bassiri) Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject (Fordham University Press, 2015). Other publications include articles on topics such as cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and twentieth-century political and legal theory.
Grégory Chatonsky is a French-Canadian artist whose work explores the troubled zone between human beings and technology. Engaging themes of memory, extinction, and resurrection, he constructs fictions without narration. In 1994, he founded Incident.net, one of the early Net art platforms. During the 2000s, he investigated digital materiality as ruin and flux. From 2009 onward, he began experimenting with artificial intelligence, and between 2017 and 2019 he organized a seminar at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on the impact of artificial imagination on art. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, MOCA Taipei, Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Hubei Wuhan Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, CIAP Vassivière, Collection Lambert, MAC VAL, and the Moody Center, among others. His works are held in public and private collections including CNAP, FRAC Île-de-France, FAC, BnF, Hubei Museum, and the Musée Granet. Chatonsky has taught at Le Fresnoy, UQAM, Artec, and Musashino Art University. He has served on expert committees for the AI Act and the AI Summit, and in 2017 authored a report for the French Ministry of Culture on the impact of generative AI on cultural industries.
Sergio Edelsztein was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1956. He studied at the Tel Aviv University and shortly after founded Artifact, a commercial gallery in Tel Aviv (1987-1996). In 1998, Edelsztein founded The Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and has served as its director and chief curator until 2018. Within the framework of the CCA he curated seven performance art biennials (titled “Blurrr”) and five international video art biennials (“VideoZone”). Other major exhibitions curated for the CCA include solo shows of Guy Ben Ner, Roee Rosen, Yael Bartana, Marina Abramoviç, Christian Jankowski, Rosa Barba, Ceal Floyer, Gary Hill and many more. Edelsztein curated the Israeli participation of the 24th Sao Paulo Biennial in 1998, and the 2005 and 2013 Israeli Pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Since 1995 he has curated and produced exhibitions and time-based events, has lectured, presented video programs and published texts in numerous outlets in Israel, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Austria, Germany, China, the USA, Switzerland, and Argentina, and he writes extensively for catalogues, web-sites and publications throughout the world. In 2020 he started a record label called Ediciones Inauditas that publishes original sound pieces by conceptual artists, like Jimmie Durham, Rosa Barba, Anri Sala, Christine Sun Kim and others (www.ediciones-inauditas.art). Since 2019, he has lived in Berlin where he is associate curator at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.
Claire Fontaine is a collective, conceptual, and feminist artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in Paris in 2004. Since 2017, they have lived and worked in Palermo. Present in numerous museum collections, Claire Fontaine articulates a space of resistance within the art world, opposing the transformation of artistic authorship into brand identity and the homogenization of formats and content in times of censorship and crisis. The 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, titled Stranieri Ovunque / Foreigners Everywhere (2024), took its name from the collective’s series “Foreigners Everywhere,” including a large-scale installation of sixty neon works suspended above the lagoon in the Gaggiandre. Their work was also presented in the Giardini and the Arsenale, as well as in the Vatican Pavilion exhibition With Your Eyes, installed inside the functioning women’s prison on Giudecca. Anthologies of their writings have been published in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese by Semiotext(e), Diaphanes, DeriveApprodi, and GLAC éditions. The first critical study of their practice and philosophical position, Claire Fontaine: A User’s Manual by Anita Chari, was published by Lenz Press in 2024. In 2025, Claire Fontaine was awarded a project by the Italian Cultural Institute in London, Show Less, whose first part was presented at Mimosa House and will open at the WoW Foundation in Rome in 2027, alongside a retrospective curated by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
Yuk Hui is Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions and directs the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology. Hui studied computer engineering at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a PhD thesis under Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) at Goldsmiths University London, and obtained his Habilitation in philosophy from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Hui is author of several monographs that have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press/e-flux, 2021), Post-Europe (Urbanomic/Sequence, 2024), Machine and Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press,2024) and Kant Machine (Bloomsbury, 2026). Hui is co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015) and editor of Philosophy after Automation (Philosophy Today, Vol.65. No.2, 2021), Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction (2024) among others. Since 2014, Hui has been the convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology and sits as a juror of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture since 2020 (currently as jury chair). For a full list of my publications, please visit my personal websiteOpens external.
