AIxDESIGN monthly dispatch 🎂 may 2026 - celebrating our festival's 1 year anniversary!
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May 2026 aixdesign.co · View in browser |
🎂🎂 Today marks our festival 1 year anniversary 🎂🎂
We're feeling nostalgic this month as we look back to May last year when we pulled off the first-ever AIxDESIGN Festival: On Slow AI 🐌 Together, we transformed Loods6 in Amsterdam into a 3-day playground for deconstructing mainstream AI stories and dreaming up new ones. 19 events, 600m² of exhibition, talks, workshops, film screenings, all shared with a community of hundreds of AI hotties, whisperers, baddies and haters from across the globe.
We're feeling nostalgic this month as we look back to May last year when we pulled off the first-ever AIxDESIGN Festival: On Slow AI 🐌 Together, we transformed Loods6 in Amsterdam into a 3-day playground for deconstructing mainstream AI stories and dreaming up new ones. 19 events, 600m² of exhibition, talks, workshops, film screenings, all shared with a community of hundreds of AI hotties, whisperers, baddies and haters from across the globe.
With our team fully recovered and our grants reported (it took a while hehe), we can now look back and truly relish in the memories and nostalgia of the beautiful space we brought into being together! It was so special and I don't think we'll ever get fully over it 💕
There's no festival this year, but the memories? Locked in 🔒
Did you attend? We'd love to hear what stuck with you. What did you bring home, new ideas, friends, merch? Any favorite moments or memories? Tell us how the festival lives on in your corner in the comments 🤗
To celebrate we made a final aftermovie. Watch below and time travel through 36 hours of AIxDESIGN Festival in 80 seconds!
PS: You can find all the other aftermovies and we're slowly releasing recordings from all the talks & workshops on the AIxDESIGN YouTube channel.
📡 AIxD Updates
🎬 Festival Talk: Eryk Salvaggio, Human Presentation
We're getting festival footage out into the world, one talk at a time. First up: Eryk Salvaggio's performative lecture from last May: a live reading of his video essay Human Movie: Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm over the original film and soundtrack. A meditation on what it means to insist on being human when everyone's busy comparing brains to language models.
Watch on YouTube
🎙️ :on Slow AI, First Conversation w/ Moisés Horta Valenzuela
We kicked off the :on Slow AI conversation series with Moisés Horta Valenzuela (aka 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰). We talked about SEMILLA.AI, a generative audio synthesizer built to explore the latent space of small AI models, all trained by 𝔥𝔢𝔵𝔬𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔰𝔪𝔬𝔰 himself. We talked neural audio synthesis, divination as interface, why the gods would use corn, and what it means to read predictive patterns as subconscious personal narratives. Rich, weird, exactly the kind of conversation we wanted to have. Recording coming soon, but until then, go have a roam around the Miro board from the session. It's a good one. Explore the Miro board →
🛍️ Zine Pack Sale, extended to June 1
Still going! Grab the full pack of all three Slow AI zines: [Dis]enchantment (Esoteric AI), AI for Ants (Small AI), and Pasts, Presents, Futures (Ancestral AI), for €15. That's 144 pages of alternative AI imaginaries made with internet teapot, arriving at your door with a little stack of AIxDESIGN stickers. Or pick up at NDSM if you're Amsterdam-local. |
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🎵 OCT: AIxMusic Workshop w/ Mateusz Mieciek
Mateusz Mieciek (aka Jak Woda) leads a workshop on sound-making with nervous systems and neural networks, where the parameters are genuinely unknown, not just unfamiliar. Part of our Open Culture Tech residency with Thunderboom Records and Sound & Vision.
