We have since developed considerably more sophisticated ways of being watched, and considerably more sophisticated ways of watching each other. Cameras, phones, sensors, browsers, social networks, cloud services and now AI systems have made the boundary between what is public and what is private increasingly difficult to see. Often we participate willingly. We click accept, upload the photograph, ask the question, share the location, give the application access. The technology works because we have agreed to let it into our lives, although we do not always know exactly what we have invited in.

At CODAME, we have been exploring these questions for years, often before we had the vocabulary we use today. Artists have a useful habit of arriving at difficult questions before the rest of us have decided that they are important.

Back in 2014, our ⁠Security & Privacy ART+TECH Festival turned a San Francisco gallery into a playground for privacy, surveillance and cyberpunk culture. The language was playful, but the questions were serious. What happens when the technologies designed to protect us also become technologies that watch us? What happens when our bodies, identities and everyday behaviour become data?

A telephone booth became a passage into questions about military technology, public policy and state surveillance. ⁠Surveillance Phone, by Vivian Charlesworth and Alyson Ogasian, was designed as a kind of rabbit hole into an alternate reality, using science fiction to examine historical and contemporary questions around public policy and military-industrial development.

Cursor Watching turned the audience into observers of the data being extracted from our digital lives. The Faraday Cave went in the opposite direction: a small physical space where cellular signals and Wi-Fi disappeared, making privacy something you could actually experience rather than something described in a policy document.

Other works explored body scanning, autonomous drones and digital identity. They were playful, sometimes uncomfortable, and often deliberately ambiguous. That ambiguity was part of the point.

An artist does not necessarily need to tell us whether a technology is good or bad. Sometimes it is more interesting to make us experience it differently.

This is one of the things we continue to learn from the artists in our community. They take technologies that have become invisible through familiarity and make them visible again. A surveillance system becomes an artwork. A body scanner becomes a portrait. A drone becomes a game. An algorithm becomes something we can see, hear or touch.

And suddenly we start asking questions.

Who owns the data? Who gave permission? Who is watching? Who is being watched? What happens when the system gets it wrong?

With AI, these questions have become both more urgent and more complicated. Generative models are trained on enormous collections of human-created material, while new AI systems can generate images, text, music and code, make recommendations, interact with people and increasingly act through other software and services.

For artists, this brings very practical questions about copyright, consent, attribution and creative ownership. For organizations, there are questions about privacy, security, transparency, governance and responsibility. And for all of us there is the larger question of agency: when a machine can remember, infer, recommend and eventually act on our behalf, how much of the decision remains ours?

These questions are at the heart of what we have been exploring through ⁠The New Human, our 2026 ART+TECH theme. We asked what happens when cognition is shared between humans and machines, where thinking ends and authorship begins, and how we design for care and agency when everything is connected.

The questions are deliberately open. We are not particularly interested in predicting a single future. We are more interested in creating spaces where people can experience possible futures and decide what they think about them.

This is where compliance becomes an interesting word.

Compliance is necessary. Organizations need rules, controls, audits and frameworks. But being compliant does not automatically make something ethical. A system can follow the rules and still be invasive. Data can be legally acquired and still have been collected in a way that feels wrong to the people who created it. An AI system can behave exactly as designed and still produce consequences nobody intended.

The checklist can tell us whether we are allowed to do something. It cannot always tell us whether we should.

Perhaps this is why our connection with the hacker community has always felt so natural. Our participation around DEF CON in Las Vegas brought this back into focus. DEF CON is built around the idea that one of the best ways to understand a system is to take it apart, test its assumptions and find where it breaks. The AI Village brings that approach to artificial intelligence, exploring vulnerabilities, adversarial behaviour, bias and the ways AI systems can be manipulated.

Artists often do something surprisingly similar, although the language is different.

They misuse systems. They push interfaces beyond their intended purpose. They expose hidden behaviours. They take the assumptions built into a technology and turn them into something people can experience.

The hacker finds the vulnerability. The artist can sometimes make us understand why that vulnerability matters.

Both are forms of investigation.

This feels particularly important as AI moves from being something that generates an answer to something that can take action. An AI that writes a paragraph is one thing. An AI that can read our documents, access our systems, call other services, make decisions and change things in the world is something else entirely.

At that point, security and ethics stop being questions for a specialist team somewhere inside the organization. They become part of the design of the experience itself.

This is also part of what we are exploring through ARTEX. When we describe it as ⁠a new medium for living digital art, we are thinking about technology as something that can respond, evolve and interact rather than simply produce a fixed output. But the more responsive the technology becomes, the more important questions of agency, ownership and trust become.

We want artists to be able to experiment with AI without giving away ownership of their work by default. We want organizations to be able to explore new technologies without treating privacy and security as something to consider after the product has been built. And we want audiences to have the opportunity to experience these questions rather than only read about them.

Maybe that is one of the useful things that happens when art and technology meet.

Technology gives artists new materials with which to question the world. Art gives technology another way to be examined.

