Performing AI: “wild interdisciplinarity” between – and from within – the social, natural and human sciences and the arts

This paper describes and reflects on the imaginaries, knowledge, processes and methods of a new four-year research project called Performing AI (PAI): Governance, Agency and Action – An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s “collaborative and interdisciplinary research” program, the project assembles researchers from three Swiss universities (the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne and the Zurich University of the Arts) and Japan (University of Tokyo’s General Systems Science department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). PAI’s goal is to investigate “AI” from epistemic, ontological, aesthetic and ethical angles, neither taking for granted its “uncontroversial ‘thingness’”, nor assuming received disciplinary frames to fit the purpose. Instead, we address how AI is “performed” – that is, enacted and produced – across different discursive and material sites and contexts. PAI asks multiple questions: How is AI enacted in governmental policy? What does artistic practice do to AI, and what does AI do to artistic practice? How is AI reconfigured in interdisciplinary scientific domains such as artificial life (as opposed to computer science)? How is AI taken up, or reconfigured in the public sphere, including schools, museums and festivals focused on the intersections of art, technology and society?