About this Event
10am
Welcome & Opening remarks
10-11:30am
Virtual Panel: Whither Aura: Profaning, Reclaiming, Preserving
As artificial intelligence and platform-mediated algorithm saturated networks reshape artistic production and visual culture, "aura” perhaps undergoes a transformation rather than an obsolescence. This panel brings together theorists, curators, and interdisciplinary artists to examine how algorithmic systems alter our understanding of human agency, sacred iconography, and cultural value. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for human creativity, the participants interrogate the conditions under which computational tools operate, shift authority, and interact with established human frameworks of belief and social/political practice.
Derek Barker-Ciganik
Mark Burchick
Christian Vittorio Maria Garavello
Davangi Pathak
Moderated by Vienna D’Angelo Patricio
*this panel will be presented virtually on*
11:45-12:30pm
AI Séance Performance
Participants write the names of those who have passed away on white cards and hand them to artist Avital Meshi, seated as a medium at a candlelit table. Wearing a DIY AI device, she calls each name and speaks aloud the response generated in her earpiece. Rather than claiming to contact the dead, the piece stages questions of memory, presence, and authorship — drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of aura and Michel Foucault's notion of the author as function. The AI assembles a voice from public traces rather than retrieving a self, producing a presence that belongs to no one alone, but emerges between archive, algorithm, performer, and audience.
1:30-3pm
Academic Faculty Panel: AI, Agency, and the Politics of Futurity
More than just a technological development, artificial intelligence both questions and makes newly visible foundational assumptions about human agency, cultural production, and the future. Bringing together practicing artists and academics, this interdisciplinary panel considers AI as a site where questions of autonomy, authorship, and cultural power are being renegotiated. These presentations examine the possibility of artificial subjecthood, alongside the ways AI systems reproduce, appropriate, and transform existing cultural imaginaries. Together, they probe how AI complicates longstanding distinctions between human and machine agency while raising questions about whose knowledge, creativity, and vision of the future are most legible within emerging technological infrastructures.
Robert Clarke
Christopher Michlig
Moderated by Sloane McNulty
3-4:30pm
Creative Research Panel: BY WHOSE AUTHORITY?
What happens to the claim of art once the labor that created it becomes optional?
Is it possible for an iterative persona to contain and/or transmit an aura?
When reproduction is the aura-creating element within an art form, how will it conflict with copyright law?
Has authorship ever belonged to a single body?
BY WHOSE AUTHORITY? is a graduate student-led panel focused upon exploring themes surrounding the state of aura when such questions arise that challenge the authorship and authority of art in this age of AI. Panelists unpack and examine the complex web of authorship and authority through vehicles such as; war/conflict photography, algorithmic aesthetics of social media, necro-assemblage resurrection, and playing tabletop role-playing games.
Ryan-Ashley Anderson
Aminn Obermayer
Brighid Schlenz
Avital Meshi
Moderated by Tori Nickles
6pm
Dorothy Lemelson Keynote Lecture: Sasha Stiles
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Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet and language artist whose work explores what it means to be human in a more-than-human world. Her interdisciplinary practice reimagines poetry as an ancient technology and a living computational medium, advancing poetic intelligence — the synthesis of emotion and algorithm — as a philosophy for the generative age. Her work has been honored with the Prix Ars Electronica and Lumen Prize, featured in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and Artforum, and exhibited internationally, including at MoMA and Art Basel. A recent Monument Lab Fellow and Google Arts & Culture Artist-in-Residence, she has been co-evolving with her AI alter ego, Technelegy, since 2018.
Art, Aura & the Algorithm: PNCA's 2026 Symposium
Schedule Overview, October 1-3, 2026
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1
5-8pm
First Thursday Exhibition Openings
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• Symposium Exhibition
• Aura photographs with Aura Archive
• PTXM Artist-Led Sewing Circle
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2
10am
Welcome & Opening Remarks
10-11:30am
Virtual Panel: Whither Aura: Profaning, Reclaiming, Preserving
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11:45am-12:30pm
AI Séance Performance
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1:30-3pm
Academic Faculty Panel: AI, Agency, and the Politics of Futurity
3-4:30pm
Creative Research Panel: BY WHOSE AUTHORITY?
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6pm-7:30pm
Keynote Lecture: Sasha Stiles (Dorothy Lemelson Lecture)
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3
1-3pm
Workshop: WHEN LANGUAGE COMES ALIVE: A LIVING POEM WITH SASHA STILES
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Event venue & nearby stays
Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 Northwest Broadway, Portland, United States
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