Friday June 26 we organized a Creative Resistance Against AI Assembly during the INC Exit Fest. Some of you were there. It was hot, it started a bit too late, we might not have properly invited everyone, and honestly: we pretty much improvised on the spot because of the circumstances. But we loved to do it, we met some great people, and we want to just share with you that it happened and that it will happen again later! We decided to continue exchange and collaboration around creative resistance to current tech systems.

Below a small recap with some links to materials that were shared. We took resisting and refusing AI as an inherently collective, defiantly promising, and inherently creative field of research and experimentation.
At 10 o’clock in the morning we gathered at the OT301 in Amsterdam, it was more than 30 degrees Celsius, and we already had an evening and full day of great talks and nice people. But we were determined to go ahead with it and take our time to discuss and find common threads.
We went outside into the park. We sat down and exchanged all kinds of materials and ideas; we shared the experiences and discussed what we all have been working on lately. Just to state the obvious: we don’t really like AI as a term, we are very concerned about it use as part of violent military technologies, and we hate the related ecological destruction and its immense energy usage. We furthermore certainly do not like techno-fascist cyberbosses and much of the AI slop and hype bullshit. We are already exploring multiple ways to resist and oppose it. But there is much more to say about it. We don’t just want to disengage and let it be. And we certainly keep imagining how to do things otherwise. We refuse to take recent tech developments for how they are presented to us. We think there is much potential on building on resistance and refusal to create alternative sociotechnical configurations, to imagine radical different kind of computational infrastructures, and to experiment with ever more ways to halt or confuse the devastating systems that are currently imposed on us. So, we gathered to talk about active forms of resistance and creative subversion.
We shared and mapped out ways we are already doing this. We very much enjoyed hearing about all kinds of experiences for resisting AI, refusing tech solutionism, tech worker protests, building alternatives, and other kinds of defiant artistic experimentation. We looked for possibilities to collaborate and reinforce practical tactics.
We took all kinds of different zines and booklets with us. Some were made by us, and some were created by others and reproduced for the occasion. These zines were printed so they could be handed out on the spot, but they were also shared these through a simple Arduino local wifi fileshare. We can bring it with us to further events or workshops, but in the meantime, we now also made a concise online collection of zines so you can already check them out, download them, or distribute them. It also includes the AI_Anxiety zine!
We also developed a typology of resistance, which was discussed and elaborated on during the gathering. We will work on a new version of it, and we will experiment with in art & design education. But it seemed helpful for some to reflect on their own practice or think about new forms of creative opposition, so we already wanted to share the draft version. We hoped to establish the richest and boldest possible vision of creative resistance (but let’s keep working on that!): for now, the most interesting work is probably done when combining different types of resistance or when you go through different types of resistance in different phases of your work. Maybe the ‘epistemic refusal’ can fuel the other types of resistance. We hope it can help to inspire further research and action!
Also, finally, we made a tablecloth – or rather picnic cloth, as we happened to go to the park – full of recent investigations of tech systems (in broad sense of the word). It was printed in black on a big white sheet. It combined multiple complex visualizations, for example parts of work by Crawford and Joler, some by Estampa and Sarah Ciston, and also Disnovation and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. A picture of this cloth is now also posted online with links to the different visualizations that were included and with several pictures of us using it during the event. It might be an interesting tool for further brainstorming and a great conversation starter for discussing new points of intervention or topics to further explore. We scrabbled all kinds of practices and ideas on top of it, which made a rich visualization of practices and possibilities.

Anyway, this is just a quick recap, but it will give you some ideas what we have been up to. We want to come together and continue our exchange after the summer break, preferably again in a rather informal AI_Anxiety style. If you would like to host or prepare with us, do get in contact! There were already some suggestions for this. So let’s conspire and get together again after the summer. We are now even more determined to keep thinking together how to strengthen the somewhat scattered but defiant field of creative resistance.