Call for Participation:

Hallucinate, unbox, restart: A winter school for slowing down inside the synthetic everyday
Organized by Game of Tech
October 27-29, 2026
Naples, Italy
https://www.gameoftech.eu/eventi/winterschool2026/

Deadline for submission of applications: August 31, 2026

The recent proliferation of generative AI systems has been accompanied by the entrenchment of a particular imaginary – one that frames and accept AI as a black box. This has a twofold implication. On one hand, it legitimates the design of AI structures, codes, and networks as hyper-opaque, restricting full comprehension of its operations and naturalizing this failure. On the other hand, this embedded opacity also makes it harder to look into another fundamental dimension of generative AI, stemming from the appreciation of the latter as a sociotechnical assemblage: its uses and counter-uses, practices of appropriation, deviation and renegotiation.

The black box operates as a powerful narrative that erodes human agency. If machines are somehow shaping the future in ways that elude our understanding, no space is left to resist this trajectory. In such a framing, any possibility of unpredictable more-than-human interactions instantly collapses, along with any desertion from intended prescriptions and shared assumptions. And yet people keep engaging with AI in ways its producers never anticipated: pushing back, resisting, appropriating, redesigning, dismantling.

Along with tangible uses, everyday habits and practical adaptations, what is at stake is the construction of imaginaries and the very possibility of trusting one own’s perception, senses and impressions. In the cities we inhabit, through our mobiles and the countless screens colonizing intimacy, offices, universities, public spaces and homes, we are relentlessly overexposed to an endless stream of synthetic images and fabricated worlds – a condition unevenly distributed, yet structurally intertwined across geographies. The explosion of generative AI, with its alleged democratizing power over content production, adds yet another layer to this saturation, blurring truths and hallucinations, probability and actuality, warping reality and gradually reshaping the very perceptive structures of the real.

Two questions hold this framing together:

• How can we engage with technologies whose authority rests on the claim of being inherently unknowable and that produces unstableness of sensed and perceived reality itself?
• How do we navigate an increasingly opaque, enshittified and hallucinatory digital environment without losing sight of the material reality of its infrastructure and of its asymmetries?

Our winter school sets out to pause on these questions: not to offer solutions, but to immerse ourselves in the contradictions, speculations, and alternatives such pause generates. We do so through a deliberate slowing-down: a collective pause in which observing our own gestures becomes a way of observing the world, and decomposing the everyday becomes a way of deconstructing the systems that frame it. To do so, it engages in a two-sided methodological intervention.

TWO MODES OF UNBOXING

The school advances this exploration along two intertwined methodological lines: auto-ethnography and art-based research. First, we propose autoethnography as one mode of unboxing: a chance to slowly inhabit the ephemeral nature of using, interacting with, fighting against, and making kin with, generative AI. With autoethnography we will retrace our daily practices and mediated behaviours, reflecting on our positionality with intelligent (?) machines, and investigating our embodied, tangible, material experience in the so-called cloud.

Second, to bring out the thickness of sociotechnical assemblages and engagements, we then propose to draw on art-based research: sound-works, multimedia installations, performances, speculative design iterations and narrative provocations are a way to voice, spatialize and process our affective interactions with AI.

Unlocking the black box should therefore not be understood as a merely technical gesture. We conceive it instead as a process of deconstructing the standardized paradigm of use, through the exploration of the interstices within human-machine systems – an exploration that encompasses the appreciation of minute, granular, more-than-human interactions, as well as the grand picture that lies behind them. Eventually, this inquiry could become the generative site for redesigning both.

We invite PhD students, early-career researchers, artists, independent scholars both from Humanities and ICTs, technology’s (un)enthusiasts, tech workers, hackers, and anyone curious to explore these concerns and to engage with such resources to apply for our winter school.

The winter school will take place in Naples, Italy, from 27 to 29 October 2026. Over these three days, we will bring together seminars with scholars and artists, autoethnographic sessions and art-based workshops, and artistic re-enactments in a collective, convivial (some would say: fun) moment:

•  Situated and post-disciplinary approaches to digital inquiry
• Artistic, speculative, and collaborative methodologies
• Humanistic approach to technological affordances
• ICT approach to social impacts of technology
• Collectively hacking the code(s)

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

The Winter School will take place in Naples, Italy, from October 27th to 29th.

Application deadline: August 31st
Notification of acceptance: September 15th

The number of participants is limited to 20.

The winter school is completely free to attend. Unfortunately, we cannot cover travel or accommodation costs. All activities will be held at university facilities (Vico Monte della Pietà, 1) and social spaces in the historic city center.

MORE INFORMATION

Please visit https://www.gameoftech.eu/eventi/winterschool2026/