EVENTS

Spectacular Data: Fascism Redux and the AI Frontier

 

June 21-26, 2026

Intermedia Research Studio, Edmonton, Alberta
 

This was a five day team building, research-creation practice intensive studio
session that brought together researchers/artists from the Spectacular Data Media Collective
and research-creation practitioners from the Intermedia Research Studio’s Toxic Media Ecologies AI Observatory at the University of Alberta in order to create experimental intermedia environments where subjects encounter media formations and algorithmic processes through interactive intermedia performances.

 

Such molecular media probes suspend ideological abstraction and foreground for research participants their sensuous embodiment. The studio sessions will culminate with a public-facing workshop in November of 2026 to which researchers from the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada will be invited along with students and researchers from the University of Alberta on and off campus community. Through workshop performances interested stakeholders are able to reflect on both the very personal significance and meaning of their interactions, interrogate both hidden dangers as well as transformative possibilities of these environments and debate the public policy implications of the new forms of research data generated by these performances. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Planned: Spectacular Data Media Collective

Public-Facing Workshop 

 

November 15, 2026

Intermedia Research Studio, Edmonton, Alberta

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Excerpt from the KIAS Grant proposal

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Rapid advances made in the field of AI enabled information processing systems have
resulted in both a race to develop national strategies for the adoption of these technologies, such
as the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, as well as grave concerns regarding their
harmful impacts, given their unpredictability and their unprecedented capacity for scaling
instrumental reach and scope. AI safety has consequently emerged as an urgent issue, especially
as AI technologies enter an intermedia ecology and political economy where toxic social media
have already become a multi-dimensional social crisis and policy nightmare. However, current
evaluation and assessment of risks and dangers of AI remain limited and under-examined. The
Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, for instance, restricts the scope of risks it
examines to harmful content depicting child sexual abuse, non-consensual intimate imagery, and
to fraud, impersonation, deception, along with losses of trust and privacy. Yet this is a very
minimal inventory of risks which overlooks dangers to public mental health and safety, cultural
dignity, social agency and economic well-being posed by the unpredictability of AI models, by
gendered and racialized biases of its weighting and training processes, by its potential
optimizations of existing economic, political and media processes of manipulation, coercion,
exploitation, state repression and war.

This project develops research-creation interventions for reimagining AI as a public good rather than as an exclusive weapon for powerful self-interests given interlocking systems of oppression characterizing our present. As Marshall McLuhan observed, when new technologies emerge, creativity becomes crucial for forethought.

While leading AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Jacob Steinhardt among others called for
a moratorium on the AI integration in existing technological systems just fifteen months ago,
these alarms have been swiftly forgotten in the frenzy of the AI gold rush unleashed by
governments competing with each other around the world as the post-cold war international
order melts away. Public concerns for AI safety continues to grow, prompting the establishment
of research programs seeking to develop policy guardrails aiming to keep AI technologies out of
the hands of what this discourse calls “bad actors.” But this process of social adaptation to new
technology also exhibit the characteristic features of what science and technology studies calls
“black boxing” and Canadian communication theorist and economic historian Harold A. Innis
termed the formation of “monopolies of knowledge”. Networks of computer engineers,
executives of technology start ups and state bureaucrats create institutional silos of expertise
which consolidate their leadership roles but exclude broad scale public participation in the
process of social adaptation to new technological capacities while disregarding the insights of
long-standing traditions of research in the humanities, social sciences and the creative arts. The
Digital Research Alliance of Canada and the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute
exemplify such formations of monopolies of knowledge. Both Innis and subsequent research in
science and technology studies suggest that this process of technological black boxing can result
in the significant underestimation of the dangers and risks posed by the reorganization of social
life around undemocratic technological complexes. The histories of our ever deepening
dependence not only on fossil fuels but on energy of every kind as well as the platformization of
our mass media ecologies are textbook examples of the wicked problems we are capable of
creating for ourselves through such patterns of technological advancement.

The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute limits the range of the risks it researches to
to harmful synthetic content (content depicting child sexual abuse, non-consensual intimate
imagery), and cyber crime (fraud, impersonation, deception) along with losses of trust, personal
autonomy and privacy. But this is a minimalist inventory which ignores dangers to public mental
health and safety, threats to cultural dignity, to social agency and economic well-being posed by
the unpredictability of AI models, by gendered and racialized biases of its weighting and training
processes, by its capacities to optimize existing economic, political and media processes of
manipulation, coercion, exploitation, state repression and war. The construction of large language
models, moreover, requires new collaborations between state power and private wealth as human
experience needs to be rendered into digital form before models can be built, predisposing AI
technological development to unfold within circuits of powerful elites. Indeed, nothing offers
itself as a more obscene index of the toxicity of our contemporary intermedia ecology than
Silicon Valley’s numerous collaborations with the Israel Defence Forces, involving capitalization
estimated to be in excess of $40 billion USD, with the joint Google- Amazon project Nimbus
providing cloud data storage and other services accounting for $1.2 billion USD of such
astronomical war-profiteering alone. (Almasri 2025, Perrigo 2024).

Consequently, Spectacular Data: Fascism Redux and the AI Frontier draws upon intermedia
research-creation in order to pose speculative questions which the black box of contemporary AI
safety discourses cannot: What if bad actors comprise the normal not exceptional case in our
society as it attempts to adapt to AI enabled intermedia environments? Given the multiple
colonialisms of racial capitalism and the long histories of interlocking systems of oppressions, do
we not in fact greet the advent of AI enabled information capitalism in a social world in which
bad actors are systemic agents? Given the deep cultural biases of colonizing societies for valuing
technological innovation as the highest good and for axiomatically assuming it to be the
historical inevitability of progress, how can marginalized and disenfranchised communities brace
themselves for the new forms of power asymmetry emerging through these monopolies of
knowledge and their new forms of frontier violence as the rule of law is shaken from its
foundations?

Intermedia research-creation is the best research approach for shining the light of such questions
into the black boxing of contemporary technological innovation for several reasons. With roots in
Harold A. Innis’ and Marshall McLuhan’s media probes, intermedia research-creation, as
developed at the Intermedia Research Studio, also draws upon our innovations in research-
creation developed through the Speculative Energy Futures collaborative research project led by
my colleagues Dr. Sheena Wilson and Dr. Natalie Loveless.

 

Intermedia research-creation:

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1)prioritizes the research process over the creation of a work for an artist’s portfolio;

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2) adapts creative practices and techniques specifically to decolonize and pluriversalize universal social scientific theories and methodologies;

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3) foregrounds its institutional location in researchuniversities in order to create an interdisciplinary research process involving subaltern intermedia counter-environments designed to cultivate what philosopher Jacques Rancière theorizes as an “equality of intelligences” and a “redistribution of the sensible.”

 

Dr. Sourayan Mockerjea