The acceleration of computational networks has simultaneously reanimated questions of failure and obsolescence/obsoletion, death and life, as of safety and danger. With the rapid expansion of AI in networks, we face rapid data leaks and network crashes, openness, and proprietary enclosure. The pressing, and perhaps irresolvable, philosophical questions of contingency and slippage, open possibility and determinism, repetition and acceleration, predictability and disruption are constitutive of AI-based networks. Additionally, engage questions of AI thinking, notions of cognition, and the idea of sensation during connection, what are the necessary relations of sensation to cognition? How does AI thinking think differently, if its relation to the sensory is reductively computational? What happens when the sensory fails, the senses offering no content, or content differently for thinking to have its conventional inputs? Can AI have intuition? Can it make informed guesses? Can it make Freudian slips, and if so, correct itself?
Keywords: Systemic Fragility, Cognitive Slippage, Speculative Malfunction
This theme traces a nonlinear, discontinuous genealogy of artificial intelligence—not as a singular technological evolution, but as multiple and queered histories shaped by cultural, political, and artistic interventions. Drawing from cyberfeminist strategies and DIY AI practices, among others, the project interrogates the framing of AI as a neutral, inevitable outcome. Instead, the project foregrounds alternative imaginaries: from local grassroots initiatives that reclaim agency in machine learning development to parallel connections between early internet subcultures and our current moment of AI acceleration, typified by uneven access to technology, linguistic and cultural diversity, labour precarity, and environmental harm. Through the metaphor of roots, rhizomes, and branching structures, the theme considers the anatomy of AI as a tangled assemblage of power, language, and affect. It asks: What would it mean to queer the history of AI—to see it as messy, performative, collaborative, and deeply embodied?
Keywords: Counterhistories, Queer Infrastructures, Radical Assemblies
In the intersection of planetary ecological crisis and artificial intelligence advancement, trans-species care emerges as a challenging task. AI is often framed as either a solution or a threat. This theme invites a rethinking of AI through the lens of care—not as a soft supplement to rational systems, but as entangled, diffractive, and affectively charged forces. Under the theme Careful(l) AI: Planetary Commotion and Trans-species Affect, we ask: What might it mean to develop AI with, through, or even as care? We explore how care translates/trans-relates across species boundaries, computational infrastructures, human and nonhuman entanglements, and planetary disturbances. Through a diffractive methodology that highlights mutual interference, we challenge the extractive AI paradigm and imagine pluriversal AI attuned to trans-relationality, vulnerability, and co-becoming.
Keywords: Trans-species Care, Pluriversal AI, Co-becoming
This theme foregrounds the question of where AI is developed, trained, and deployed—examining how locality, language, and geopolitics shape what AI is, and who it serves. With Taiwan as both a technological powerhouse and a site of geopolitical friction, we ask: What does it mean to design AI from Asia, and for Asia, rather than merely adapting systems built elsewhere? How do local histories, linguistic ecologies, indigenous knowledges, and cultural protocols reconfigure assumptions built into AI systems? Drawing from Taiwan’s unique position—technologically advanced, linguistically rich, politically complex—this theme engages the uneven distribution of computational power and the cultural erasures embedded in dominant AI models. It asks how art, design, and humanities practices can make visible the infrastructural and ideological layers of AI, and contribute to the development of systems that are regionally grounded, ethically attuned, and culturally specific.
Keywords: Taiwan/Asia as Origin Sites, Linguistic and Cultural Specificity, Geopolitical Infrastructures of AI
Cultural institutions today are not only a space for preservation and display but a site where artists and the publics come together to make, discuss, and reimagine their relationship to technologies. It is a place for embodied engagement, where critical and creative encounters with AI open up new ways of thinking about intelligence as affective, unpredictable, and relational. This theme explores evolving definitions of intelligence—human, animal, and artificial—through artistic practices rooted in diverse cultural lineages. Some of these practices draw specifically from Southeast and East Asian philosophical traditions, where care, interdependence, and impermanence shape understandings of knowledge and being. Rather than viewing machines as inert tools or existential threats, we ask: Can AI know, feel, or create? What if care and sentience were central to intelligence rather than exceptions? In challenging Western anxieties about the boundaries between human and machine, this theme proposes AI not as a rupture, but as a continuation of the human evolutionary story—material, embodied, and culturally situated.
Keywords: Site of Public Making, Artists and Publics, Asian Artistic Practices, Southeast and East Asian Philosophies, Embodied AI, Cultural Dialogue