Collapse – a state of events in which multiple systems fail at once, without the promise of repair – is one of the key terms used today to described various contemporary crises. We encounter it in relation to climate systems, political institutions, economic infrastructures, AI models, social systems, and increasingly, epistemic authority itself. Yet the question this session will pose is not simply whether collapse is really happening or how far advanced it may be. Instead, it will interrogate what kind of story collapse has become, what kinds of affects it mobilises and what kinds of subjects it presupposes and produces. The event will start from a screening of Joanna Zylinska’s new short film, titled /collapse, which explores its eponymous subject as a mediated cultural condition. It will be followed by a short presentation by Zylinska and a panel discussion on post-collapse narratives and visions by Professor Mercedes Bunz, Dr Sebastián Lehuedé and Dr Eleonora Lima.

Please join us to explore how to tell better stories about what’s to come!

Followed by a drinks reception.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, artist, curator and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London, where she directs the Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception. An advocate of ‘radical open-access’, she is a co-Director of Open Humanities Press and an editor of its MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series. Zylinska is an author of a number of books – including The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Her own art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. Zylinska is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while examining various narratives of collapse, be it on the level of AI models or planetary systems.

Mercedes Bunz is Professor of Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. Author of The Silent Revolution: How Digitalization Transforms Knowledge, Work, Journalism and Politics without Making Too Much Noise and multiple publications on the calculation of meaning by AI models, her research explores how digital technologies transform knowledge and power, with a focus on algorithms and data infrastructures. She co-leads the Creative AI Lab in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries and is a co-founder of meson press, an open-access publisher for digital culture research.

Sebastián Lehuedé is Lecturer in Ethics, AI and Society at King’s College London. His research focuses on the governance of digital technologies from a global social justice perspective. His current project, AI’s Nature, explores the connection between AI and environmental justice. He has engaged with urban, peasant and Indigenous communities in Chile and Colombia mobilising against a data centre project, resisting lithium extraction and participating in AI-centred conservationist initiatives. Sebastián’s approach combines ethnographic methods, political ecology and decolonial thought.

Eleonora Lima is Lecturer in Cultural AI in the Department of Digital Humanities and Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where she works on the EU-funded project Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (KT4D). Her research sits at the intersection of Critical AI Studies, Narrative and Literary Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, focusing on three main areas. She has contributed to Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines (OUP, 2023) and published a monograph on the advent of information technologies in Italy through the literary works of Italo Calvino and Paolo Volponi (Florence University Press, 2020). Her current work investigates dominant AI narratives, especially participation and justice in AI design and implementation.