Short Description
Underground Art and Design (UAAD) and Liminal, a design futures agency, are co-presenting TechnoMirage, an Event Series on Creative AI and Speculative Futures.
TechnoMirage names the illusion of progress projected by AI—Beneath its polished interface lie extractive logics, optimization myths, ghosted authorship, stolen identities, machinic hallucinations of neutrality, and others rendered invisible.
Spanning NYC and global programs, this series invites artists to puncture the illusion—reclaiming the future as a space for refusal, reworlding, and radical play.
As two platforms committed to cultivating speculative, participatory, and radical practices across digital and physical realms, together, we are assembling:
Ghost in the Feedback Loop—Virtual Exhibition on New Art City
Artworks exploring AI’s spectral paradoxes, agency, and misread identities.
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control.But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see.
TechnoMirage IRL (NYC)—In-person Panel, Speculative Workshop, and Live Performance
A one-day gathering exploring AI as a tool for reclaiming narratives, prototyping liberatory futures, with live performance.
· Reclaim: A panel featuring artists and cultural practitioners resisting dominant AI narratives—surveillance, optimization, bias—and reclaiming AI to build stories of care, agency, and refusal.
· Reimagine: A speculative workshop (facilitated by Liminal) to collectively prototype alternatives to extractive machine futures through hands-on making and shared visioning.
· Rewire: A closing set of intimate audiovisual performances that disrupt machine logic through sound, movement, and glitch.
Virtual Panel (Global)—Co-hosted with Parsons School of Design
Cross-cultural dialogues with designers and artists on creative authorship, labor, and agency in AI-mediated futures.
TechnoMirage Publication—Digital + Print Archive
A living record featuring artworks, interviews, workshop outcomes, and panel highlights.
Following UAAD’s editorial formats (e.g. Alt-Alterity, Matrix of the Not-Yet), this publication will include featured works, exhibition artist interviews, panel takeaways, workshop strategies, and community contributions. Published digitally (with potential print editions), it will serve as a collective record of resistance, imagination, and worldbuilding.
Eligibility
We are calling for artists, designers, technologists, researchers, writers, worldbuilders, and collective practitioners from any discipline or background.
All mediums welcome, including but not limited to:
- Generative art and design
- Code-based experiments
- Narrative fiction
- Poetry
- AI-assisted Photography and film
- Animation
- Interactive web pieces
- Sound art
- Game Design/ Virtual Environements / World-building
- Mixed/hybrid forms
How to Apply
Online Application
Program Benefits & Awards
All selected participants will receive:
- A feature on UAAD’s website, reaching audiences in 103 countries
- Dedicated social media features (reels + feed posts)
- A spotlight in our weekly newsletter (6,000+ subscribers)
- Media exposure through distribution on major U.S. platforms
Additional benefits per program:
Virtual Exhibition
- Inclusion in a permanent online exhibition (New Art City)
- A text-based interview published in the TechnoMirage publication
There is no application fee. If selected, a $65 participation fee per artist or collective helps cover the production of the virtual exhibition (platform fees, documentation, and editorial work).
In-Person Panel (NYC)
- Artist honorarium ($75-100)
- Live conversation and networking opportunity with NYC audiences
Virtual Panel (Global)
- Artist honorarium ($75-100)
- Broadcasted globally and co-hosted with Parsons School of Design
Live Performance:
- Artist honorarium (ticket revenue share)
- Photo and Video Documentation
Entry Fee
None
Location
NYC, United States
Timeline
- Application Deadline: 8 August 2025
Website Link: https://www.uaad.art/technomirage
