Abbildung © AURORA, 2025
Workshop #03 »The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence«
What is it about?: This workshop examines Artificial Intelligence not as a neutral tool, but as a system that fundamentally reshapes how art, culture, and heritage are produced, distributed, and valued — one that carries within it specific histories, hierarchies, and economic interests. Taking artistic practice as its central site of inquiry, the workshop explores how AI systems embed historical inequalities and cultural archives — and how artistic strategies can intervene. Vanessa Garcia (S A V V Y Contemporary) guides participants through critical inputs, collective exercises, and practitioner-led sessions that move from analysis to practice. Christoph Holtmann (HTW Berlin) will be present to answer technological questions. All participants are warmly invited to bring their own experiences and questions into the conversation.
Target Group: The independent cultural scene and smaller creative industry companies in Berlin (no previous knowledge necessary)
Lecturer: Vanessa Garcia (S A V V Y Contemporary)
Venue: S A V V Y Contemporary e.V., Reinickendorfer Str. 17, 13347 Berlin (Wedding). Google Maps
Time: 20 May 2026, 10:00 am – 04:00 pm
Language: English
Fee: Free thanks to the ERDF funding in the program »Strengthening the innovation potential in culture III« (INP-III).
Registration: Please write a short email incl. a link to your website or portfolio to hi-iuno@htw-berlin.de.
Program
10:00
Arrival
Doors Open
Registration and refreshments.
10:15
Welcome
Includes an overview of S A V V Y’s ethos from Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock (S A V V Y Contemporary), an introduction to Project IUNO at HTW Berlin and the origins of this collaboration from Maja Stark (Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin), and a short introduction round for all participants.
10:30
Threshold
Individual writing exercise. A guided exercise anchoring participants in their own relationship to language, authorship, and technology.
11:00
Session 01:
Entanglement
A collective introduction to the conditions, consequences, and politics of AI — beginning not with definitions, but with our understanding of ourselves within these systems.
A guided survey of participants’ existing relationships to digital platforms and AI tools, and an open discussion.
12:00
Session 02:
Disruption
A collective exercise drawing on poetic practice, decolonial theory, and hands-on technological literacy, this session proposes the cultural practitioner as both analyst and saboteur.
13:00
Pause
Lunch Break
14:00
Session 03:
Exposure
From language as intelligence to the systems that deploy it. The critical input grounds the workshop’s questions in the histories, hierarchies, and cultural consequences that precede any specific tool, followed by open discussion.
15:00
Session 04:
Reconstruction
| Working across the conceptual and the technical, this session posits resistance not as refusal but as reconstruction. Vanessa Garcia presents artistic strategies as intervention through concrete cases; Christoph Holtmann will be present to discuss technological questions — exploring what creative and technological autonomy can look like outside the major AI platforms. |
16:00 (latest)
Landing
End
The workshop closes not with answers but with questions — yours and ours, held open.
16:15 +
Connections
| Participants are welcome to stay and continue connections and conversations at the S A V V Y library as well as engage with the S A V V Y Pillars. |
About Vanessa Garcia
Vanessa Garcia is a Berlin-based curator, arts manager, and cultural strategist whose work explores the intersection of art, technology, and critical theory. Her practice centers on ritual, materiality, and the archive as curatorial methodologies; examining how technology and digital systems intersect and reshape visibility, labour, and authorship.
Working across exhibition-making, research, and public formats, she explores diasporic identity and memory, the politics of technology and cultural production, and the intimate entanglements between the body and the systems that increasingly mediate it. Grounded in pluriversal perspectives, she approaches curation as a means of building communities across geographies and temporalities — as collective sites for the production of knowledge, and therefore power.
Alongside her curatorial work with institutions such as S A V V Y Contemporary, she develops practice-based and mmresearch-driven formats that bridge complex theoretical questions into accessible, collective experiences. She engages interdisciplinary methods spanning digital media, research, and platform-based projects, treating technology as material, tool, and a subject of critical inquiry.
