Emerging technologies like Generative AI, often come with the velocity of inevitability. They proliferate quickly, become insidious in our everyday practice and naturalise pre-wired responses that are mandated by the architectures, design, and spread that are coded into these technologies. This input thinks about the breathlessness, the newness, and the immediateness of Generative AI, as facilitating ‚generative anxiety‘ – a seemingly resistant affect that intends to slow, question, resist, or stop the expansive spread of Generative AI, but instead facilitates its profileration and naturalisation. Drawing from our research on the role that anxiety plays, and its inefficacy at refusing these technologies, I draw from three different projects around Generative AI pedagogy and narrative change practice to offer speculation, anticipation, and pause as epistemic and material positionalities that intervene in GenAI futures through collective action. 

Texts:

• Shah, Nishant (2024). The unbearable oldness of generative artificial intelligence: Or the re-making of digital narratives in times of ChatGPT. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 27(4), 769-777. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231223572
• Shah, Nishant (2025). Doing things otherwise: Liveability as an epistemic reorientation to interdisciplinary work. Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society. 2025;1:e3. https://doi.org/10.1017/cfc.2025.10006

Nishant Shah is Professor of Global Media & Culture at Chinese University of Hong Kong, directing the Digital Narratives Studio and Masters in Global Communication. He is Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University and a knowledge partner to the Feminist Internet Research Network, and Take a Pause Fund. His work sits at intersections of digital technologies, feminist/queer theory, and social justice, focusing on south-south connections through projects like the Generative AI Network (:GAIN), building anticipatory skills for collective futures, Possible AIs Speculative Technology Institute, equipping movement builders to imagine and build alternative AIs.

Since 2020, some of Silicon Valley’s defining companies and most visible CEOs have picked up and moved to Texas. Hewlett-Packard is now headquartered in Houston; Oracle and Tesla have moved to Austin. Elon Musk calls the state home, as does Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies. This talk will argue that their moves reflect a wider embrace of a set of beliefs anchored in the history of the region: the Texan Ideology. Proponents of this ideology embrace fantasies of an endless frontier, celebrate the cowboy entrepreneur, and claim to hate the institutions of government even as they siphon off government resources. The talk shows how these ideas are rooted in Texas’s history as a religious refuge in the 18^th century, an independent Republic in the 19th, and an oil drilling and ranching mecca in the 20th. It also shows how these ideas challenge the ethic of care. The Texan Ideology promises that collective wellbeing depends on segregation, exploitation and patriarchal governance. The ethic of care suggests that citizens have an equal responsibility to tend to one another. As such, the talk concludes, the ethic of care stands as a powerful ideological bulwark against the rise of authoritarianism. 

Texts:

• The Texan Ideology. Silicon Valley looks for Lebensraum in the Bible Belt: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-texan-ideology-turner  
• Machine Politics. The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism: https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/machine-politics-facebook-political-polarization/ 

Fred Turner is a Professor in the Departments of Communication and Art and Art History at Stanford University, focusing on media, technology and American cultural history. Fred Turner’s research and teaching focus on media technology and cultural change. He is especially interested in the ways that emerging media have helped shape American life since World War II.
Turner is the author of three books: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries.

In our session we present our project: „Intensive Milieus: Becoming Human in the Loop“ is an interdisciplinary research and performance project led by Irina Kaldrack, Martina Leeker, and Moritz Wehrmann. The project explores the dense, affective configurations that may emerge when humans and machines enter into new relations.

We unfold conversation as the current predominant mode of interaction with Large Language Models (LLM). The AI instances act as discursive entities that respond, question, comment and eventually blur the boundaries of origin, intellect and agency. Through the lens of a contemporary spiritism, we examine a magical relation with AI. This evokes a „ghostly“ presence of automated intelligence, allowing for an uncanny exchange between human experience and machine processing.

Our workshop will build on these experiences to explore vibe coding as another way of relating to AIs.

