For its sixteenth iteration (and fifth in Berlin), Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2026, “In the Fog of the Digital: AI and the Neural-Digital Entanglement in Cognitive Capitalism,” will focus on the effects of the acceleration of digital technologies (especially AI) on the process of individuation of the contemporary subject and its repercussions for thought and understanding, as well as artistic and aesthetic countermoves. The concept of the “fog of the digital” serves as a metaphor for the dizzying transformation of industrial capitalism into cognitive capitalism, driven by the rapid expansion of neural and digital technologies under neoliberalism. Together with AI, we have entered a third digital age. The recent surge of these technologies in the public sphere poses new challenges to social, cultural, political, and economic orders and requires profound somatic and cognitive adjustments – changes that sometimes exceed our current capacities to reason and understand.
Abstracts:
Automatization and Deautomatization: This talk suggests that in order to understand the liberation power of automation, we will have to reflect on strategies of realizing what Karl Marx calls free time or disposable time. This process we call deautomatization. However, automatization is not the opposite of deautomatization, but rather it is indispensable for it. In order to do so, we will need to understand more sufficiently the nature of automation. We are dealing with two kinds of automation, which have to be distinguished in order to understand our contemporary situation. These two kinds of automation could be illustrated, as the talk suggests, by two figures, namely the fire engine boy in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the food delivery boy in Beijing. Through this detour, this talk also suggests reformulating the approach to study contemporary automation and its impacts.
Yuk Hui is Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions and directs the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology. Hui studied computer engineering at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a PhD thesis under Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) at Goldsmiths University London, and obtained his Habilitation in philosophy from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Hui is author of several monographs that have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press/e-flux, 2021), Post-Europe (Urbanomic/Sequence, 2024), Machine and Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press,2024) and Kant Machine (Bloomsbury, 2026). Hui is co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015) and editor of Philosophy after Automation (Philosophy Today, Vol.65. No.2, 2021), Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction (2024) among others. Since 2014, Hui has been the convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology and sits as a juror of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture since 2020 (currently as jury chair). For a full list of my publications, please visit my personal websiteOpens external.
Towards a Philosophy of AI: Vilém Flusser and Artificial Intelligence(s): This talk follows the recent publication of my book The Society of the Screen: Vilém Flusser’s Radical Prescience (MIT, 2026), which details the Czech-Brazilian philosopher’s interactions with artists and the impact of art on his philosophy. I will summarize some key elements of the book and link them to the current discussion on AI. Flusser (1920-1991) was born in Prague, where the word “robot” was invented, and he would have been fascinated by the ethics, politics, and end of linear thinking driven by Large Language Models, chatbots, text prompts, and new hybrids of image and text. Flusser didn’t live to witness our empire of AI, but many of the terms he employed in his writings - apparatus, black box, vector, algorithm, cybernetics, functionary - are central to 21st-century techno-culture. For Flusser, artificial intelligences (he often used the plural) could include digital technology, but even other animals, as in his parabiological "cybernetic" fable Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1987), in which a deep-sea vampire squid was likened to a computer, a subaquatic interface imbibing data through its own skin. AI could be utopian or dystopian, a dialogic interlocutor or a deceptive design object that troubled the ontology of “thing” and “non-thing.” Theorizing intelligence, consciousness, and “rationality” at the dawn of the digital age, Flusser’s precautionary ideas, often informed by experimental art practices, are distinctly relevant to our own era.
Martha Schwendener is an art historian and art critic for The New York Times. She is Visiting Associate Professor at New York University and Researcher in Residence at the Vilém Flusser Archive, Berlin. She is the editor of Vilém Flusser’s Essays // Artforum (Metaflux, 2017) and her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Afterimage, Bookforum, Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, October, and many other publications.
Recursion: Agnieszka Kurant’s presentation will draw on her investigation of collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and forms of exploitation embedded in digital capitalism. Developed in collaboration with scientists and philosophers, her work addresses the processes of networked value creation in the digital economy, the global labor extraction underlying artificial intelligence, and the transformations of collective subjectivity in response to technology. She will discuss her recent exhibition “Recursion” at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, which examined how digital capitalism renders us all part of vast recursive machines: feedback systems that forecast behavior; automate decisions; and monetize probabilistic futures. The show featured thought experiments drawing on automation, cybernetics, and the recursive and self-organizing phenomena, from living systems to brains, from languages and signs to social organizations, currencies, and states. Recursion explored the recursive nature of digital images extracting energy, labor, and attention to train predictive algorithms in an endless feedback loop, in which forecasting the future can actively shape it.