| When: Thu May 7 | Where: NDSM, AMS |
| Cost: Free (RSVP required) | Part of: Open Culture Tech |
🎙️ Out in the world: Ploi & Nadia in May
May 5: Ploi Flynn at Gender & Tech #10: Possible AI Futures, hosted by the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. Feminist, queer, and Global South perspectives on digital governance, our kind of conversation. Free to register. Register →
May 13: Nadia Piet at Domus Academy Milano, part of their Disrupting Patterns series. Domus also just launched a new Master in Design x AI starting September 2026. Master in Design x AI →
May 20: Nadia at the Creative Days (Un)Conference in Vienna, co-curated with our friends at co-matter at ORF RadioKulturhaus. This year's theme: Creating the culture we want / Building the infrastructures we need. More info →
May 13: Nadia Piet at Domus Academy Milano, part of their Disrupting Patterns series. Domus also just launched a new Master in Design x AI starting September 2026. Master in Design x AI →
May 20: Nadia at the Creative Days (Un)Conference in Vienna, co-curated with our friends at co-matter at ORF RadioKulturhaus. This year's theme: Creating the culture we want / Building the infrastructures we need. More info →
🎵 OCT: Liveshow w/ Lacuna, May 30, Utrecht
Lacuna (Mihir Raina), India-raised, Utrecht-based producer working across experimental electronics, garage, 2-step and dub, plays live as part of our Open Culture Tech residency with Thunderboom Records and Sound & Vision. At De Helling, Utrecht. More details coming soon. De Helling →
🍎 Link Picking
Deviation Game, Tomo Kihara & Playfool
What if the goal was to make something an AI genuinely can't understand? That's the premise: a co-op party game where you draw things your friends will recognise but an image classifier won't. Humans trying to fool the machine, not the other way around. On Steam in Early Access; exhibited at Ars Electronica and Now Play This. Equally fun and provocative.
Deviation Game →
What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem
"The people who cannot sit through novels aren't broken. They're adapted to an environment we built. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted." Flagged by Marc as "felt AIxD coded," and he's right.
Aeon →
Beyond the Machine, Frank Chimero
Frank Chimero on creative agency in the AI era, told through Brian Eno and others. His reframe: AI is an instrument, not a tool. Instruments require technique and touch, they don't just run themselves. "You use a tool, but you play an instrument." Worth reading slowly.
frankchimero.com →
Tech Tips, Arabelle Sicardi at CULTUREHUB
💅 A lovely performance-installation by CultureHub resident Arabelle Sicardi in which a nail artist and an AI system attempt the same design at the same time. As a team of confirmed nail girlies who also spend most of our waking hours thinking about AI, this one felt extremely on-brand.
CULTUREHUB →
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This monkey selfie will protect you from AI slop
The US Supreme Court just declined to hear the Thaler AI copyright case: AI-generated work can't be copyrighted. The legal thread traces back to a macaque that accidentally took a selfie in 2011. When something that isn't human makes a work of art, who owns it?
BBC Future →
AI Index 2026, Stanford HAI
Stanford HAI's annual state-of-the-field report. The most cited dataset on where AI actually is, stripped of hype. If you want numbers to argue with, start here.
Stanford HAI →
GenAI is an epistemic carcinogen, Jill Walker Rettberg
Rettberg argues generative AI doesn't just spread misinformation, it degrades the infrastructure we use to evaluate what's true. The "glorbo" test (a fictional fruit planted online to track LLM contamination of training data) is the most alarming thing in this piece. Dense but tight. (Paywalled via Springer.)
AI & Society →
Scores Against Tech Fascism
13 works selected by Hito Steyerl, Nora O'Murchú, and Sam Lavigne. The brief: a "score" (a simple instruction set) for resisting tech fascism. A DIY rocket blueprint for disrupting White House Wi-Fi, a guide to spamming the ICE hotline, leftist texts slipped inside Jordan Peterson book covers in public libraries. Funny, specific, genuinely useful.
Error 417 Expectation Failed →
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👩💻 Jobs & Opportunities
O'Shaughnessy Fellowship Up to $100K equity-free funding for builders, researchers, and creatives advancing civilisation. Apply →
Critical Pathways Fellowships 2026 Utrecht University. "Making Visible the Invisible," sustainability and circular economy focus. More info →
Freelance Writers, Critical Playground New Media Caucus. Analytically rigorous writing on design, tech, art, and culture. More info →
Senior Designer, NewWorld Inc. Award-winning media company at culture, storytelling, and impact. Apply →
🌸 Flowers
Big love this month to Moisés Horta Valenzuela for being the first :on Slow AI guest and making it such a rich conversation, Eryk Salvaggio for a generous and beautiful festival contribution and letting us share it with the world, and Shaan Rehsi for the ongoing festival reel edits.
💓 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, Prabhnoor, Brandon, Fred, and 6 anonymous friends 🤍
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