Our exhibition with the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, opens on Thu 29 October, and we're celebrating with a night of workshops, films and live-coded techno right inside the library. Come party with us! 🪩

What happens to the book when anyone can publish one with a few prompts? Broncode, an exhibition and program made by KB & AIxDESIGN, looks at what AI is made of, what AI in turn makes, and what that means for the book and for how we deal with knowledge: books made wholly or partly with AI, artworks that question the technology, and the data, human labor, raw materials and energy behind the apparent magic. Free to visit until the end of January.

Opening night lineup 🍾
🍽️ Vegetarian dinner at 17:00, then the official opening at 18:00 with host Dymphie Braun
🗞️ Build a next-word model out of paper and old Delpher newspapers with Agustín Martínez Caram
🌀 Make dreamlike collages with DIY software, AI manipulations and point-cloud effects with Compiler (Tanya Boyarkina and Oscar Cass-Darweish)
🎬 Films about AI by Geoffrey Lillemon, Tabitha Swanson, Alan Warburton, Jacob Adler, Cyan Bae and Catherine Griffiths
🕹️ Play through our AIrcade, tailor your chatbot's defaults into your own custom instructions, and trace websites down to their data centers with r00ts
🎛️ Machine Music by NDA/ (Niki Scheijen and Den Ree), live-coded techno with real-time visuals tracing how semiconductors are made, plus a VJ set by Ana Roman built from picture books, old ads and other ephemera from the KB collection

Come celebrate with us:
🗓️ Thu 29 Oct, 17:00-22:00
📍 KB, The Hague
🎟️ Dinner €10 · Official opening free (registration needed) · Festival 18:30-22:00 €12.50 incl. a drink

The last of our four artist talk + workshop evenings at the Netherlands Film Academy. AI filmmaker Herinarivo Rakotomanana came to generative video from analog street photography and music-video directing, and in Directing the Unpredictable he asks what's left of the director's job when the machine improvises back. Part of AI Greenhouse, our two-year collaboration with the Film Academy, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Two events, two sign-ups (both at the Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam):

🎤 Artist lecture + Q&A + drinks
🗓 Thu 8 Oct, 18:45-21:30 · 💰 Free, RSVP required

🛠 Workshop: Bring Your Own Memory, turn a personal memory into a 30 to 45 second AI film
🗓 Fri 9 Oct, 10:00-17:00 · 💰 Free, around 30 seats allocated by selection
💻 Bring your own laptop, and join the lecture the evening before

MozFest is back in Barcelona from 28 to 30 October, this year around the theme of wilding, and we're bringing paper. We're hosting a zine-making table where anyone can drop by, cut, collage and make sense of AI with their hands, plus a welcome zine that goes out to the 2,000-odd people coming through the doors.

The first traveling edition of our Community Zine Library comes along too, packed with zines from across the community, before a second set heads to The Hague for Broncode. Funded by Mozilla.

Going? Come find the table, and hit reply if you want to help staff it for an hour.

In September, Geoffrey Lillemon walked us through twelve real-time artworks chained together, each one's output feeding the next one's input. In Possession of Chess, the chess engine Stockfish plays both sides and every capture triggers a scream, which then drives the lightning and the tempo of a string quartet in Symphony of the Tempest. He calls it the old Frankenstein pattern: author becomes scientist becomes creature that outgrows its maker.

The next day, at his Quantum Editing workshop, participants built their own real-time worlds with a little help from Claude Code. We made deities, then re-lit, re-angled and re-expressed them until they read as something else entirely: Kwan Suppaiboonsuk and Nina van den Berg's Chamadevi guardian deity and her cloud angel, Wei-Yun Ning's croco harpist who never stops playing, and Nadia's mushroom forest where every bit of decay adds a note to the soundscape. The lecture recording lands on our YouTube soon. Photos by Pablo Núñez Palma.

Part of AI Greenhouse with the Netherlands Film Academy, funded by NWO.

On 22 Sept we opened up How to (Not) Talk to People About AI, our research with the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, and nearly 100 of you signed up to swap notes on AI conversations that go sideways. Some of what we heard: one-to-one conversations beat group debates, a short post travels further with a skeptical friend than a long research paper, and saying out loud that you're not pro or anti can relax the other person enough to actually talk.

From people who run workshops: a "black box" to park your fears in at the start, spectrum exercises where everyone physically stands somewhere on a line of opinion, and a role-play where you channel ELIZA, the 1960s chatbot, to practice blunt, open-ended questions. And one we're taking to heart: shaming people for using AI shuts conversations down instead of opening them.

Where it's heading: less about getting everyone to agree, more about connection versus disconnection. When a conversation starts to slip, you can go inward (check your own position and fears) or outward (reconnect with the person in front of you). Next up is a playtest session to turn all this into something you can use. Want in? Hit reply.

Quick one: r00ts, our browser extension that traces your browsing to the data centers behind it, is now in both the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons. No more unzipping, no more Developer mode, one click and you're tracing. Funded by Stimuleringsfonds through the Grounding the Cloud open call.

Rio de Janeiro, 22-23 Oct: Nadia is speaking at the Possible Futures Festival at Casa Firjan, now in its ninth edition and themed AIxial Era: A World on a New Axis this year.

Lithuania, 19 Oct: Ploi & Rasa run a How to (Not) Talk About AI workshop at the IASA-BAAC conference.

Chiang Mai, 9-10 Nov: Nadia is in town hosting an internal training and would love to meet people working with AI, design and culture there. Around? Hit reply.

Online, 20 Nov: Ploi joins a panel at After Prompt, the University of Cologne's conference on arts education and the politics of AI.

A few things we'd love help with right now:

Help us install Broncode at the KB. Free on 28 or 29 October? Come to The Hague and help us with the final details of setting up the exhibition, then stay for the opening, obviously.

Put r00ts to work. Running a workshop, class or field trip about data centers and where the internet physically lives? r00ts was made for exactly that. Tell us how you'd use it, share what it turns up, or help us plan the next playtest.

Know anyone at Hugging Face? We'd love a warm intro. We're after credits or an educational partnership with the makers of image generators, language models and code assistants, so workshop participants get free accounts to actually work with. A name in an inbox beats a contact form every time.

Share a recipe for Grain. Grain, our cookbook of critical and creative AI literacy exercises made with the Netherlands Film Academy, is still taking recipes for its web edition. Tried and tested, 15 minutes or a full day, analog or hands-on: if another educator could run it from your write-up, we'd love to see it. Share a recipe →

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