Unsettling Intelligences: The Politics of Reason through AI and Art

On the morning of October 24, art and artificial intelligence met in unusual harmony within the bright glass halls of Stony Brook University's Simons Center for Geometry and Physics.

The campus became a site for dialogue between artists, theorists and technologists, convening to ask a pressing question: what new ways of thought, creativity and responsibility emerge when art and AI converge in a world of expanding technodiversity?

Co-presented by the Future Histories Studio at Stony Brook University and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the symposium 'Unsettling Intelligences: The Politics of Reason through AI and Art' marked an ambitious partnership that blurred the line between research and exhibition. Organizers Stephanie Dinkins, Kusama Endowed Chair of Art at Stony Brook, and Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Guggenheim, gathered a global assembly of voices to probe how artificial intelligence is transforming the politics of perception and creativity.

Throughout the day, speakers returned to one central idea: that AI does not simply extend human thought but exposes its limits. "We aimed to examine the profound transformations brought by automation," said Noam Segal. "As these systems become ever more embedded in daily life - largely invisible yet deeply consequential - they challenge the very foundations of subjectivity and governance."

"Unsettling Intelligences asks us to see AI not as a neutral future, but as a mirror of the histories that built it," said Dinkins. "Prismatic reason - a way of thinking that honors multiplicity, memory and care - offers a path beyond the narrow logics we've inherited. If we want technologies that serve us all, we must build them with many truths in view."

Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal at the AI Innovation Institute website.