Panelists: Hito Steyerl, Paolo Caffoni, Felix Stalder, Vanja Subotić
Moderated by: Boris Buden
Rapid development of digital technology, especially the breathtaking rise of AI, compels us to radically rethink Gramsci’s famous claim that all humans are intellectuals but not all humans have in society the function of intellectuals. He meant a historically specific division of labor in which the common intellect, alienated in the form of a social class, was used to create cultural hegemony so as to pacify the intrinsic contradictions of industrial capitalism, normalize its class rule and prevent the revolution – which alone was expected to return the intellect to its original owners, the human commons.
A similar hope reemerged in the early days of internet, now in the form of digital commons. But the sweet dream of the neoliberal globalization about a borderless world in which an instant communication across all socio-political, cultural and linguistic divides, and a nonrestricted access to the entire knowledge of humanity will generate prosperity and secure peace for all, turned soon into a bitter reality. In the process of its technological appropriation the human intellectual commons reemerged as a “natural resource” – only to be fenced off, extracted, commodified and algorithmically instrumentalized in the service of capital and power. A new intellectual agency entered the scene, the AI, claiming superiority over its human substratum. Wherever it is deployed, it profoundly transforms the world we know – increasingly, for worse: it even reentered the loop of war, “the mother of all high-speed technologies” (F. Kittler).
Has something gone wrong? How and why? Is there a way out?
Short Zoom introduction to the topic
The Master’s Voice
Generative AI, flexible realism and the Pantheon data centre in Topusko
hito steyerl, filmmaker, writer Berlin
Niépce invented both photography and a heat engine — and with GenAI they finally fuse. Pantheon AI is a €50 billion gigawatt hyperscaler to be installed in 2027 by decree on Topusko, a Croatian village of 945. Topusko has been, in a single century: an Ustaša killing-ground, a partisan congress centre, the site of mass ethnic cleansing, the place where Ivan Supek gave a stunning lecture about quantum physics and soon a GenAI slop megafactory fleeing from Iranian missiles on Gulf data centers. The EU-funded police unit Koridor pushes asylum-seekers back across the green border at night. But Topusko had another koridor too: in 1944 a partisan war-photography unit improvised an exhibition in a spa hallway. Against the slop photorealism of generative AI, that friction-aesthetic points towards an alternative — a liberated, federated, low-energy compute and education stack.
Paolo Caffoni is a researcher in philosophy, media theory, and artificial intelligence. He is currently affiliated with the AI Forensics group at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and with the ERC project AIMODELS at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on linguistic labor and the material conditions of translation technologies. From 2009 to 2021, he was editor et large at the Berlin-based publishing house Archive Books, where he also co-directed the exhibition and public program at Archive Kabinett. His writing has appeared in AI & Society, MicroMega, Arts of the Working Class, and Civic Sociology, among other publications.
Felix Stalder is a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, teaching in the Department of Fine Arts’s “art:ifical studies” major. His work focuses on the intersection of cultural, political and technological dynamics, in particular practices of commoning, datafication, AI, and transformation of nature and of subjectivity. He not only works as an academic, but also as a cultural producer, as long-time moderator of <nettime>, a crucial nexus of critical net culture, first for the email list, now for its node in the fediverse. He is a member of the World Information Institute and the Technopolitics Working Group, both based in Vienna.
He is the author/editor of numerous books, among others Digital Solidarity (PML & Mute, 2014), Kultur der Digitalität / Digital Condition /字 状况 (Suhrkamp, 2016/Polity Press, 2018, School of Public Art, 2023), Aesthetics of the Commons (Diaphanes, 2021), Digital Unconscious (Autonomedia, 2021), From Commons to NFTS (Ljubliana 2022) and “Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices” (Sternberg Press, 2025)
Vanja Subotić is a Postdoctoral Research Associate affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. She was an EPSA Research Fellow at the Center for Language, Logic, and Cognition at the University of Turin. Her areas of expertise include the philosophy of AI, the philosophy of cognition, the philosophy of linguistics, general methodology, and experimental philosophy. She earned her PhD from the University of Belgrade in 2023 with a dissertation on the prospects for explaining linguistic competence using deep learning models in natural language processing and large language models. She is a long-time collaborator of the Center for the Promotion of Science in Belgrade and the Center for Bioethical Studies in Belgrade, and has two certificates, one in Science Communication (from the Center for the Promotion of Science in Belgrade, obtained in 2021), and the other in AI Safety, Ethics, and Society (from the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco, USA, obtained in 2026).
Screening schedule
- Dokukino KIC
