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Who’s Afraid of AI – Oct. 23 & 24, 2025 – Recordings of Conference Sessions

2025 marks an inflection point in our technological landscape, driven by seismic shifts in AI innovation.

Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Science, and the Futures of Intelligence is a week-long inquiry into the implications and future directions of AI for our creative and collective imaginings, and the many possible futures of intelligence. The complexity of these immediate future calls for interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together artists, AI researchers, and humanities scholars. 

In this volatile domain, the question of who envisions our futures is vital. Artists explore with complexity and humanity, while the humanities reveal the histories of intelligence and the often-overlooked ways knowledge and decision-making have been shaped. By placing these voices in dialogue with AI researchers and technologists, Who’s Afraid of AI? examines the social dimensions of technology, questions tech solutionism from a social-impact perspective, and challenges profit-driven AI with innovation guided by public values.

Mind the World

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Suzanne Kite – Director, The Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI
James DiCarlo – Director, MIT Quest for Intelligence
N. Katherine Hayles – James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature
Moderator: Matt Ratto – Associate Dean, Research and Professor in the Faculty of Information, U of T

What are the merits and limits of artificial intelligence within the larger debate on embodiment? This session brings together an artist who has given AI a physical dimension, a neuroscientist who reckons with the biological neural networks inspiring AI, and a humanist knowledgeable of the longer history in which the human has tried to decouple itself from its bodily needs and wants.

Staging AI

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Kay Voges – Artistic Director, Schauspiel Köln
Roland Schimmelpfennig – Playwright and Director, Berlin
Hito Steyerl – Artist, Filmmaker and Writer, Berlin
Moderator: Brendan Healy, Artistic Director of Canadian Stage

How is AI changing the arts? To answer this question, we bring together theatre directors and artists who have made AI the main driving plot of their stories and those who opted to keep technology secondary in their productions.

Recognizing ‘Noise’

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Marco Donnarumma – Artist, Inventor, Theorist, Berlin
Jutta Treviranus – Director, OCAD University, Inclusive Design Research Centre
Eryk Salvaggio – Media Artist and Tech Policy Press Fellow, Rochester
Moderator: Avery Slater – Associate professor of English at the University of Toronto

Life with AI

Thursday, October 24, 2025

Jeanette Winterson – Author, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Great Britain
Leif Weatherby – Professor of German and Director of Digital Theory Lab at  New York University
Jennifer Nagel – Professor, Philosophy, University of Toronto Mississauga
Moderator: Nora Young – senior technology reporter with CBC News

Social history & Possible Futures

Thursday, October 24, 2025

Memo Akten – Artist working with Code, Data and AI, UC San Diego
Beth Coleman – Professor, Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, U of T
Matteo Pasquinelli – Professor, Philosophy and Cultural Heritage Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Moderator: Karina Vold – assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, U of T

Maddening the Machine: Drawing and AI – Michael Newman – Jan. 20, 2026, 5:30 pm

Michael Newman, Goldsmiths, University of London
January 20, 2026 at 5:30 pm
BMO Lab, CDTPS, University of Toronto

Building on his earlier engagement with drawing as trace in Derrida and drawing on drawing as disegno and scribble in the Renaissance, Michael Newman will explore the double nature of drawing: as trace of what has passed, associated with memory, and as generativity, associated with the future. An archaeology of drawing made using chance (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage) will lead to consideration of its relation to probability and randomisation in AI. Partnerships between human artists and AI, involving bodily gesture and choreography, show that imagination may be conceived not as a faculty of the individual subject, but rather as inhering in relations, leading us to consider AI’s potential for imagination. Artists’ practice with AI generativity may open up radical transformations in the relations between humans and machines. However, returning to the trace will also raise inescapable questions of finitude and ethics.

Michael Newman

Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing at in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds degrees in English Literature and Art History, and a PhD in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary artists as well as thematic essays on the wound, the horizon, contingency, memory, drawing, and nonsense. He is co-director of the new Drawing Centre for Humans and Machines at Goldsmiths University in London, U.K.

LOCATION:

BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and Artificial Intelligence 
University College, University of Toronto

DIRECTIONS: https://bmolab.artsci.utoronto.ca/?p=3341

Who’s Afraid of AI – Conference Oct 23-24, 2025

Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Science, and the Futures of Intelligence is a week-long inquiry into the implications and future directions of AI for our creative and collective imaginings, and the many possible futures of intelligence. The complexity of these immediate future calls for interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together artists, AI researchers, and humanities scholars.

