Our new browser extension traces your web browsing to the data centers behind it, the real buildings with real addresses where your internet actually lives, and the droughts, energy battles, and community resistance playing out around them. Private by design, free and open source.

It's not in the Chrome or Firefox stores yet, so for now it's a manual install: grab the latest release (click on the zip file under Assets), unzip it, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode (toggle top right), then "Load unpacked" the folder.

This is where we need you. Trace a few sites, tell us what you find, what you uncover, where it breaks, what else you imagine possible. Running research, field trips, or workshops on data centers and internet materiality? We especially want to hear from you. Already curious what's been traced so far? Browse the community map.

Shout out to Arran, Andrea, Ploi and Nadia for making it all come together, and to Stimuleringsfonds for making it possible.

An instrument of memory. That's the closest translation of Saz-e-yaad, the music-making tool built during our Open Culture Tech residency with Lacuna (Mihir Raina) and ML researcher Moisés Horta Valenzuela, aka hexorcismos.

Over a year they turned rare recordings of Kashmiri folk and classical music from the 80s and 90s, shared with consent by Ravimech Studios, into an ML-ready archive, trained generative models on it, and wrapped the lot into a standalone desktop instrument. Feed it audio or a text prompt and it makes new sound in the style of the archive, ready to drag into Ableton. In May, Lacuna took it on stage at De Helling in Utrecht, where one visitor described it as "both traditional and experimental."

The code is live for anyone to tinker with, and the full process, dead ends included, is written up in the project wrap.

Submissions close at the end of August, so consider this the nudge. We're building Grain, a community cookbook of critical and creative AI literacy exercises for educators across film, audiovisual and creative practice, with the Netherlands Film Academy. If you've run an exercise that gets a room thinking critically and making with AI, the kind of thing you'd hand to another educator to run themselves, we want the recipe. Contributors get credit, a print copy, and an invite to the launch, plus a need-based €150 per recipe for freelancers and independents.

Rather cook it live? On Wed 12 August we're running a 30-minute session where you bring a rough exercise and we turn it into a recipe on the spot.

This November we're opening an exhibition and public programme about AI at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, built entirely from the national collection. Long before neural nets, libraries were the machines we made to organise human knowledge. We're inviting three things: a performance for opening night, workshops to run across the three-month show, and existing artworks to include. Paid.

After a very happy collab back in June, we're excited to be pairing up with Geoffrey again! In September he's back for two: an artist lecture, The Performance of the Algorithm, and a full-day workshop, Quantum Editing: A 9-Click Film, both at the Netherlands Film Academy as part of AI Greenhouse, our two-year collaboration on responsible AI in filmmaking and film education. 10 and 11 September in Amsterdam, and 40 people have already claimed a seat. Both are free, both need an RSVP.

ABOUT THE LECTURE
🎤 Artist lecture + discussion + drinks
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
🗓 Thu Sept 10, 18:30-21:00
💰 Free, RSVP required → luma.com/icuc0sgn

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
🧰 Full day hands-on workshop
🗓 Fri Sept 11, 10:00-17:00
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
💰 Free. Limited seats, allocated by selection → luma.com/ceczx0se

Our online edition with ekip (Edinburgh's Morgan Currie and Caitlin McDonald), Sound & Vision's Rasa Bočytė, and our own team: a zine-making workshop and panel on what AI does to online collections and archives.

Thu 27 August, 11:00-15:00 CEST.

We're helping curate an AI Games Café for an academic conference, and we're taking recommendations: if there's a game about AI, physical or digital, that you think belongs in the room, send it our way. Budgets are academic-sized, but we can buy physical copies and license digital ones.

Margarita Ryzhakova joins us for three months as our design intern, on an Erasmus placement from UMPRUM in Prague. She'll be rebuilding our website in Framer and making event and print material with Ana. She's in Amsterdam from 7 September, so say hi if you spot her.

On 22 July we opened the doors for the first time in far too long, and it was lovely. r00ts got its first showing before anyone outside the team had seen it, we walked through the How to (Not) Talk research and the formats we're prototyping (bingo cards, a banned-words game), and we opened up the KB call. Vanessa K is taking r00ts out into the wild to gather first findings, and Rasa wants field recordings from every data centre on the map, which is a very good idea. More of these to come.

A few things we'd genuinely love hands on right now:

Put r00ts to work. If you run research, field trips, or workshops about data centres and the materiality of the internet, we want to hear from you. Test it, break it, tell us what it should become.

Help us produce our AIxFilm events. Organising, spreading the word, documenting. The next two are 10+11 September and 8+9 October in Amsterdam.

Know anyone at Hugging Face? We'd love a warm intro. We're after an educational partnership and workshop credits, so participants get free accounts to actually work with, and a name in an inbox beats a contact form every time.

Something catch your eye? Post in #aixdesign-updates-contributors on Slack, or browse everything we'd love help with →