On Wednesday, October 22nd, the EpisTEAM project hosted an insightful lunchtime seminar exploring gender issues in technological development through a historical lens. The event featured Professor Janet Abbate, a renowned scholar and Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, USA.

Topic: Gender and the Knower in Computing

Professor Abbate examined how gender as a cultural construct has influenced perceptions of expertise in computing. Drawing on historical examples from the second half of the 20th century, she highlighted women’s experiences in the US and UK and connected these insights to contemporary debates such as data feminism. The talk raised critical questions about the epistemological and ethical implications of digital technologies, particularly AI, and challenged the notion of knowledge as a “gaze from nowhere,” as theorized by Donna Haraway.

Key Themes

• Historical analysis of gendered roles in computing.
• Exploration of feminist critiques and their relevance to AI and digital policy.
• Discussion on situatedness, intentionality, and accountability in computer-generated knowledge.

About the Speaker

Janet Abbate is the author of Inventing the Internet (1999) and Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (2012), and co-editor of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society (2022). Her research focuses on the history, culture, and politics of computing and the Internet.

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From August 18–24, 2025, the Chimerical Intelligence Lab and Baltan Laboratories hosted Beyond the Blue Marble: Summer Camp for Planetary Imaginaries in the stunning setting of Bolsena, Italy. This 7-day program brought together creatives and thinkers from diverse disciplines to explore how image-making can shape alternative planetary imaginaries and influence our shared reality.

Participants engaged in talks, workshops, and collaborative projects, rethinking the iconic Blue Marble image and its role in cosmological ordering. Through historical and philosophical perspectives, the camp questioned how imaginaries impact value systems, economies, and technologies—and how we can reclaim agency in creating new visions for the planet.

The program featured inspiring contributions from guest experts, including Miha Turšič, Corrado Melluso, Laura Tripaldi, Freddy Paul Grunert, and Cristina Fiordimela, who shared insights on art, science, philosophy, and design.

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In light of recent advances in generative AI language and image models, there is a critical need to address the ontological status of computationally generated artifacts. The DXARTS¹ EPISTEAM Summer School explored these developments and challenges through the course of two weeks of intensive technical workshops, thematic discussions, and the public exhibition of collaborative cross-disciplinary artistic interventions that stemmed from those discussions.

^{Exhibition presentation. Photo by Daniel R. Smith}

The Summer School was facilitated by DXARTS faculty members Tivon Rice, Afroditi Psarra, and Laura Luna Castillo and participated by a number of DXARTS PhD candidates and associates along six of EPISTEAM beneficiaries including artists Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi from Apo33 in France, Inés di Loreto, Santiago Pérez and Xavier Hollebecq from UTT, also in France, Ioana Moldovan and Silivan Moldovan from UTCN in Romania, Patrique Dengen from H-da in Germany, José Manuel Ferrández and Gema Benedicto from UPCT in Spain, and Noel Fitzpatrick and Ester Toribio-Roura from TU Dublin in Ireland.

Topics explored in the Summer School

• NLP and the Hyperlocal: As Natural Language Processing has exploded into an international arms-race of Large Language Models, we propose that sometimes smaller can be better. How can small & bespoke datasets be used to fine-tune or detourn LLMs toward more specific and culturally aware outputs? This hyperlocality extends from data to hardware, deploying language models on local off-cloud platforms, such as personal computers and wearable/embedded systems.
• {Techno} Magic & Crafting Digital Artifacts – How can digital technologies harness the enchantment and transformative potential of magic? How can rituals rooted in bodily practice shape new forms of technological interaction? We propose exploring these questions through embodied, participatory experiences, contributing to a growing discourse on technology as a medium for the sacred.
• Ekphrasis and (In)visibility – In Ekphrasis, an intense descriptive analysis of a visual artwork is adopted as a literary device. How can this practice be revisited (creatively and critically) in the contexts of NLP, Computer Vision, and other computationally augmented modes of perception?
• Transmediation – Rather than simply using the text from an NLP system as the final unmediated output, can AI inference be seen as a prompt back to the artist, to be considered, questioned, and developed through another medium (craft, music, performance)?