Moritz Wehrmann is a media artist and lecturer at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His artistic work is situated at the intersection of art and science. He is particularly interested in the possibilities and critical aspects of artificial intelligence, as well as the analog and digital forms of human–machine interaction. In addition to working with the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Humboldt University Berlin, he was affiliated with the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy (IKKM). His works have been exhibited at Ars Electronica in Linz and Tokyo, at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden.

Irina Kaldrack studied mathematics (diploma) and theatre studies (minor) in Mainz and Berlin. She earned her doctorate in cultural studies with a dissertation on interactive performances. Since 2009 she has been teaching and conducting researching in media studies, and from 2015 to 2021 also in transformation design. Since winter semester 2022/23, Irina Kaldrack is lecturer in Society and Digitalization. She was a professor at the Foreign Studies College of Hunan Normal University in Changsha, China (spring semester 2022), and held the interim professorship for „Knowledge Cultures in the Digital Age“ at the University of Fine Arts Braunschweig (2015-2021). Her research focuses on sustainability and digitalization, the interrelations between digital media cultures, community building and society, as well as methods of media studies at the intersection of design processes, artistic practice, and cultural studies-oriented media research.

This wide-ranging talk will review the extensive terraforming effort that has accompanied and powered the computing (and now AI) revolution, and the no less extensive effort to make this work disappear: via strategic supply chain management, via regulatory (and deregulatory) jiu jitsu, and via metaphor and ideology. It will review theories of care and repair (and where they meet and part ways) and explore a notion of ‘working relations’ as a third way of characterizing human relations to place, things, and planet. It will then ask if /where/when/how different planetary relations with computing might be established (where planetary includes the very big and also very small) and what small steps towards a working relation might be ventured under the compromised conditions of the present.

Steven Jackson is a Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies and Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell University.  His work combines theoretical and methodological traditions from pragmatism, critical theory, and the interpretive social sciences to study how people build and maintain order, value and meaning in and with the worlds around them.  He’s especially interested in problems of infrastructure, repair, and hope, and the times and places where new computational practices meet shifting social and material worlds, with implications for sustainability, inequality, and collectivity.  His most recent venture is the Computing On Earth Lab, an experimental collaboration that brings together social scientists, humanists, artists and engineers to rethink the material and planetary foundations of computing. For more information, see: https://infosci.cornell.edu/content/jackson.

In times of planetary crisis, game makers are increasingly engaging with ecological concerns as part of their creative and production practices. Ethnographic research with developers and industry professionals reveals how ecological themes are addressed in game design – from nature and climate crisis narratives to concrete energy-saving measures in production and a deeper ecological awareness of their role within a resource-intensive industry.

These diverse, bottom-up strategies exemplify how care for both people and the planet is enacted through attention to planetary relations in local action, such as environmental impact, resource use, and responsibility across digital value chains. Framed as planetary play, this talk explores game development as a practice of care that connects global ecological challenges with deeply local work practices. By foregrounding the situated actions of game makers, we highlight how play and playfulness offer meaningful ways to engage with planetary conditions and imagine more sustainable futures.

Sonia Fizek is a professor of Media and Game Studies at the Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences, and a visiting professor at the University of Lower Silesia, Wroclaw (Poland). She is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Her latest book, Playing at a Distance (MIT Press 2022), explores video game aesthetics, focusing on automation, AI, and posthuman play. Fizek’s current research concentrates on environmental sustainability in video games. She leads the “Greening Games” project (2021-2024) and is the scientific lead for “STRATEGIES. Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries” (2024-2027, www.strategieshorizon.eu).

Ruth Dorothea Eggel is a cultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer, currently exploring sustainable game development practices in the EU Horizon project “STRATEGIES – Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries” (www.strategieshorizon.eu) at the Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences. Her research concentrates on the ethnography of technosocial lifeworlds and the anthropology of play and games. Her dissertation, Embodying Gaming (University of Bonn 2024), explored the materialities and embodiments of gaming culture at gaming events in Europe. She was a lecturer at the Universities of Bonn, Graz, and Vienna and is co-editor of the journal Kuckuck. Notizen zur Alltagskultur.