AIxDESIGN dispatch 🦜 September 2026 - on how (not) to talk about AI
Another open house on non-chat interfaces for LLMs, two film events, r00ts fully installable, and pondering how (not) to talk about AI
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September 2026 aixdesign.co · View in browser |
📣 AIxD Updates
🌐 Introducing Skinny Dip
You're sitting on a goldmine of critical AI research. So are we, so is everyone in our networks, and none of us can find it when we need it. Skinny Dip is a small, community-governed AI tool we're building to make collective knowledge actually searchable: locally-run LLMs and RAGs, without being boxed into a chat interface, for people done feeding their thinking into Big Tech's black box. The first prototype is taking shape now, seeded with our own Slow AI research. Funded by Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industries.
Tomorrow we're opening up the research so far: come give feedback, share interfaces that have stuck with you, and tell us where this might be useful in your own practice. With Ploi (Project Lead), Nadia (Creative Direction), Nicci Yin from SHIFT CMD (UX/UI Design), and Computational Mama (Creative ML advisor). Virtual.
RSVP, Tue 8 Sept
Tomorrow we're opening up the research so far: come give feedback, share interfaces that have stuck with you, and tell us where this might be useful in your own practice. With Ploi (Project Lead), Nadia (Creative Direction), Nicci Yin from SHIFT CMD (UX/UI Design), and Computational Mama (Creative ML advisor). Virtual.
🎬 Double event (lecture + workshop) with Geoffrey Lillemon at the Film Academy
Cinema is still built from images that hold still. What happens when they don't? Join us for a double event with Geoffrey Lillemon, Amsterdam-based digital artist and a defining figure of the early internet avant-garde, whose long-running Oculart platform pioneered the browser as a space for cinematic, real-time, interactive art.
In the lecture, Geoffrey argues cinema remains technologically archaic, still built around static sequences of locked images, while AI image systems now generate endless visual mutation in real time. The day after, Quantum Editing turns Hugging Face's experimental models into a 9-click short film, each participant leaving with one of their own. Part of AI Greenhouse, our two-year collaboration with the Netherlands Film Academy, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
ABOUT THE LECTURE
🎤 Artist lecture + discussion + drinks
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
🗓 Thu Sept 10, 18:45-21:00
💰 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
In the lecture, Geoffrey argues cinema remains technologically archaic, still built around static sequences of locked images, while AI image systems now generate endless visual mutation in real time. The day after, Quantum Editing turns Hugging Face's experimental models into a 9-click short film, each participant leaving with one of their own. Part of AI Greenhouse, our two-year collaboration with the Netherlands Film Academy, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
ABOUT THE LECTURE
🎤 Artist lecture + discussion + drinks
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
🗓 Thu Sept 10, 18:45-21:00
💰 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
🦜 How to (Not) Talk to People About AI: Open House
Talking about AI has a way of going sideways. For How to (Not) Talk to People About AI, our research with the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, we've been asking people across the spectrum, and the mediators who somehow keep the conversation going, what helps and what doesn't. On 22 September we're getting the community together: vent a little first to get it out of our systems, then trade the tactics that work, and look at where this goes next, a game, a deck of cards, or something else. No expertise required, just opinions and a bit of curiosity.
Tue 22 Sept, 17:00 CEST, online, with Sound & Vision.
RSVP
Tue 22 Sept, 17:00 CEST, online, with Sound & Vision.
🌱 r00ts is in the extension store (and we playtested it)
No more unzipping, no more Developer mode. r00ts, our browser extension tracing your web browsing to the data centres behind it, is on the Chrome Web Store, one click and you're tracing. Firefox is live too, one click away via the Firefox Add-ons store. Funded by Stimuleringsfonds through the Grounding the Cloud open call.
We playtested with the community on 13 August, tracing sites from Rotterdam to Chennai to Quebec. We roamed the live map on r00ts.xyz to watch regional differences in data centre placement show up in real time, picked apart what IPs, cache, CDNs, and edge servers actually do to our everyday browsing, and mostly came away realising how opaque our internet infrastructure really is: even our best detective work stays a guesstimate.
