Generating Resistance, Persistence, Presence in the Age of AI

Over the course of the 2025–2027 academic years The Center for Experimental Humanities and Stevenson Library are collaborating on a series of workshops, interdisciplinary panels, lectures, and community conversations focused on the implications of GenAI for our social, mental, and environmental ecologies.

In October, 2025 we kicked off this series with an interdisciplinary panel focused on putting GenAI in context: discussing the language we use and why, understanding its historical antecedents, and interrogating the socioeconomic systems that condition us to use technologies in ways that are perceived as inevitable. Other highlights from fall 2025 include guest lecture and demo, Ctrl+Alt+Survive: Fear in the Age of AI, with artists Victor Morales and Ben Williams.

Spring 2026 programming explored how GenAI complicates questions of human agency and attention. As algorithmic systems increasingly shape how we read, create, and make decisions, how do we protect and care for what is essentially human? And how do we make spaces for collective reclamation, resistance and presence in this moment? To explore these questions we hosted artist and developer Aarati Akkapedi for a durational performance, Rituals of Recursion, and panel discussion in the library, inviting students and faculty to consider how artistic practice can illuminate the tensions and possibilities between digital technologies, creativity, and human agency.

A central part of our programming also included EH Media Corps students hosting a series of analog events centered on textile technologies, foregrounding slow, tactile, and embodied forms of making. We closed the semester with a student and faculty panel presentation on “AI Technologies at Bard College: an Investigation of Student Practices and Perspectives.”

Looking ahead, our Fall 2026 programming will focus on the environmental impacts of generative AI, including a keynote lecture in October with Steven Gonzalez Monserrate (this event also in collaboration with Anthropology). His book project, “Cloud Ecologies”, is an ethnographic study of data centers and their ecological impacts. We plan to close out this 2-year long collaborative programming with a large-scale symposium in Spring 2027.

Events

AI on Bard Campus: A Community Conversation Centering Student Voices
May 16, 2025
Synthetic Media: Generating Resistance, Persistence, and Presence in the Age of AI
October 22, 2025
Ctrl+Alt+Survive: Fear in the age of AI
November 13, 2025
Textile Technologies: Mending
March 6, 2026
Attention Sanctuary
March 30, 2026
Textile Technologies: Weaving Part I
April 10, 2026
Generating Resistance, Persistence, Presence in the Age of AI: Rituals of Recursion with artist and technologist, Aarati Akkapeddi
April 14, 2026
Textile Technologies: Weaving Part II
April 17, 2026
Meditations on Slow TV & Cinema Watching Challenge
April 24, 2026
AI Technologies at Bard College: Student presentation & faculty panel discussion
May 6, 2026
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate: Cloud Ecologies
September 30, 2026