Agnieszka Kurant investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and forms of exploitation within digital capitalism. Her works function as speculative thought experiments developed in collaboration with scientists and philosophers. Oscillating among biological, digital, and geological realms, her practice explores plural subjectivity, the evolution of living systems, culture and technology, and the implications of automation and cybernetics. Kurant was Artist Fellow at the Berggruen Institute (2019–21); Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2017–20); and Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2018). She was Artist in Residence at Art Explora, Paris (2022), and Visiting Artist at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University (2023). Her solo exhibitions include Mudam Luxembourg (2024); Hannover Kunstverein (2023); Kunsthal Gent (2023); and Castello di Rivoli (2021–22). In 2015, she received a commission for the façade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and in 2021–22 completed a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. In 2010, she coauthored the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture with Aleksandra Wasilkowska. Her honors include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Art + Technology Award (2020); the Frontier Art Prize (2019); and the Google AMI Grant (2022). Her monograph Collective Intelligence, coedited by Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey, was published by Sternberg Press and MIT Press in 2025.
Swiping Time: The title of this lecture emerges from the dual sense of “swiping” which means both flicking away an image on a screen and stealing something. Through our constant repetition of the first kind of swipe, we are enacting the second as well, because swiping as an iterative practice that brings a new present into being again and again, ends up stealing both our past and our future. This “real allegory” of digital scanning will open onto a more general discussion of how the plasticity of time--the ability to mold it to the will of capital and technology, is in fact today’s most significant arena of political struggle. Through its capacity to accelerate processes of learning and knowing in the service of a present, AI is one of the central protagonists in the contemporary plasticity of time. “Swiping,” as what Bertolt Brecht called a “social gest” will be evaluated through the works of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, using generative AI, as well as Christian Marclay and Thomas Hirschhorn, whose use of digital tools is more conventional.
David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames & Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He co-organized the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, which opened at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, in 2015. Joselit is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture. His book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press, 2020) received the Robert Motherwell Book Award in 2021. His most recent publications include Art’s Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023) and the co-authored (with Anne Gunnison) volume Art/Work: Plastics (Princeton University Press, 2025).
What If? Generative AI, Art, and Counterfactual History: In his lecture, Antonio Somaini will discuss the ways in which AI technologies are transforming our relation with the past: with history, memory, and the archive. The lecture will also present a technical and philosophical account of latent spaces as a new kind of historical a priori, comparing them with different understandings of the “archive” with its technical, institutional, and epistemological dimensions. Somaini will then survey a wide range of contemporary artistic practices that use AI to explore alternative, counterfactual pasts, including works by Erik Bullot, Grégory Chatonsky, Alexander Kluge, Kevin B. Lee, Ania Szczepanska, Gwenola Wagon and Pierre Cassou-Noguès. Works like these embody what he terms a "meta-archival impulse": a critical desire to probe, expose, and resist the algorithmic processes through which AI models organize, transform, and sometimes erase historical materials. The lecture will end by arguing that the political challenge of our moment is twofold: developing critical methodologies for examining latent spaces as new infrastructures of memory, and resisting the privatization of these meta-archives by a handful of hegemonic tech corporations.
Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has been a visiting professor at Yale University (2022) and at Harvard University (2024, 2025). His current research and curatorial work focus on the impact of artificial intelligence on images, visual culture, photography, cinema, and contemporary art. He is chief curator of The World Through AI, presented at the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2025), and at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2026). He is also curating Energies of AI for MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon. His recent publications include “Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture” (Grey Room, no. 94, Fall 2023) and “A Theory of Latent Spaces” in the catalogue of The World Through AI (Paris: Jeu de Paume / JBE Books, 2025).
Read more: Glimpses of In the Fog of the Digital
Read more: In the Fog of the Digital: AI and Neural-Digital Entanglement in Cognitive Capitalism
