[Commlist] Call for Participation - Game of Tech Winter School "Hallucinate, unbox, restart"

As Game of Tech <https://www.gameoftech.eu/>, following last year's 
edition we are happy to share the call for participation for the winter 
school "*Hallucinate, unbox, restart: a winter school for slowing down 
inside the synthetic everyday*", taking place in *Naples*, Italy, *from 
27 to 29 October 2026*.

In brief: the winter school offers a three-day path to critically engage 
with the "black box" imaginary of generative AI, combining 
autoethnography and art-based research to explore uses, counter-uses, 
and practices of appropriation of generative technologies.

It welcomes PhD students, early-career researchers, artists, independent 
scholars, and anyone interested in the topic, from both humanistic and 
technical/ICT perspectives. *Participation is free* (limited to 20 
places), though travel and accommodation costs are not covered. 
*Application deadline: 7 September 2026*.

Full call below and here 
<https://www.gameoftech.eu/eventi/winterschool2026/>.




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)

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