For the Faculty of DXARTS and EPISTEAM’s Consortium, the Summer School provided opportunities to present their artistic research in the context of such challenging dialogues, alongside contributions from interdisciplinary scholars, philosophers, scientists, designers, and creative practitioners. The exchange between the UW and seconded staff from the EUT /ECT+ Lab in Europe also fertilised a rich ground for networking and continued collaborations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Summer School Exhibition Projects & Prototypes

The last day of the Summer School participants presented their finalised and work-in-progress projects and prototypes.  The significance of this work, that will be continued through EPISTEAM future events and deliverables, is rooted in current relationships between art, technology, and epistemology and involve a meaningful assessment, understanding, and critique of AI’s impacts on cultural production. The Summer School addressed such needs for transdisciplinary responses to overcome siloed thinking of academic fields of study, and to offer alternatives by revisiting questions of speculation at the basis of science, engineering, design and the arts (including performing arts).

The Shadow Feels You by Daniel R. Smith (Creative Director, Mortalsalt)

A black figure in a 100 year old Masonic death costume rides an escalator while playing a broken toy piano. A stack of black cowboy hats tumble down a light well, falling several stories through a brutalist building, directly towards the camera. Overlapping videos of these surreal scenes play while multiple computer generated voices read a text—part country song, part directions for an imagined sound piece:

“‘A silent pattern. A fallen feather…’ ‘Remember. His form.’ ‘A slow and silent climb.’ Vocally fractured—repeating fragments—distorted—as it goes.

^{TSFY installation. Photo by Daniel R. Smith}

“The Shadow Feels You” is an interactive installation which uses machine learning to trigger overlapping/competing video and audio files whenever a black or white cowboy hat is shown to the computer. The text, which serves as the foundation for the entire project, was first generated in MSTY using a Gemma 3:1b artificial intelligence model. The model was trained on a collection of dark, surreal country songs I wrote for a hallucinatory cowboy and resulted from the prompt to “write a country song from the perspective of a vulture eating its best friend.” Visuals from the lyrics inspired the filming of a variety of characters in surreal scenes inside McMahon and Padelford Halls on the University of Washington campus. The audio translation of the text was generated online by multiple speech-to-text tools promising scary “vampire voices.” The final result, programmed in TouchDesigner, is a looping cacophony of sound and imagery which can be navigated by donning either a black or white cowboy hat.

The Machine That Misunderstands (You) by Ines di Loreto, Xavier Hollebecq (UTT, ECT+Lab,EUT)

TMtMY is an interactive system exploring miscommunication, ambiguity, and epistemic disruption in human-AI interaction. The piece invites users to enter a dialogue with an AI-based system that appears responsive but is in fact structured around intentional misalignment. When prompted with a question, the system algorithmically distorts the input (substituting key terms with semantic opposites or unpredictable variants) before passing it to a large language model (Mistral).

^{TMtMY, photo by Silivan Moldovan}

The resulting answer is similarly twisted and finally displayed using a visual caviardage effect: a progressive redaction that renders the output increasingly unreadable.

The result is a layered interactive experience where users encounter the illusion of sense-making, only to find themselves in a recursive breakdown of clarity. The machine never fails outright: it performs failure as a method, staging contradiction and incompleteness as active forces. In doing so, it materialises many of the questions raised in Episteam WP4, particularly around speculative experimentation, alternative epistemologies, and the cognitive friction produced by non-linear or ambiguous feedback loops. The installation reflects critically on the nature of machine-mediated knowledge, simulating how AI systems may appear coherent while distorting or dissolving meaning through layers of abstraction. It proposes a poetic, theatrical reconfiguration of digital interaction (closer to a Beckettian exchange than a utilitarian tool) where users must navigate ambiguity as part of a situated, improvised epistemic act.

In search of Duende (ISOD first iteration) by Ester Toribio Roura (TU Dublin, ECT+Lab of EUT)

The main issue addressed by EPISTEAM is the negative impact of digital technologies on knowledge construction, proposing that diversifying epistemological perspectives is essential for responsible innovation. The digital age is reshaping creativity and art, raising questions about originality, authenticity, and the status of AI-generated art, as well as ethical and intellectual property concerns. Integrating generative AI into art leads to distributed creativity among humans and algorithms, contrasting with the traditional view of creativity as a uniquely human act. While generative AI offers new possibilities, it also risks homogenizing outputs and intensifying intellectual property conflicts, prompting further questions about the uniqueness and emotional value of creative acts in a world filled with similar machine-generated content.

Inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s concept of “Duende” as a force of deep creativity in flamenco and a promoter of dialogue between art forms and epistemologies, ISOD examines embodied human creativity in relation to generative technologies and their power dynamics. It proposes that creativity arising from the Duende serves metaphorically as a “CAPCHA” test, emphasizing the complex, interconnected, and political aspects of artistic practice. The project calls for more embodied, diverse, and situated approaches to technology, understood as Techné, and questions how to address what is unquantifiable in an increasingly rationalized technological world. As part of this inquiry, a hologram prototype based on primary research ethnographic material was created using TouchDesigner and Msty during the EPISTEAM’s Summer School. The prototype interacted with a live performer using wearable technology.

^{ISOD Hologram of dancer Selena Horvath. Photo by Santiago Pérez}

Frames of McMahon Hall by Silivan Moldovan, Ioana Moldovan (UTC, ECT+Lab of EUT), Tivon Rice (UTC, UW)

The video work developed following the DXARTS Summer School at the University of Washington, Seattle explores McMahon Hall, a monumental Brutalist structure, through a multi-perspective, polyvocal narrative. Frames of McMahon Hall brings together emerging technologies and critical spatial inquiry to examine the epistemological frameworks embedded in architectural forms and their environments.

^{FMMH photo by Ioana Moldovan}

The authors assembled the material using MSTY, a program that enabled them to work with a curated library of textual and visual information, forming a controlled yet contextually rich generative environment. The narrative is delivered not by a single speaker, but through a set of distinct voices: the building itself, a journalist, the concrete that composes it, a bird, and an architect. These characters, generated through a combination of curated AI narration and text-to-speech synthesis (via ElevenLabs), create a speculative yet grounded discourse around material memory, architectural intent, and urban folklore. The visual dimension of the work is equally layered, incorporating photogrammetry, short documentary fragments and AI-generated imagery.

By interweaving various generative AIs, computational imaging, and speculative narration, Frames of McMahon Hall investigates how emerging technologies can serve not only as representational tools, but also as instruments for producing new epistemologies. It presents both a portrait of McMahon Hall and a methodological experiment, an interface between site-specificity and algorithmic interpretation.

This work is part architectural study, part speculative fiction, and part inquiry into how machine-augmented perception can reshape our understanding of locality, authorship, and the built environment.

Automatic Speculation by Patrique Dengen (H-da, Germany)

Automatic Speculation is an experimental still image film. A large language model is prompted to take the perspective of a hunchback whale. As the story continues, the model’s temperature or ‚randomness‘ and other parameters are steadily manipulated. The result is ‚read‘ by an ‚AI‘-voice model. On the visual level, real photos of hunchback whales are gradually displaced by increasingly disturbing AI-imaginations. 

^{Photo by Patrique Dengen}

The piece is an experiment in perception: What compels us to attribute human-like entity to technical systems? What can we truly know about real non-human entities, aka animals? How much of what we infer into the non-human is mere projection? And what happens to the sense of meaning if the apparent coherence of AI content is slowly twisted while we listen and watch?

EntropAI by Jenny Pickett & Julien Ottavi (Apo33)

EntropAI is a real-time, generative sound installation built upon the long-term research of APO33’s BOT framework—autonomous, autopoietic systems that evolve sonic environments across extended durations. Developed during the Seattle Summer School, EntropAI will explore computational chaos, machine cognition, and sonic self-organisation through a spatially immersive, AI-driven sound installation.

^{Photo by Apo33}

As part of the installation process, APO33 will lead a DIWO (Do-It-With-Others) participatory workshop during the summer school, inviting students, artists, coders, composers, and theorists to collectively build and modify the EntropAI system. Participants will engage hands-on with the construction of the installation in both conceptual and technical dimensions.

Data Folds by Marinos Koutsomichalis (CUT, Cyprus)

A Data Folds workshop has been facilitated by yours truly as part of the ‘Rhetorical Machines + the Hyperlocal’ event taking place at DX Arts, Seattle US. Data Folds are concerned with creative impromptu interpretations of data employing extempore folding, chasing, and hammering techniques on sheets of metal. On this particular occasion the workshop pivoted on 1mm thick sheets of copper; participants experimented with different ways in which data (of all sorts) could be physicalised on this material.