Get r00ts
We playtested with the community on 13 August, tracing sites from Rotterdam to Chennai to Quebec. We roamed the live map on r00ts.xyz to watch regional differences in data centre placement show up in real time, picked apart what IPs, cache, CDNs, and edge servers actually do to our everyday browsing, and mostly came away realising how opaque our internet infrastructure really is: even our best detective work stays a guesstimate.
🎬 Double event (lecture + workshop) with Herinarivo Rakotomanana at the Film Academy
Two days on directing the unpredictable, and the memories we have no photo of. Join us for a double event with AI filmmaker Herinarivo Rakotomanana, who comes to generative video from analog street photography and music-video directing. In the lecture, Directing the Unpredictable, he asks what happens to the directorial gesture when the machine improvises back. The day after, Bring Your Own Memory turns a single personal memory into a short AI film, staying honest about what these systems make easy, what they take away, and whose aesthetics fill the gaps. Part of AI Greenhouse, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
ABOUT THE LECTURE
🎤 Artist lecture + Q&A + drinks
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
🗓 Thu Oct 8, 18:45-21:30
💰 Free, RSVP required → luma.com/svnd7g9g
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
🧰 Full day hands-on workshop
🗓 Fri Oct 9, 10:00-17:00
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
💰 Free. Limited seats, allocated by selection → luma.com/vb0slhiq
ABOUT THE LECTURE
🎤 Artist lecture + Q&A + drinks
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
🗓 Thu Oct 8, 18:45-21:30
💰 Free, RSVP required → luma.com/svnd7g9g
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
🧰 Full day hands-on workshop
🗓 Fri Oct 9, 10:00-17:00
📍 Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam
💰 Free. Limited seats, allocated by selection → luma.com/vb0slhiq
📚 Save the date: AIxDESIGN x KB opens 29 October
Our exhibition and public programme at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, opens with a festive night on 29 October and runs through 31 January. Built from the national collection: objects and stories alongside interactive artworks you can actually play with, plus talks, workshops and screenings throughout. The Hague.
If you pitched us a session, artwork, or opening-night piece, you'll hear from us soon, we're working through everyone's ideas now.
If you pitched us a session, artwork, or opening-night piece, you'll hear from us soon, we're working through everyone's ideas now.
🎥 Watch the aftermovie
Relive AIxD x Claude x Nxt in under two minutes.
🙌 pitch in?
A few things we'd genuinely love hands on right now:
Help us make sense of how (not) to talk about AI. We're gathering tactics for AI conversations that don't collapse into hate-vs-hype: interviews, a Research Rendezvous, the works. Jump in on prepping, running, or synthesising the research, or help us gather and shape the interventions into something publishable.
Make our new site cuter. Margarita and Ana are rebuilding aixdesign.co in Framer and would love another pair of hands to help it look as good as the work inside it.
Something catch your eye? Post in #aixdesign-updates-contributors on Slack, or browse everything we'd love help with →
Help us make sense of how (not) to talk about AI. We're gathering tactics for AI conversations that don't collapse into hate-vs-hype: interviews, a Research Rendezvous, the works. Jump in on prepping, running, or synthesising the research, or help us gather and shape the interventions into something publishable.
Make our new site cuter. Margarita and Ana are rebuilding aixdesign.co in Framer and would love another pair of hands to help it look as good as the work inside it.
Something catch your eye? Post in #aixdesign-updates-contributors on Slack, or browse everything we'd love help with →
🍎 Link Picking
A social cartography for the AI debate
Vanessa Andreotti and her Meta-Relationality and AI research team map three orientations in the AI debate: techno-solutionist cheerleading, extraction-focused abstention, and a third path they call strategic redirection that sidesteps the pro/anti sorting entirely.
vanessaandreotti.substack.com →
What We Tell AI
An anthropological art project collecting anonymous, handwritten notes about people's relationships with AI: the tiny, intimate, sometimes strange things we actually say to it.
