AI_Anxiety
Produced by Jordi Viader Guerrero, Dmitry Muravyov, Erica Gargaglione, Aarón Moreno Inglés, Mariana Fernández Mora, and Orestis Kollyris
With contributions by Dmitry Muravyov, Jordi Viader Guerrero, Ali Alkhatib, Marcela Suárez, Aarón Moreno Inglés, Eke Rebergen, Erica Gargaglione, Mariana Fernández Mora, Orestis Kollyris, Daniel Leix Palumbo, Alexandra Barancová, Jef Ausloos, Oksana Dorofeeva, Rasa Bocyte, Nic Orchard, Ruben van de Ven, Donald Jay Bertulfo, Michaël Grauwde, Ildikó Plájás, Marlon Kruizinga, Caitlin van Bommel, and Inte Gloerich.
In 2025, there is no shortage of research projects about AI. Spanning different disciplines, countries, and domains, AI research, whatever one means by it, is on the rise. Besides more technically minded fields, social sciences, humanities, and the arts are also part of this conversation, as evidenced by an ever-expanding list of research projects and exhibitions on AI in these areas.
If you are also an early career researcher in these fields, doing a project on AI, you may, perhaps, resonate with our sense of anxiety. It is a feeling of trouble, unsettledness, an itchy sensation that your topic is too topical. Amongst the multitude of events, publications, and discussions, one can only wonder: How did so many of us end up doing research on AI? What are we actually doing? What does our research do in the world? For whom our research is intended? And can we do it differently?
There is indubitably nothing new about this congruence between a technology that captured public interest and funding streams, changing academic interests, and institutional incentives. Yet, being researchers in the social sciences and humanities, we see the need to understand how the current moment of the “AI boom” shapes our practices of producing knowledge about the subject and engaging with it outside academia. Since there is no single, unquestionable way to do research about anything, it makes sense to pause and think about how we do it.
To think about this, we might have as well written a paper. Yet, we decided not to do it; there are already good works out there on this (see our Reading List), but also not everything we do in academia has to be necessarily a paper. Instead, we thought we needed a community-based reflection format about how we are implicated in the current AI (research) landscape.
So, we gathered people. This zine published by the Institute of Network Cultures is the result of a collage-making workshop held on October 1st, 2024 in Amsterdam organized with the support of the Platform for Research Through the Arts and Sciences (ARIAS). This zine continues the relatively old tradition of self-publishing to create knowledge in a manner that is parallel to more established institutions. For us, this format is attractive because it allowed us to engage many people in doing something collectively. With this workshop and zine we want to organize around a particular experience of early career researchers who work on AI, make it into a publicly visible artifact of problem articulation to be freely distributed, and use it as a stepping stone to advance a different form of research on AI (and technology in general) free from corporate agendas.
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Contact: Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA)
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org
Download the PDF here.