Agnieszka Kurant investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and forms of exploitation within digital capitalism. Her works function as speculative thought experiments developed in collaboration with scientists and philosophers. Oscillating among biological, digital, and geological realms, her practice explores plural subjectivity, the evolution of living systems, culture and technology, and the implications of automation and cybernetics. Kurant was Artist Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (2019–21); Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2017–20); and Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2018). She was Artist in Residence at Art Explora, Paris (2022), and Visiting Artist at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University (2023). Her solo exhibitions include Mudam Luxembourg (2024); Hannover Kunstverein (2023); Kunsthal Gent (2023); and Castello di Rivoli (2021–22). In 2015, she received a commission for the façade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and in 2021–22 completed a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. In 2010, she coauthored the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture with Aleksandra Wasilkowska. Her honors include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Art + Technology Award (2020); the Frontier Art Prize (2019); and the Google AMI Grant (2022). Her monograph Collective Intelligence, coedited by Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey, was published by Sternberg Press and MIT Press in 2025.
Liz Magic Laser is a video and performance artist from New York City. Her work examines the aesthetics of the absurd – how political power performs upon us with brazen theatricality. Drawing on the tradition of the medieval jester and the buffon theater of Jacques Lecoq, Laser mines caustic humor as a language to reckon with using prohibited or inflammatory issues. “Convulsive States,” her magnum opus video installation on hysteria, Jean-Martin Charcot, and the role of performance art in the birth of psychiatry, has toured in various incarnations, including Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2023); a film screening at Tate Modern, London (2023); STUK, Leuven (2024); The Watermill Center, New York (2024); the Denver Art Museum; and the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Paris (2025), where the central video was filmed. Laser’s work has also been presented at institutions including Centre Pompidou (Paris), Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, ICA Boston, and Luxembourg + Co., New York. In September 2024, her analysis of President Trump’s appropriation of the raised-fist gesture of civic resistance was published in The New York Times.
Anna Longo is a philosopher and member of the LCSP laboratory at Université Paris Cité. She received a PhD in aesthetics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and has taught at several universities in France and the United States. Her research spans multiple fields and seeks to understand modes of subjectivation in the context of the digital revolution. Her recent books include Le jeu de l’induction: automatisation de la connaissance et réflexion philosophique (Mimesis Edizioni, 2022); Deleuze, une philosophie de la multiplicité (Ellipses, 2024); and Cannibalisme civilisationnel (forthcoming). Published papers are available here: https://u-paris.academia.edu/AnnaLongo.
David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames & Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He co-organized the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, which opened at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, in 2015. Joselit is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture. His book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press, 2020) received the Robert Motherwell Book Award in 2021. His most recent publications include Art’s Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023) and the co-authored (with Anne Gunnison) volume Art/Work: Plastics (Princeton University Press, 2025).
Warren Neidich works between New York City and Paris. He studied visual art, neuroscience, medicine, and architecture. His multimedia practice—encompassing neon, photography, video, and painting—pursues what he terms a “third way” of epistemological justice, in which all forms of knowledge are regarded as sacred and essential to planetary survival. Since 2015, he has served as founding director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. He is a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine and a correspondent for 02 Magazine. He has taught at institutions including Brown University; Harvard Graduate School of Design; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; California Institute of the Arts; University of Oxford; University of Cambridge; Goldsmiths, University of London (tutor, 2004–8); Sorbonne University; Central Saint Martins; and Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin (professor, 2017–19). He is editor of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Parts I–III; author of An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader (Archive Books) and Neuromacht (Merve Verlag); and coeditor, with Deborah Hauptmann, of Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics (010 Publishers).
Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he is Principal Investigator of the five-year ERC Consolidator project The Culture of Algorithmic Models: Advancing the Historical Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence (AIMODELS). His research focuses on the intersection of philosophy of mind and language, political economy, and forms of automation such as artificial intelligence. Among other publications, he edited the anthology Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (Meson Press, 2015) and co-authored, with Vladan Joler, the visual essay “The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism” (AI & Society, 2022). He is the author of The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023), which received the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2024 for the best book in the tradition of critical theory. His writing has also appeared in AI & Society, Electra, e-flux, Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, Les Mondes du Travail, Micromega, Multitudes, Parrhesia, Qui Parle, Radical Philosophy, Sociologia del lavoro, South Atlantic Quarterly, Tecnoscienza, and Theory, Culture & Society.
Martha Schwendener is an art historian and art critic for The New York Times. She is Visiting Associate Professor at New York University and Researcher in Residence at the Vilém Flusser Archive, Berlin. She is the editor of Vilém Flusser’s Essays // Artforum (Metaflux, 2017) and her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Afterimage, Bookforum, Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, October, and many other publications.
Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has been a visiting professor at Yale University (2022) and at Harvard University (2024, 2025). His current research and curatorial work focus on the impact of artificial intelligence on images, visual culture, photography, cinema, and contemporary art. He is chief curator of The World Through AI, presented at the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2025), and at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2026). He is also curating Energies of AI for MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon. His recent publications include “Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture” (Grey Room, no. 94, Fall 2023) and “A Theory of Latent Spaces” in the catalogue of The World Through AI (Paris: Jeu de Paume / JBE Books, 2025).
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