AIxDESIGN dispatch 🤝 july 2026 - on community as method
POV on community as method, open calls for our KB exhibition and our AI x film cookbook, a tool for tweaking your LLM’s defaults, and more
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July 2026 aixdesign.co · View in browser |
POV: Community as Method
Making sense of AI for ourselves, together.
We all tell ourselves stories about AI: how it works, who it is for, and what it can do. These stories hit without us noticing through films, books, memes, quietly shaping our assumptions long before we touch a tool. They arrive pre-narrated by filmmakers, newsrooms, by the companies selling it. AI will save us, AI will end us, AI is coming for your job.
In 2023 we came across the term "Slow AI" in this article about Timnit Gebru, and rather than nod along from afar, we wanted to work out what it could mean in practice. So we gathered 70-odd people on Miro to figure it out together: thinking out loud, dumping links, disagreeing, clustering. And 3 years on, that one session has become 3 reports, 4 zines, and 3 commissioned artworks, with 59 named authors between them.
But the news kept newsing: AI is bad for the power grid, data centres are being built on drought-hit lands, AI as a weapon of war. There's always something new to un/learn. Turns out, sensemaking isn't a project you ever finish. It's a forever practice, best done for yourself and with each other.
Thankfully, AI haters, hotties, and weirdos around Europe have joined us in this community practice. Ramla Anshur is doing it in London with and for the British Somali diaspora. Institute of Machine Unlearning is doing it in Lisbon. Studio Imposter and Plateia is doing it in Athens. DigitalFems is doing it in Barcelona (with a playbook in Spanish and Catalan coming soon!).
Insights from this work have taken root in new, artist- and community-led AI projects. Like Maria Than who has carried Slow AI into her Adobe Creative Resident in AI + Digital Worlds residency at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Or Chipo Mapondera who's built on Ancestral AI to make Cry to the Water: a language model trained on oral histories and Tunisian climate data.
Every time someone makes something with AI, or runs their own session and shares what they found, we all get a firmer grip on what the heck this actually is. We help each other imagine what it could be used for, and, maybe just as usefully, what it probably can't.
Seen Slow AI out in the wild? Reply and tell us about an initiative or project you've come across, we're always collecting them.
In 2023 we came across the term "Slow AI" in this article about Timnit Gebru, and rather than nod along from afar, we wanted to work out what it could mean in practice. So we gathered 70-odd people on Miro to figure it out together: thinking out loud, dumping links, disagreeing, clustering. And 3 years on, that one session has become 3 reports, 4 zines, and 3 commissioned artworks, with 59 named authors between them.
But the news kept newsing: AI is bad for the power grid, data centres are being built on drought-hit lands, AI as a weapon of war. There's always something new to un/learn. Turns out, sensemaking isn't a project you ever finish. It's a forever practice, best done for yourself and with each other.
Thankfully, AI haters, hotties, and weirdos around Europe have joined us in this community practice. Ramla Anshur is doing it in London with and for the British Somali diaspora. Institute of Machine Unlearning is doing it in Lisbon. Studio Imposter and Plateia is doing it in Athens. DigitalFems is doing it in Barcelona (with a playbook in Spanish and Catalan coming soon!).
Insights from this work have taken root in new, artist- and community-led AI projects. Like Maria Than who has carried Slow AI into her Adobe Creative Resident in AI + Digital Worlds residency at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Or Chipo Mapondera who's built on Ancestral AI to make Cry to the Water: a language model trained on oral histories and Tunisian climate data.
Every time someone makes something with AI, or runs their own session and shares what they found, we all get a firmer grip on what the heck this actually is. We help each other imagine what it could be used for, and, maybe just as usefully, what it probably can't.
Seen Slow AI out in the wild? Reply and tell us about an initiative or project you've come across, we're always collecting them.
You can also read this POV in the AIxDESIGN Archive →
We want to do more of this work: community sensemaking, hacking and subverting commercial AI tools so that they work for us, DIY AI. We've prepared a 2-year programme of activities called AI for the Rest of Us for a Stimuleringsfonds grant. Read more in our application here → If you know a person or an org who'd help fund this, hit reply, we'd love an introduction.
This newsletter was supported by Imagine Intel, the zine and cultural artefact published by Mozilla Foundation to accompany the Imaginative Intelligences Assemblies work led by the Foundation's Creative Futures program. Check out the work of The Counterstructural Commons, Mozilla Foundation's cultural R&D residency at Rhizome.
