Wednesday seminar: The Textures of Value: Creative Research, Technical Mediation, and Econormativity in the "Age of AI"

This seminar is part of the Wednesday seminar series this spring “Processes of Documentation”, where we explore a wide range of processes of documentation emerging within the field of artistic research. Here you can learn more about the series and discover upcoming seminars!

In this seminar, artist and doctoral researcher Paola Torres Núñez del Prado and legal scholar Connal Parsley explore that question through examples from artistic research, collaborative practice, and technical experimentation. Together, they ask how values emerge through media, systems, and shared environments, and what creative research can make visible in that process.

Participants 
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, artist and PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts
Dr Connal Parsley, Reader in Law (Associate Professor)

Rather than treating values as something private or fixed, this seminar asks how they are formed through media, technical conditions, and shared environments, and how creative research can help us engage with that process.

Drawing on examples from the presenters’ work, the seminar explores how the distributions, paradoxes, and displacements associated with AI can help us rethink how we talk about values, and what counts as valuable today.

A central thread in the conversation is econormativity: the idea that normative values emerge through bottom-up and distributed processes rather than through top-down imposition. This connects values to both ethics and economics, drawing on perspectives from ecological economics, thermoeconomics, and thinkers such as Howard Odum and Frederick Soddy. With AI playing an increasingly decisive role in finance and warfare, the question of what kinds of values emerge under such conditions, and what might be imagined beyond them, becomes urgent.

Examples from Connal Parsley’s collaborative research practice include the Econormativities project, which collectively theorises bottom-up normativity; two collaboratively designed Live Action Role Play projects engaging different themes; and a collaboration with Machine Listening, "How to Read a Dataset."

Connal Parsley is Reader in Law (Associate Professor) and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Kent Law School. He leads the multi-sector collaborative research project The Future of Good Decisions: An Evolutionary Approach to Human-AI Administrative Decision-Making, which brings together philosophies of evolving technosocial ecologies, emerging normative foundations for governance institutions, human-AI decision system design and evaluation, and creative participatory prefigurative research methods.

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado is a Peruvian-Swedish artist, researcher, and PhD candidate based in Stockholm, whose practice explores the intersections of machine learning, interactive systems, and non-Western knowledge traditions. She is a PhD candidate in Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Arts, where she leads the Critical AI Working Group, and she is a recipient of the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Google Arts & Culture and Google AI (2020).

Host: Petra Bauer & Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Profile Area: Art, Technology and Materiality

Read about accessibility at Teknikringen 35