^{Photo by Marinos Koutsomichalis}

1. DXARTS is a practice and research-based PhD program at the University of Washington. Based in Seattle, artists, researchers, and students work collaboratively to reimagine our emerging relationships with new technologies, while critically engaging with traditional forms. ↩︎

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How are digital technologies changing the production, distribution, and use of knowledge? The participants of the conference “Knowledge in the Age of Digital Re-/Production: Responsible Epistemologies” explored this question on June 4 and 5 in Darmstadt.

The contributions came from the fields of philosophy, media studies, architecture, and art: How does science change when its findings are no longer derived from theories but from AI models? What problems are associated with the entanglement of digital technology and capitalism? And what answers can concepts such as care or the Hindu school of philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, provide?

In a supplementary panel discussion, science communicator Philipp Schrögel, media artist Allapopp, and writing scholar Margret Mundorf discussed AI, authorship, and human creativity in education, science, and the arts, moderated by Martin Steinebach, head of the “Media Security and IT Forensics” department at Fraunhofer SIT|ATHENE.

The events were organized by the European Culture and Technology Lab (ECT Lab+) as part of the EU-funded MSCA SE project “EpisTeaM” and in cooperation with the Schader Foundation.

More insights from the conference can be seen on ECT Lab+ YouTube page.

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On March 28, 2025, the EPISTEAM project hosted the International Online Seminar on Sensing the Body via its digital platform. This interdisciplinary event explored how emerging technologies are reshaping the ways we sense, interpret, and interface with the human body—bringing together experts in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and engineering.

The seminar examined the epistemological, technological, and ethical dimensions of body sensing, focusing on:

• Advances in signal processing and physiological monitoring, enabling continuous tracking of emotional and cognitive states.
• The role of neuroprosthetic technologies in creating bidirectional channels between biology and machines.
• Ethical considerations in human–machine interaction, including privacy, autonomy, and dignity.

Renowned speakers, including Prof. José Manuel Ferrández, Dr. Paul Hayes, and Prof. Eduardo Fernández, shared insights on emotional computing, affective robotics, and neural ethics. A major highlight was the progress in cortical visual neuroprosthesis research, which enables blind individuals to perceive shapes and movement through direct cortical stimulation—a groundbreaking step in neuroengineering.

The seminar emphasized that sensing is not merely a technical process but also a cultural and ethical one. As technology penetrates deeper into cognitive and emotional spheres, ethical frameworks must evolve alongside innovation. Discussions underscored the importance of human-centered design and virtue ethics to ensure that technological progress enhances autonomy, empathy, and meaning.

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The post Epistemic Crises seminar first appeared on EpisTeaM.

In this initial Episteam meeting at the Cyprus University of Technology, Prof. Noel Fitzpatrick and all WP-leaders presented their work packages in this project. The event began with an overview of the MSCA SE and the funding scheme. It was emphasized that MSCA SE deals with three dimensions of mobility: intersectoral, international and interdisciplinary. New aspects were also highlighted such as the emphasis on transdisciplinarity. Episteam deals with transnational major thematic in Epistemology in STEAM disciplines. One of the main questions addressed by Episteam is how this impacts how knowledge is constructed from arts and new media to nanotechnology (the whole spectrum). This event laid out the structure for the project and addressed the financial management and reporting schedule.

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Sometimes it’s nice to put in text just to get an idea of how text will fill in a space on your website.

Traditionally our industry has used Lorem Ipsum, which is placeholder text written in Latin. Unfortunately, not everyone is familiar with Lorem Ipsum and that can lead to confusion. I can’t tell you how many times clients have asked me why their website is in another language!

The post Posts #3 first appeared on EpisTeaM.

Sometimes it’s nice to put in text just to get an idea of how text will fill in a space on your website.

Traditionally our industry has used Lorem Ipsum, which is placeholder text written in Latin. Unfortunately, not everyone is familiar with Lorem Ipsum and that can lead to confusion. I can’t tell you how many times clients have asked me why their website is in another language!

The post Posts #2 first appeared on EpisTeaM.

Sometimes it’s nice to put in text just to get an idea of how text will fill in a space on your website.

Traditionally our industry has used Lorem Ipsum, which is placeholder text written in Latin. Unfortunately, not everyone is familiar with Lorem Ipsum and that can lead to confusion. I can’t tell you how many times clients have asked me why their website is in another language!

The post Posts #1 first appeared on EpisTeaM.