📣 AIxD Updates
🎨 What we made at Nxt Museum, with Claude
In May we ran a two-week micro-residency with Nxt Museum and Claude: three artist teams, a pile of Claude credits, one brief: make the museum into something visitors could touch and play with. On June 4, 200+ people turned up to try the prototypes.
Geoffrey Lillemon built a cauldron you control by stirring, Ivano Salonia turned a room of phones into one instrument, and Mama Magnet (Tulika Ahuja and Reza Hasni) made a game that matches strangers then sends them treasure-hunting.
As Tulika put it on the night: maybe the real treasure is the friends we make along the way. All three prototypes are playable and open to remix. Roam the project vault →
Video recap: the <please touch the art> playlist →
Geoffrey Lillemon built a cauldron you control by stirring, Ivano Salonia turned a room of phones into one instrument, and Mama Magnet (Tulika Ahuja and Reza Hasni) made a game that matches strangers then sends them treasure-hunting.
As Tulika put it on the night: maybe the real treasure is the friends we make along the way. All three prototypes are playable and open to remix. Roam the project vault →
Video recap: the <please touch the art> playlist →
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🪞 Try our new tool: LLM Counter-Defaults
LLMs come with defaults most of us never chose: they agree with you, sound sure when they're guessing, write in your place, and pad three paragraphs where one would do.
So Nadia built Counter-Defaults, a small free tool that writes custom instructions to tune those behaviours to fit you: push back instead of sycophancy, flag uncertainty instead of false confidence, keep your voice instead of flattening it. 13 sliders to start, then tune from there. Built with the AIxDESIGN community, made with Claude.
Take it for a spin and tell us how it goes, hit reply with your setup.
Try Counter-Defaults
So Nadia built Counter-Defaults, a small free tool that writes custom instructions to tune those behaviours to fit you: push back instead of sycophancy, flag uncertainty instead of false confidence, keep your voice instead of flattening it. 13 sliders to start, then tune from there. Built with the AIxDESIGN community, made with Claude.
Take it for a spin and tell us how it goes, hit reply with your setup.
🦜 How to (Not) Talk to People About AI
We're starting a new research thread on something most of us run into: the AI conversation that goes nowhere, the one that hardens into hate-vs-hype, or quietly stalls. We want to gather practices for having better exchanges: more honest, more nuanced, less polarised.
A few questions we're sitting with: what makes an AI conversation fruitful, and what makes it go sideways? Where do these talks get stuck, and how do you intervene?
A community session is coming soon to spill the tea and trade strategies. Until then, tell us: hit reply, gossip in Slack, or drop a message at [email protected].
A few questions we're sitting with: what makes an AI conversation fruitful, and what makes it go sideways? Where do these talks get stuck, and how do you intervene?
A community session is coming soon to spill the tea and trade strategies. Until then, tell us: hit reply, gossip in Slack, or drop a message at [email protected].
🎚️ That's a wrap on Open Culture Tech 2.0
OCT 2.0 came in two strands, a workshop series and a creative-tech residency, and we're in the process of wrapping both.
Workshop series. We made music with people who come at it from very different angles: Nicole Chufi on speculative sound worlds (so good we ran it twice), Lina Lab navigating the latent space of a RAVE model, Jak Woda (Mateusz Mieciek) collaging scraps into music with gesture and language models, and Moisés Horta Valenzuela closing us out by training real-time generative audio models with CoDiCodec-Flow. Recaps, slides and codebases live in the OCT Project Vault in the AIxDESIGN Archive. Big thanks to Thunderboom for the project and every artist who shared their expertise & passions along the way.
Lacuna's residency: Saaz-e-yaad. Lacuna (Mihir Raina), Moisés, and Ploi spent the year building generative audio tools from Kashmiri folk music. Sourcing recordings from Ravimech Studios, training a stack of models, and landing on a standalone instrument that riffs out new melodies, rhythms and textures in the style of the archive. Lacuna performed it live on May 30 at De Helling and it was better than any of us could have imagined. The tool's being open sourced soon but if you want you can already dig into the process →
Workshop series. We made music with people who come at it from very different angles: Nicole Chufi on speculative sound worlds (so good we ran it twice), Lina Lab navigating the latent space of a RAVE model, Jak Woda (Mateusz Mieciek) collaging scraps into music with gesture and language models, and Moisés Horta Valenzuela closing us out by training real-time generative audio models with CoDiCodec-Flow. Recaps, slides and codebases live in the OCT Project Vault in the AIxDESIGN Archive. Big thanks to Thunderboom for the project and every artist who shared their expertise & passions along the way.