In this volatile domain, the question of who envisions our futures is vital. Artists explore with complexity and humanity, while the humanities reveal the histories of intelligence and the often-overlooked ways knowledge and decision-making have been shaped. By placing these voices in dialogue with AI researchers and technologists, Who’s Afraid of AI? examines the social dimensions of technology, questions tech solutionism from a social-impact perspective, and challenges profit-driven AI with innovation guided by public values.

The two-day conference at the University of Toronto’s University College anchors the week and features panels and debates with leading figures in these disciplines, including a keynote by 2025 Nobel Laureate in Physics Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” and 2025 Neil Graham Lecturer in Science, Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer.

For more info: https://uoft.me/who’s_afraid_of_ai

Welcome Professor Sarah Bay-Cheng!

The BMO Lab is thrilled to announce that Sarah Bay-Cheng will join the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies on July 1, 2025 as Professor of Emerging Technologies in Theatre and Performance and the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama. As an outstanding and field-shaping scholar, Professor Bay-Cheng will bring exciting research, collaboration, and pedagogical innovation to our department. In this position, Sarah will be an integral part of the BMO Lab team.

Sarah Bay-Cheng

Sarah Bay-Cheng, PhD is Professor of Emerging Technologies in Theatre and Performance and the Helen and Paul Phelan Chair in Drama at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Toronto. A former Fulbright Scholar at Utrecht University, her research explores the intersections of theatre, performance, and digital technologies, examining how historical practices in media inform contemporary performance and culture. She has published four books, including Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (co-authored, University of Michigan, 2015) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (co-edited, University of Amsterdam Press, 2010). She edited the book series, Avant-Gardes in Performance and has published over 75 essays, chapters and reviews.

Her current research projects include Digital Historiography and Performance: Introductions & Provocations (University of Michigan Press), “AI in Performance-making: New Frontiers in the Humanities” Contemporary Theatre Review, co-edited with Liam Jarvis and Aneta Mancewicz, and new work on data in creating impact frameworks for arts organizations and researchers. 

Previously, Bay-Cheng served as the Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design and as Department Chair of Theatre and Dance at Bowdoin College. In 2012, she founded the Technē Institute for Arts and Emerging Technologies, and graduate programs in Theatre and Performance at the University at Buffalo. She is a founding co-host for On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast, and can be heard there occasionally. 

Beyond scholarship, Bay-Cheng has worked as a director and dramaturg with a focus on intermedial collaborations and a fondness for puppetry. 

Algorithmic Millennium: Creating Staged & Digital Games – Feb 4, 2025

Winter Keynote Lecture
  
Natalie Tin Yin Gan & Remy Siu
of Hong Kong Exile & Sunset Visitor
in conversation with Dr. Doug Eacho

Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025, 5-7pm

Audio recording of the presentation:

What does experimental performance have to do with video games? How do emerging media provide new landscapes for diasporic narratives? How can live and digital bodies perform and resist algorithmic control? The BMO Lab’s winter keynote will explore these questions and more with two of Canada’s most exciting young artists: Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Remy Siu, of the multimedia performance collective Hong Kong Exile and the video game company Sunset Visitor. Their conversation with Dr. Doug Eacho aims to explore transpacific politics, vocal performance, motion capture, the state of electronic dance music, uses of allegory, anime fashion… at least.  
 
Since 2011, Hong Kong Exile’s interdisciplinary works such as Foxconn Frequency (no. 3), No Foreigners, and Visitors from Far Away to the State Machine have performed across Canada and in New York, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
 
Sunset Visitor 斜陽過客 ’s debut narrative science-fiction game, 1000xRESIST (2024), appeared on nearly 80 ‘game of the year’ lists from major outlets like NPR, Polygon, and Paste. The game was praised as “a revolution in storytelling” (IGN), “one of the best stories in the medium” (Paste), and “an extraordinary piece of work – one that places diasporic trauma front and centre” (Eurogamer). It was nominated for three awards at the Independent Game Festival and seven Canadian Game Awards.
 
Natalie Tin Yin Gan 顏婷妍 is an independent choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, and writer. Remy Siu 蕭逸南 is a composer and new media artist. Both work on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied lands of the Coast Salish peoples.