Programs
Learn more about this year's theme and research focus, Artificial Stupidity
The rise of generative machine learning technologies has been the target of an onslaught of discourse, much of it producing more heat than light. A series of breakthroughs in such technology has given many–in tech, in finance, in the press, in academia–the impression that such technologies will continue to improve indefinitely. In fact, large tech firms seem dead set on catastrophic energy and water consumption to realize improvements, with diminishing financial and technical returns. The promise of improvement has been accompanied by savvy marketing efforts of such technologies as "artificial intelligence." Machines that really think seem, perhaps, to be just around the corner–perhaps perpetually so.
We at the Centre for Culture and Technology aren't very impressed with the hype.
Our programming in the 2025/26 programming year will be dedicated to the theme "Artificial Stupidity." We mean this term evocatively, not strictly; there is no specific thing or attitude we mean by the term artificial stupidity. Rather, we welcome art and scholarship, research and conversation, that puts pressure on construction of the machine learning revolution as "artificial intelligence."
How have logic, thinking, or reasoning machines relieved us of the burden of thinking for ourselves? How have people had to impoverish their sense of human thinking to imagine that current technologies are (always almost) capable of such thinking? How can we understand the present of "AI" technologies in light of past moments of boosterism, vapourware, unfulfilled promises? What might we learn from past moments of technological critique and activism–from the Luddites' smashing of machines to the Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason, to 1960s and 1970s critiques of computer culture? What might we do with machine learning technologies that goes beyond–or departs in an entirely different direction from–Silicon Valley and Big Tech ideas about these technologies–what they are, might become, or ought to do? What kinds of intelligence, labour, and creativity must we bolster in the face of LLMs and image GANs?
We are emphatically not interested in "AI ethics" or "AI alignment"; the goal is not harm reduction. We are interested, instead, in the politics, aesthetics, and economics of machine learning. How, that is, might we foster worlds–even small, evanescent ones–that host other, more convivial ways of doing with our computational machines?
But there's another way in which we might parse artificial stupidity. McLuhan argued in Understanding Media and elsewhere that then-new "electric" technologies like television had obviated "literate man." Linear thinking was no match for an increasingly interconnected world. Forms of thought focused on text and depth and reflection could not grasp the polyrhythmic changes of a new technologized political and aesthetic economy. Like Walter Benjamin some 30 years before him, McLuhan theorized arts of attention and forms of intelligence capable of grasping the new world new media were bringing into being. And both Benjamin and McLuhan understood that such techniques might, in fact, appear as a new kind of barbarism (to borrow Benjamin's term): uncultured, distracted, gossipy, ignorant–in a word, stupid.
Perhaps, in an age where you might find an LLM embedded in your dishwasher, we ought to foster new, critical, even activist, forms of stupidity. And so, what kinds of stupidity might be necessary in a world dedicated to "smart" everything?
2025-26 Programming
- 1 Artist in Residence
- 5 Faculty Fellows
- 2 Graduate Fellows
- Regular programming of Monday Night Seminars
- Drop-in and ad-hoc events
Artist in residence
Xuan Ye makes noise as a compass, navigating the eddies of art, music, and technology. Their practice unfolds in vibrational world-building via software, sound, image, installation, performance, publication and teaching. Through improvisation and computation, X traces the material and metaphysical waves across the technological, biological, and ecological resonances to evoke illegible pulses and dissonant pauses that stutter meaning, tremble systems.
Their work has been exhibited at the MOCA Toronto (2022), UCCA Shanghai (2022), UQAM and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), MUTEK Montreal (2021), and the Goethe-Institut Beijing (2018), among others. They have been recognized with awarded residencies at ZHdK (2024) and Pro Helvetia (2023) and have received grants and scholarships from the Canada Council for the Arts and the SSHRC. Their practice has also been critically featured and reviewed in Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue 111), the Goethe-Institut (Montreal), KUNSTFORUM International (Issue 257), and Musicworks (Issue 136). Hailing from China, X lives in Toronto/Tkaronto and serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.
Faculty Fellows
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who explores gender, race, and labor in contemporary digital culture. Beall Center for Art+Technology presented her major solo exhibition Ack! Knowledge! Work! (2024). Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi (2016), a comprehensive survey exhibition and catalog, was presented by Pera Museum. Additional solo exhibitions include Shelf Life (2022), Backups (2019), Anonymous Autonomous (2018), E-Waste (2014, catalog/traveling), and numerous others collaborating as "Disorientalism." Behar's books include Object-Oriented Feminism, And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity. She is Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Joshua Scannell is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the New School's School of Media Studies. His work looks at how ubiquitous computational media reorganizes governmentality and sensoria in the 21st century. He is interested in understanding how changing digital technologies transform the relationship between the body and its environment, and how these transformations are harnessed to racial and sexual techniques of organizing populations for political and economic exploitation. His current monograph, The Carceral Surround (University of Minnesota, Forthcoming) theorizes the enmeshment of digital carceral technologies with speculative imaginaries of state power.
Luke Stark is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Canada, and co-director of Western’s Starling Centre for Just Technologies and Just Societies. Stark’s research explores the history and contemporary effects of artificial intelligence (AI) systems designed to interact with humans, the conceptual and philosophical limits of key components of AI systems such as logical inference and interactivity, and the ways in which human values like equality, justice, and privacy can be supported in the design of digital technologies. Luke’s scholarship has appeared in numerous journals including New Media & Society, Social Studies of Science, American Literature, JASIS&T, and The Information Society, and in the proceedings of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conferences including on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM CHI), Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT), and the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. His current book project Reordering Emotion: Histories of Computing and Human Feeling from Cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence is under contract with the MIT Press.
Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries and the materiality of sexual media. He has published on embodiment and technology, data science, the history of technology, labor, archives, design and experience, graphic design, temporality, and metadata. His writing has appeared in Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Journal of Documentation; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021), and elsewhere. He is editor of Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023); Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); and the forthcoming Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect, 2025), among others.
Lauren McLeod Cramer is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the aesthetics of blackness and popular culture. She is currently writing a book on hip-hop, architecture, and black spatial practice. Lauren is a founding member of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics, and is the co-Editor of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, The Black Scholar,Black Camera, Film Criticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Graduate Fellows
Mathew Iantorno is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research explores how retail automation transforms labour practices, consumer responsibility, and public space. Throughout, he explores the long history of artificial intelligence, connecting modern digital platforms with vending machines, automats, and self-service stores. By doing so, he locates persistent imaginaries and driving business imperatives that have accompanied the century-spanning ambition to automate and replace workers. Outside of his dissertational research, Mathew has engaged in pedagogy development projects focused on improving digital literary within the Faculty of Information; Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology; and the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative.
Ben Pulver is a PhD candidate in Art History and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. His research examines the history of cybernetics and telematics through art and visual culture, focusing on how artists engaged critically and creatively with emerging systems of communication and control. As cybernetics laid the groundwork for what we now call artificial intelligence (AI), Ben explores its early development at the intersection of aesthetics and systems theory, particularly in postwar France. His first chapter focuses on the philosopher-physicist-cybernetician Abraham Moles and his theory of ‘information aesthetics,’ and related printed matter in pedagogy journals that link pedagogy, aesthetics, and cybernetics.