Lacuna's residency: Saaz-e-yaad. Lacuna (Mihir Raina), Moisés, and Ploi spent the year building generative audio tools from Kashmiri folk music. Sourcing recordings from Ravimech Studios, training a stack of models, and landing on a standalone instrument that riffs out new melodies, rhythms and textures in the style of the archive. Lacuna performed it live on May 30 at De Helling and it was better than any of us could have imagined. The tool's being open sourced soon but if you want you can already dig into the process →
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📽️ Open Call: Critical AI x Film Exercises
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. And we're looking for recipes.
If you've run an exercise that gets a room thinking critically and making creatively with AI, the kind of thing you'd happily hand to another educator to run themselves, we'd love to include it. Tried-and-tested group exercises, hands-on or analog, 15 minutes or all day. Contributors get credit, a print copy, and an invite to the launch. This round there's also a need-based €150/recipe fee for freelancers and independents, if it helps make the time.
Submissions are open till the end of August.
Or come cook it with us live: a 30-min session on Wed 12 Aug where you bring a rough exercise and we turn it into a recipe on the spot.
More info + contribute
Sign up for live session
If you've run an exercise that gets a room thinking critically and making creatively with AI, the kind of thing you'd happily hand to another educator to run themselves, we'd love to include it. Tried-and-tested group exercises, hands-on or analog, 15 minutes or all day. Contributors get credit, a print copy, and an invite to the launch. This round there's also a need-based €150/recipe fee for freelancers and independents, if it helps make the time.
Submissions are open till the end of August.
Or come cook it with us live: a 30-min session on Wed 12 Aug where you bring a rough exercise and we turn it into a recipe on the spot.
📚 Open Call: Pitch a session or artwork for our exhibition at KB
This November we're opening an exhibition and public programme about AI at the KB (the National Library of the Netherlands) in The Hague, made entirely from the national collection. Long before neural nets, libraries were the machines we built to organise human knowledge, and we're using the KB's collection to ask what AI is and where it comes from.
To make it happen, we're inviting submissions across three things:
1. a performance for the opening night,
2. workshops to run across the three-month show, and
3. existing artworks to include.
Paid and open till the end of August.
And as part of the same KB project, we're also looking to make something interesting with their archives, so if hands-on prototyping is more your speed, there's a sidequest for that further down.
Pitch your idea
To make it happen, we're inviting submissions across three things:
1. a performance for the opening night,
2. workshops to run across the three-month show, and
3. existing artworks to include.
Paid and open till the end of August.
And as part of the same KB project, we're also looking to make something interesting with their archives, so if hands-on prototyping is more your speed, there's a sidequest for that further down.
📁 AI and the Digital Commons
On behalf of AIxDESIGN, Fabian Mosele (they/them, animator and filmmaker) is hosting a session on what AI scraping does to online collections and archives, and how artists can reimagine the digital commons, alongside Sound & Vision, the University of Edinburgh, and ekip.
The July edition in Hilversum is full, but there's an online rerun in August with space. Grab a spot →
The July edition in Hilversum is full, but there's an online rerun in August with space. Grab a spot →
🦋 Sidequest over the summer?
A few things we could use a hand with:
Help us research How to (Not) Talk to People About AI. We're gathering practices and tactics for having better, more nuanced conversations about AI, beyond the for/against, hate/hype standoff. Help us prep, run, and make sense of the interviews and Research Rendezvous, from planning through synthesis. Sign up →
Know someone at an AI tools company? We're after educational partnerships and workshop credits with the makers of image generators, language models, code assistants, and the like (Hugging Face, and beyond). A warm intro would go a long way.
Help us prototype cute, playful archival interactions for our KB exhibition. We're co-creating an exhibition about AI with the KB. Help us prototype a playful, hands-on installation exploring a subset of their collection, so selecting a collection, brainstorming concepts, and executing them first for web and then IRL installation format.
If interested, follow next steps here → or browse other sidequests →
Help us research How to (Not) Talk to People About AI. We're gathering practices and tactics for having better, more nuanced conversations about AI, beyond the for/against, hate/hype standoff. Help us prep, run, and make sense of the interviews and Research Rendezvous, from planning through synthesis. Sign up →
Know someone at an AI tools company? We're after educational partnerships and workshop credits with the makers of image generators, language models, code assistants, and the like (Hugging Face, and beyond). A warm intro would go a long way.
Help us prototype cute, playful archival interactions for our KB exhibition. We're co-creating an exhibition about AI with the KB. Help us prototype a playful, hands-on installation exploring a subset of their collection, so selecting a collection, brainstorming concepts, and executing them first for web and then IRL installation format.
