The 9th Annual Artistic Research at Kristiania Symposium (ARK27) & the 2nd MishMash Conference. Co-organised with AI Ecologies Research Group, Kristiania AI Centre (KAI), and Atelier Nord, Oslo, Norway.

Artificial intelligence is often treated as a single technology. AI as Environment proposes a different point of departure. It approaches artificial intelligence as a complex environment: a series of interwoven material, energetic and algorithmic systems that configure and co-determine cultural knowledge production and planetary life. Rather than asking only what AI does, or what artists and other practitioners can do with it, this perspective asks how AI reorganises the conditions under which perception, knowledge, cultural production and action take place. The proposition draws on ecological and process-oriented approaches to media and technology, developed and applied in the AI Ecologies research group's project Kunstens co-pilot: Kunst og KI i et prosessøkologisk perspektiv, funded by Kulturrådet (2026–2028). Félix Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ (1989/2000), the interrelation of environmental, mental and social ecologies, provides a point of departure for thinking across domains that are too often treated separately. Feminist posthumanism and Indigenous and decolonial scholarship (Braidotti 2022; Tuhiwai Smith 2021) further foreground situated knowledge, extraction and differential inclusion, asking whose knowledge and cultural practices are represented, transformed or excluded by AI systems. In the context of contemporary machine-learning systems, we reformulate these relations through three interconnected ecological registers: infrastructural, epistemic and operational ecologies.

Themes and Questions
We particularly welcome contributions that investigate relations across infrastructural, epistemic and operational ecological registers, including, but not limited to, questions such as:
- How is AI becoming integrated into expanded sites of cultural production, and how does this integration reconfigure existing practices and institutional frameworks?
- How do different forms of AI reorganise relations between perception, materiality, imagination and decision-making?
- How can artistic practices make the material and energetic infrastructures of AI perceptible, including their geopolitical, extractive, and environmental dimensions?
- How do datasets, classification systems, machine vision and generative models produce particular regimes of visibility and knowledge, and what remains outside these regimes?
- How are AI systems enacted and transformed through artistic workflows, interfaces, institutions and collaborations?
- How can artistic research move between the local operations of AI systems and the larger infrastructural, ecological and geopolitical systems in which they participate?
- What conceptual and artistic vocabularies are needed for understanding AI not as a discrete technology but as a constitutive environment?
- What forms of artistic critique, resistance, refusal or alternative practice become possible as AI increasingly shapes the conditions of cultural production?
- How might artistic and technological experimentation intervene in the design, training or operation of AI systems and open up alternative ways of developing and engaging with them?

Keynote speakers: Tiziana Terranova · Kyle Stine · Orit Halpern · and the Spring 2027 Atelier Nord/MishMash Artist-in-Residence.

Submission
Abstract: 300 words maximum, engaging explicitly with one or more of the three ecological registers
Bio: 100 words
Format: Presentations are limited to 15 minutes and may take the form of a paper, practice-based presentation, or a combination of both. Please indicate your preferred format in your proposal.
The conference takes place in person in Oslo. Only in-person presentations will be accepted.
Kristiania University of Applied Sciences is not able to cover travel or accommodation costs for presenters.
Eligibility: researchers at all career stages, including PhD candidates, are welcome to submit
Deadline: 1 December, 2026
Submit to: https://nettskjema.no/a/651115
Notification: 18 December, 2026

The Programme Committee will select approximately 20–25 presentations for inclusion in a curated programme. Selection criteria include conceptual and artistic rigour, engagement with the conference framework, the contribution of artistic practice to research and knowledge production, and the potential to contribute to the conference's wider discussion. For full call announcement and more information about the conference, please visit:
https://www.kristiania.no/om-kristiania/kalender/call-for-contributions-ark27-ai-as-environment---infrastructure-knowledge-operation/