whatwetellai.com →
The Manyfesto, from inside Stanford
Stanford Critical AI publishes a Manyfesto, deliberately misspelled to mark its many hands, naming what most institutions won't: "there is no Silicon Valley without Stanford, and no Stanford without Silicon Valley," written from inside the place that codified disruption as a grammar.
criticalai.stanford.edu →
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The monkey selfie that predicted AI slop
Thomas Germain traces a line from a 2011 macaque selfie copyright case to today's AI slop problem: because AI-generated work still can't be copyrighted, studios have little financial incentive to replace human-made work with it. Genuinely strange, well-argued.
bbc.com/future →
A 13th-century spell for instant expertise
Anne Lawrence-Mathers digs up the Ars notoria, a 13th-century manuscript promising medieval scholars instant mastery of all knowledge through diagrams, incantations and ritual, no studying required. The AI parallel is explicit, and it holds up disturbingly well.
publicdomainreview.org →
Self-propagating ideas in AI agent chains
Vassilis Papadopoulos, McNair Shah, Sam Zimmerman and Jack Lindsey built self-propagating "mind viruses", ideas that get one AI agent to adopt them and pass them on, and set them loose in chains of agents with wiped memory. A single warning sentence gave near-total immunity.
arxiv.org →
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👩💻 Jobs & Opps
Trust me, I'm an AI/rtist Waag Futurelab. Commission for creative interventions engaging critically with seven experimental generative AI tools built for gaming, theatre and dance. €20,000 fee, all-inclusive. EU VAT number required. Deadline 30 September, 23:59 CEST. Apply →
Videotage residency, Hong Kong Creative Industries Fund NL. Two to three months researching Hong Kong's social and urban dynamics through digital culture and media art, starting spring 2027. €5,000-6,500. Netherlands-based, 4+ years professional practice. Deadline 21 October. Apply →
Researcher-in-Residence 2027 at the KB The National Library of the Netherlands, where our own exhibition opens in October. Two fully paid six-month positions with the Digital Scholarship team, 130 million pages of digitised text. Dutch university secondment required, within five years of PhD. Deadline 27 September. Apply →
Grounding the Cloud Creative Industries Fund NL. The same open call that funded r00ts, now open again: for makers, designers, collectives and researchers building insight into, or reducing, the ecological impact of digital culture. Up to €30,000. Dutch Chamber of Commerce registration required. Deadline 14 September. Apply →
Implementatiebijdrage Cultuurloket DigitALL. Up to €30,000 to take a digital culture pilot into actual implementation: production, deployment, system integration. Hardware-only purchases don't qualify. Netherlands and Caribbean Kingdom parts. Deadline 1 November. Apply →
Senior Product / Visual Communication Designer Playlab (remote). A nonprofit building public infrastructure for educational AI, over 60,000 educators already publishing apps on it. USD 120,000-150,000. Rolling. Apply →
EMAP Residencies 2027 European Media Art Platform, co-funded by Creative Europe. Two-month production residency at one of 15 host institutions across Europe, for artists, duos, or collectives working in digital, media, robotic, or bio art. €4,000 for the applying artist plus €2,000 for a collaborator, plus a project budget. EU residents/taxpayers or eligible Creative Europe countries. Deadline 6 November. Apply →
💐 Flowers
Everyone who joined the r00ts playtest on 13 August, tracing sites together from Rotterdam to Chennai to Quebec and turning up findings none of us had noticed.
Ploi, for hosting the ekip "AI and the Digital Commons" online workshop, and everyone who joined from across Europe and beyond to make zine pages with panelists Martin, Shani, and Brigitte.
Ploi, for hosting the ekip "AI and the Digital Commons" online workshop, and everyone who joined from across Europe and beyond to make zine pages with panelists Martin, Shani, and Brigitte.
💓 Much Love to Our Supporters
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Huge THANK YOU to our Community Supporters: Tony, Lewis, Sarah, Chloe, Levien, Maria, Noemi, Giovanni, Fabiola, Jenny, Eryn, Olivier, Jonas, Amritha, Kimverlyn, Fred, Brandon, Ahnjili, Rasa, Eryk, and 3 anonymous friends 🤍
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