On Friday, October 17th, the Shifting Power team hosted the second “After AI?” symposium”. This interdisciplinary and varied event brought together 11 researchers, artists and other AI enthusiasts/critics to explore who, what or when is after AI. Throughout the day over 120 attendees joined the event, delivered on zoom.
(Thumbnail image caption: Robbie Daniels, video still from “JerBerJones and The Spirits: Fashioning Myth After AI”)
For two years the Shifting Power team has been exploring the material and symbolic capacities of AI, as we have come to know it so far, through the lens of “after.” Approaching AI in this way has enabled us to consider both the temporalities of AI (science fiction pasts, speculative futures, the speed at which AI scholarship and technological development move through our worlds) and the scale of our investment in AI (how are we choosing to engage, or not, with AI; how desire might interplay with our social, technical, and academic approaches to, or articulations of, AI).
By widening the participation in conversations like this to be fully interdisciplinary – and, perhaps even post-disciplinary in terms of the epistemologies that inform how we have these discussions – we start building competencies for working together on the transformative impacts AI will have, for better or for worse. We begin to develop shared vocabularies or at least understand each other’s words a bit more clearly. We also find ourselves in the pathway of perspectives we might have not otherwise encountered in our disciplinary, cultural and political silos.
(Image caption: From Retno Larasati’s presentation, slide 5 from “What comes after (AI) trust”.)
Speakers explored artistic and social experimentation with AI, tempting questions of provenance, power, prestige. Others considered situations of trust and faith in relation to techno-ideological shifts in our world, giving way to discussions of divinity – who profits from the prophets of AI? We were invited to approach borderlands as constructed sites of embodiment and technology and were left to consider the value of raising (building up) or razing (burning down) such spaces. Panellists also explored the capacity for dislocation and disruption within and because of AI, and the persistence of racial and gendered violence in our speculative futures.
The symposium also featured performative essays by artists and scholars who wanted to approach their engagement with AI through different modalities. Through a sonic essay we experienced a common concern of artist: that artificial intelligences limit the pleasures of practice and failure. Though a music video we approached the excitement of making with artificial intelligences: inspiration through a sense of limitless creativity. And through speculative fiction we experienced the possibilities of a future collapse of the promise of AI.
Notably, 2025’s participants and attendees seemed to be focussed on the somatic relation to artificial intelligences, considering the after-effects of and on the body (and bodies: queer, Asian, migrant etc). Such a politics of presence was called into the space by Dr Hunt’s opening remarks, considering a queer approach to AI as an embodied technique at once archival and performative. While 2024’s symposium certainly considered art and aesthetics, the focus was perhaps more anthropological: from the outside in. Our 2025 symposium approached practice ethnographically: from the inside out, generally. Put another way, 2024 seems to have approached the ecological limits of AI, and 2025 considered the lived experience of such an ecology, as it has grown and changed rapidly.
(Image caption: From Grace Turtle’s presentation, slide 13: “A provocation to begin at the end. Hoy vamos a tumbar…”.)
After AI has enabled us to draw together a range of practices to approach the ethical dimensions of what AI does, more so than defining what it is or even what it should be. As we asked all our participants and attendees on the 17th:
What are your investments in AI? What will have become of our world because of AI?
Documentation of both the 2024 and 2025 symposia will be made available here. Recordings will also be made available on the Shifting Power website.
Shifting Power extends its thanks to our program committee: Dr Ben Sweeting from the Radical Research Methodologies group at the University of Brighton, Dr Aisling Third from the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University, Dr Syed Mustafa Ali from the School of Computing and Communications at the Open University, and artist and filmmaker Liz Rosenfeld.
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