Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm: Artistic Practice in the Age of LLMs: From 2016 to Today

This session turns to the present, examining today’s AI landscape through the historical lens of the Connection Machine and its early visions of distributed intelligence. While massively parallel architectures once embodied technological optimism about “thinking machines,” contemporary AI systems — from large language models to data-driven infrastructures — raise urgent questions about power, bias, and responsibility. Bringing together artists and theorists, this section approaches AI from critical and intersectional perspectives. What kinds of knowledge, labor, and data underpin today’s large-scale AI systems? Whose voices remain invisible or are deliberately silenced? In what ways do current AI systems reproduce colonial logics? And how might artistic practices help to expose, challenge, and reimagine the socio-technical systems behind AI?