If interested, follow next steps here → or browse other sidequests →
🍎 Link Picking
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Books on Critical AI (14th ed.)
Prof. Dr. Dagmar Monett curated a reading list on Critical AI, now in its 14th edition. Built to help you develop a critical stance freed of hype, washing, and irresponsibility, and resist the industries whose harms outweigh their promises.
monettdiaz.com →
Where Cloud Meets Cement
The Maybe spent five months tracking what hyperscale data centres do to the towns that host them, across Chile, the US, Mexico, the Netherlands and South Africa. Co-authored by Hanna Barakat (who made images for our Archival Images of AI), and includes Meta's secret Dutch build, codenamed "Operation Tulip."
themaybe.org →
AI With Heart // wâsikan kisewâtisiwin
A writing tool using AI to assist non-Indigenous people writing about Indigenous People. Like grammar plug-ins, wâsikan kisewâtisiwin flags and corrects unconscious bias or racism in written material.
wasikankisewatisiwin.ca →
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A People's Guide to Teaching Tech
Allied Media Projects (out of Detroit) put out a downloadable guide for teaching tech (AI included) the community-rooted way, built on popular education (think Freire, Civil Rights citizenship schools). For anyone running workshops. Their line: meet people where they meet tech.
alliedmedia.org →
Unhinged advice from an astrologer
Unfiltered suggestion from Laura Matsue: "Since AI is making everyone sound more generic and NPC, I recommend becoming the most unhinged version of you to counterbalance. Write like a crazy person who hasn't interacted with humanity in years. Break any and all of the rules. Live like a mad drunk poet."
More wild quotes →
Polaroid's anti-screen billboard
Polaroid turned its Go Gen 3 launch into an anti-screen billboard on Coney Island beach: "Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up." Creative director Patricia Varella framed it as asking not how to sell to Gen Z, but why Polaroid should exist at all in an AI era. Pinch of salt on the pro-human posturing (critics noted the irony), but data-centre water use on a beach billboard is something.
press.polaroid.com →
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👩💻 Jobs & Opportunities
Circuit Breakers Tech Workers Coalition tech-labour conference, NYC, Oct 17–18. Open call for sessions and workshops from rank-and-file tech workers. In-person only. Deadline: July 15. Apply →
Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) Arts Council England. £2,000–£12,000 for individual practitioners' R&D. UK-based practitioners. Closes midday Thu July 2. Apply →
Full Spectrum Curatorship 2026 IMPAKT, Utrecht. Media-art curatorial programme, Sep–Dec. Closes 23:59 CET July 1. If you've been meaning to, this is your sign. Apply →
Prototype Fund Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. Open-source software with social relevance, up to €95K plus coaching. Lead in Germany, team in EU. Deadline: November 30. Apply →
FUTO Microgrants Privacy tools, open-source, decentralisation, projects challenging Big Tech. $1K–$5K. Rolling. Apply →
NEW INC Mentor Open Call New Museum's cultural incubator NEW INC is looking for mentors. Applications open through July 8. Apply →
💐 Flowers
The <please touch the art> artist teams: Geoffrey Lillemon, Ivano Salonia, and Mama Magnet (Tulika Ahuja and Reza Hasni) for building wild, warm things in two weeks flat, and Nxt Museum (Ludo, Ruben, Merel, George) plus the Claude team (Cassie, Greg, Sean) for hosting and backing the whole experiment.
The OCT workshop artists: Nicole Chufi, Lina Lab, and Jak Woda (Mateusz Mieciek) for making music with us across the series, Moisés Horta Valenzuela for the Audio Flow workshop that closed it out, and Lacuna (Mihir Raina) for a year spent building Saaz-e-yaad.
Sarah Aslam, our intern, who's been a joy to work with and an incredibly helpful, smart support to the whole team.
The OCT workshop artists: Nicole Chufi, Lina Lab, and Jak Woda (Mateusz Mieciek) for making music with us across the series, Moisés Horta Valenzuela for the Audio Flow workshop that closed it out, and Lacuna (Mihir Raina) for a year spent building Saaz-e-yaad.
Sarah Aslam, our intern, who's been a joy to work with and an incredibly helpful, smart support to the whole team.
💓 Much Love to Our Supporters
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Huge THANK YOU to our Community Supporters: Sarah, C P Chia, Levien, Maria, Noemi, Giovanni, Fabiola, Jenny, Eryn, Olivier, Jonas, Amritha, Rasa, Ahnjili, Eryk, Brandon, and 5 anonymous friends 🤍
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