FUTURE MANIFESTOS CONFERENCE
Dates: April 10 – 11
Location: DIGS, Krambugata 2, Trondheim
Time: 10:00–14:30
!Mediengruppe Bitnik / Boris Debackere Boris Eldagsen / Andy Gracie
Vanessa Hannesschläger / Alexander Refsum Jensenius / Syver Lauritz
Dani Ploeger / Synne Tollerud Bull / Siegfried Zielinski / Joanna Zylinska
This event is free, but registration is required due to limited capacity.
Signup form: https://forms.gle/UgSXcPiVadGbpYXYA
The conference will be held in English.
Introduction
The Future Manifestos Conference gathers speakers who dare to pose dangerous questions and issue bold declarations about how to think, create, and act in a world increasingly conditioned by Artificial Intelligence. Their manifestos take many forms: embodied in artistic practice, philosophical speculation, perceptual shifts, and resistant action.
A true manifesto is more than words on paper. It is a performative act of rupture, a cultural and political force that pulls the future into existence.
From Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto, celebrating the speed of machines and violent renewal, to Tristan Tzara’s Dada proclamations against war and reason; from the Surrealists’ dream-logic assaults on bourgeois order to Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, embracing hybridity between human and machine; to Pussy Riot’s unapologetic acts against authoritarianism—the manifesto has repeatedly bent history.
A manifesto refuses the given. It insists on the possible. Yet today, it has grown rare.
AI systems shape opportunities and crises alike. They promise productivity and optimize life and work, reorganize society, configure thought. They create crises of their own. Corporate tech sells AI as a universal solution for both individuals and governments. Yet the crises do not recede. One emergency simply displaces another: geopolitical shocks, war, climate breakdown, economic instability. What remains is fatigue. Spectacle numbs rather than mobilizes.
This is not the time to wait and see. The manifesto must be our weapon of choice—an antidote to the passive consumption of technological systems and spectatorship of cascading crises.
What we need are bold manifestos: for creativity under automation, for criticality that escapes the dataset, for humans, for AI, for life, and for what remains after.
These manifestos need not agree. They should not. They may be extreme, contradictory, even incompatible: accelerationist and pro-AI, fiercely anti-AI, anti-technology, radically hybrid or post-human, grounded in reality or speculative beyond time and space.
The power is in boldness—in message, in form, in perception, in action. In imagining futures that diverge from algorithmically prescribed and corporately owned paths.
Questions our speakers ask:
Can we see beauty—or feel empathy—for machines when they reveal error and imperfection?
Are embodied AI and small language models the future of creative AI systems?
Does the concept of artificial extelligences offer a clearer way to describe the kind of electric thinking machines now offer us?
Who carries the risk—and the ethical responsibility—when human and machine creativity mutate together?
Has the arts field suffocated itself by becoming overly critical of emerging technologies—and therefore irrelevant?
Has the modern art field mistaken critique for consequence — and turned resistance into just another training set?
Can virtual AI agents lead resistance against techfascism, algorithmic cruelty, spam factories, and AI slop?
Or do we need the destruction and decline of advanced technological systems to make space for something else?
Why do today’s collapse narratives make us tired and numb, rather than pushing us toward redemption and change?
And what remains of all these manifestos when viewed through the inevitable scale of deep time?
These are the beginnings of Future Manifestos for the age of AI.
— Zane Cerpina
Lead Curator & Artistic Director, TEKS
