AI-generated content floods the digital space; attentions hurry to feed off the day’s offerings. CONTENT MACHINES asks: can these same techniques be used for artistic, non-commercial purposes? Embark with us on an unprecedented journey through the wonders of automated generation, mythical machinic incantations and a connection of brains and networks, just before the rot sets in. Online on Distant.Gallery and at LAB111 in Amsterdam, international artists, collectives, and institutions bring together shared toolkits and critical reflections on authorship, automation, and visibility. 

What can you expect? In two sessions on the 22nd and 23rd of June your 'For You' page will come alive. An inaugural tarot pull leads into an examination of the generating of automated visual content for online dissemination, and the ways in which artists may go about workshopping such a thing. What sort of aesthetic output does it create? From here we travel on to the moon, various moons plucked from the pastures of social media during the Hindu ritual of Karwa Chauth.

Before you know it, two computers are chatting about speaking Italian, machines are cutting up chunks of the earth, someone somewhere wishes to be famous. Finally, you land in a circular cement structure. You do not know why, but feel a sense of camaraderie and even friendship as the winds bring your faraway sounds. Unsure of what you have witnessed, you put your phone away. 

With the following speakers and work by: Anisha Baid, Sabrina Bellenzier, Mara Oscar Cassiani, Varoujan Chetirian, Clusterduck, Silvia Dal Dosso, Andrea Franco, Marialaura Ghidini, Coralie Hina Gourdon, Philomena Grassl, IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain, Raul Marroquin, Monument of Friendship Initiative, Antoni Muntadas, Ginevra Petrozzi, Remko Scha, Anika Schwarzlose & Brian D McKenna, Chinar Shah & Kaamna Patel, Valentina Tanni, Total Refusal, Wade Wallerstein, Firat Yücel & others!

Partners: Gray Area, LI-MA, ROTBOTS, Silicon Plateau, Untitled Tbilisi 

LI-MA 

As part of the festival, LI-MA presents a selection of works that trace a longer history of artists engaging with automation, generative systems, and the machine as creative agent. Long before algorithmic content generation became infrastructure, artists were already probing what it meant to delegate authorship to a process, a program, or a circuit. Works by Raul Marroquin, Antoni Muntadas, Remko Scha, and Anika Schwarzlose & Brian D McKenna are drawn from LI-MA's collection to map some of that terrain. From Scha's aleatoric image grammars and

Marroquin's scheming, self-aware computers, to Muntadas' dissection of the hidden codes embedded in media language and Schwarzlose & McKenna's inquiry into the strange agency of mining machines. Works by Remko Scha and Raul Marroquin from the LI-MA collection will be installed in the festival space, situating the programme within a longer history of artists working with generative systems and machine-based authorship.

Silicon Plateau 

Silicon Plateau, an art project and publishing series rooted in the contradictions of Bangalore, India's self-declared Silicon Valley, brings together a programme of interventions, screenings, and conversations that probe the ways technology shapes everyday life from the ground up. Contributors approach questions of digital ritual, celebrity image culture, e-commerce spirituality, and astrological futures, offering a set of perspectives that is as much about lived experience as it is about infrastructure, and as much about Bangalore as it is about the networked world it mirrors and magnifies. 

Untitled Tbilisi 

Untitled Tbilisi brings to the programme a research and artistic process centred on the Monument of Friendship: a concrete structure built in the 1980s near the tripoint of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, now fenced off, forgotten, and guarded by border forces. Through a virtual monument, navigable via VR, and a sound sculpture of resonating metal plates tuned to archival recordings of South Caucasian choral song, the project works through what remains when declarations of unity fall away: the spectral presences, the small memories, the frequencies that carry something human even when not intended for human ears. 

Gray Area 

Presented by Wade Wallerstein and Andrea Franco, this film programme brings together three recent works that examine what screens are doing to us, and what we are doing to screens. Firat Yücel's happiness, Total Refusal's Hardly Working, and Coralie Hina Gourdon's Time Sensitive Characters each approach digital productivity from a different angle: the sleepless activist, the looping NPC, the livestreaming dreamer. Collectively they sketch a portrait of a networked condition that is at once critical and, in its own way, tender. 

Programme Overview

Monday 22 June

19:00 - START
19:00–19:05 - Intro
19:05–19:20 - Tarot pull w Santini Cards by Mara Oscar Cassiani 
19:20–19:30 - 'Computers Chat' by Raul Marroquin
19:30–19:55 - Lecture Valentina Tanni
19:55–20:00 - Chinar Shah and Kaamna Patel: Moon Sightings
20:00–20:10 - 'Artificial' by Remko Scha
20:10–20:20 - IOCOSE show and tell

20:20–20:35 Break

20:35–20:55 'happiness' by Firat Yücel
20:55–21:05 Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain show and tell
21:05–21:15 Exhibition tour with Marialaura Ghidini
21:15–21:32 'Media Ecology Ads' by Antoni Muntadas

Tuesday 23 June

17:00–17:20 Guided Meditation with Anisha Baid
17:20–17:30 Clusterduck viewing

17:30–19:00 Dinner

19:00–19:05 Intro
19:05–19:10 Yes My Wish by Tara Kelton
19:10–19:32 'Unearth' by Anika Schwarzlose & Brian D McKenna
19:32–20:02 Lecture by Silvia Dal Dosso
20:02–20:10 Intervention by Ginevra Petrozzi

20:10–20:25 Break

20:25-20:50 'Hardly Working' by Total Refusal
20:50-21:10 Monument of Friendship by Untitled Tbilisi
21:10-21:25 Debrief: Constant, ML, Silvia
21:25-21:43 'Time Sensitive Characters' by Coralie Hina Gourdon
21:43-21:49 END

Tickets & Practical Information

A limited number of in-person spots at LAB111 in Amsterdam are available for €5 per evening, or €7.50 for both festival days via Eventbrite. Join us for screenings, talks, a tour at LI-MA, and shared encounters unfolding between the physical space and distant.gallery. Bring your own laptop for a special LAN party event during the second day.