I’m excited to be giving one of the keynotes at the Media Theory Conference 2025 at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. On Nov. 8, I’ll give a talk titled “AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity.” Here is the abstract:
Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence often frame the technology in terms of “existential risk.” Yet such framings rarely pause to consider what existential might mean in the existentialist sense. In this talk I return to Heidegger’s account of the “worldhood of the world” and Sartre’s concept of “hodological space” to argue that the risk posed by AI is not confined to catastrophic scenarios of planetary survival, but lies more immediately in the reconfiguration of subjectivity itself. AI systems bypass conscious perception, modulating aesthesis—the sensory, affective, and preconscious conditions of experience—and in doing so recalibrate the orientations that make ethical deliberation possible in the first place.
Seen from this angle, the hazard of AI is not external to us but infrastructural, shaping our movements, postures, and affective attunements. At the same time, this hazard can be taken up as an opportunity: artworks that use machine learning to stage glitches, detours, or dissonances do not merely represent technological change but provide laboratories for inhabiting it, exposing how bodies and worlds are being rewritten. If AI marks an existentialist risk, it also opens an occasion to engage aesthetically with the reorganization of perception and orientation, and to confront the stakes of ethics where they begin—in the aesthetic, in the felt conditions of living and acting in a changing world.