AI² – Artistic Inquiry x Artificial Intelligence
AI is evolving at breakneck speed – and it’s completely reshaping the landscapes of pedagogy, art and knowledge production as we know them.
Across three projects, AI2 seeks to explore the ethical, cultural and environmental impacts of this shift and develop new modes of engaging with the technology through artistic inquiry and transdisciplinary collaboration.
AI² Consortium Partners
Slow AI material playground with Angelo Custodio, March 2025
Slow AI
Slow AI aims to foster a critical, ethical, and sustainable relationship with AI by reimagining how we engage with these technologies in our societies, helping us speculate alternative presents and futures with AI technologies.
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Nederland Intitute for Sound and Vision.
AI workshop at IDlab – ATD.
AI Greenhouse:
Cultivating Responsible Engagement with AI in Filmmaking.
Netherlands Film Academy Research Department at the Amsterdam University of the Arts, supported by cultural partner AIxDESIGN.
Users interacting with the Film Catcher installation at the Eye filmmuseum.
Image: Jordi Wallenburg
Archival Landscapes of AI
Archival Landscapes of AI promotes environmental sustainability through archival practices, exploring how AI relates to historical narratives and environmental histories.
Informatics Institute & Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, supported by cultural partner EYE Filmmuseum.
Events
The Rhine as Liquid Archive: Towards New Mythologies with Slow AI
Artists Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen, writer Nat Muller, and researchers at the Visual Methodologies Collective (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) are developing a local, slow-AI-driven story generator and invite you to explore how training an AI on curated data and playing with its settings affects the kind of outputs it produces.
We will explore how new myths of the Rhine—in which rivers speak, trees pass judgment, and humans are in constant transformation between human, phantom, or animal—offer an alternative perspective on the relationship between humans and nature, and how a DIY, small AI that is intentionally built to be contemplative and poetic rather than conclusive and concise could help inspire different forms of imagination.
11 December 2025 – Nieuwe Teertuinen, Amsterdam
Cinema Thinking Through Machines: Artefacto on AI & Documentary
What happens when cinema learns to think through machines? How do we maintain documentary integrity when any image could be synthetic? This artist lecture features Barcelona-based filmmakers and researchers Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero from Artefacto Films, exploring how machine vision and generative AI are reshaping documentary practice. Through projects like Membrana, Artifacts of War, and 09/05/1982, they reveal cinema as an expanded field of thought—one that learns through algorithms, datasets, and probabilistic imagination. This isn’t about whether to use AI tools, but how we learn to think through machines, make processes visible, and turn uncertainty into a new form of truth.
13 November 2025 – Netherlands Film Academy
Symposium: Slow AI – Practices of Thinking, Sensing, and Refusing
Join us on 15 May at Framer Framed for Slow AI: Practices of Thinking, Sensing, and Refusing, a day-long symposium reimagining artificial intelligence through artistic practice and the lenses of ethics, relationality, and refusal. Structured around three thematic blocks, the symposium pairs brief presentations with extended collective conversations, bringing together artists, theorists, designers, and technologists working across disciplines and tempos.
15 May 2025 – Framer Framed
By cross-pollinating artistic and scientific research, the AI2– Artistic Inquiry x Artificial Intelligence consortium aims to provide holistic perspectives on AI technologies, that include human and more-than-human experience, ethical considerations, and planetary awareness towards more just futures.
This project in the research programme Innovation and Networks is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the grants:
Archival Landscapes of AI (NWA.1418.24.008)
AI Greenhouse (NWA.1418.24.013)
Slow AI (NWA.1418.24.036)