Not every experiment needs to produce an answer. Some are valuable simply because they make us notice something we had stopped seeing.

We have spent years looking at surveillance, privacy, security and identity through the work of artists. AI is now bringing all of those questions into a much larger conversation, and it is moving very quickly.

The vocabulary will continue to change. The regulations will change. The models will become more capable.

The questions underneath them probably won’t.

What do we give to machines?

What do we allow them to remember?

What should they be allowed to do?

And, perhaps most importantly, what should remain ours?

The city has learned to predict you.
Not metaphorically. Physically.

A Waymo glides past a man who has stopped to look up. At what, nobody knows. The car continues. The man stays. That gap is where Vanessa Chang’s new essay begins.

Baudelaire had a name for the kind of person who walks without destination, noticing everything. The flâneur. What Vanessa wants to know is what happened to that person — and to that city — when the streets got a nervous system.

The essay goes places we didn’t expect — including protesters who use orange traffic cones to freeze autonomous vehicles in place, and a turn at the end toward what these same cars might actually open up for people who experience cities differently. Vanessa finds things in this material that we hadn’t thought to look for.

The New Human is CODAME’s festival theme this year, and it keeps asking exactly this: what does it mean to be human in a world shaped by systems that don’t share our reasons for moving through it? Vanessa’s essay is one of the sharpest things we’ve read on the question. Not because it resolves anything. Because it knows exactly where to stand and look.

Published in Pittsburgh Review of Literature. Read it slowly.

And maybe take the long way home after.

From the essay

Algorithms might seem intangible, but they have palpable consequences for human bodies moving through the built environment. Unlike a traffic light — which treats every pedestrian identically, indifferent to identity or history — an algorithm changes its instruction per individual. It knows who you are. It routes accordingly.

This is not neutrality. It is a new kind of choreography, one in which the city’s directions are whispered differently into every ear, and the commons of shared navigation quietly dissolves. The flâneur required a city legible to anyone willing to walk slowly enough to read it. That city is being rewritten.

The full essay moves through Rimini Protokoll's street theater, the protesters using orange cones to strand autonomous vehicles, and the unexpected possibility that accessibility features in these same cars might produce the most novel experience of a city anyone has had in years.

About Vanessa Chang — Vanessa is a mentor, curator, and cultural critic whose work centers on art, technology, and the built environment. She has been part of the CODAME community since 2019, collaborating on programs that live at the intersection of creative practice and emerging systems. Her current focus — what it means to be a New Human navigating cities increasingly shaped by machine intelligence — runs directly through this essay and the broader questions CODAME keeps returning to.

View Vanessa’s profile on CODAME →

Earlier this month, visitors walking through the Walker Art Center stood in front of Olalekan Jeyifous’s digitally rendered prints, including a piece called “Tomorrow’s Bundle Run,” and got it wrong. They read the work as generative AI output. Some called it AI slop. The museum had to step in and add context: this was deliberate digital-art technique, made by an artist, not a prompt.

We keep coming back to this story because it’s not really about one exhibition. It’s about what happens when a whole category of authored, technical, hard-won work gets flattened into “probably AI” the moment it looks unfamiliar.

Jeyifous didn’t type a sentence and wait. He built the image the way a digital artist builds an image: choice by choice, render by render, with a visible hand in every decision even when the surface looks synthetic. That distinction, between a deliberate practice and a generated output, is exactly the line ARTEX and CODAME have spent years trying to keep visible. Living work has an author. It has a process you could ask about and get a real answer. When audiences lose the ability to tell the difference, the cost isn’t abstract. It lands on the artist standing next to their own print, explaining, again, that they made this.

The Walker’s fix was to add a wall label. Ours is smaller but points the same direction: name the artist, name the tool, name the choices. Every authored experience on ARTEX carries that with it, not as a disclaimer but as the credit an artist is owed. Technique is not a footnote.

If you’re an artist working in this space, digital, generative, AI-assisted, or all three, we’d love to hear how you think about this line for your own practice. Bring it to our weekly community call, open to artists, collectors, and anyone curious. Details and the join link are on codame.org.

Story: MPR News, “Walker Art Center clarifies AI use in Olalekan Jeyifous exhibition”

This is the first post in ART+TECH Signals, a running column on what’s happening at the edge of art and technology. More will be collected under news.codame.com [confirm URL once the section is live].

There are moments in history when a new technology destabilizes art — not by replacing artists, but by forcing them to rethink their role.

Photography did this in the 19th century.

And today, artificial intelligence is doing it again.

To understand this moment, it helps to look at how artists responded the last time the ground shifted.

When Photography Changed Painting

When photography emerged, painting lost its monopoly on representation. A camera could capture likeness, detail, and realism with mechanical precision.

So painters asked a radical question:

If a machine can reproduce reality, what is painting for?

The answer did not lead to the end of art.

It led to transformation.

Movements like Cubism — pioneered by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque — abandoned single-point perspective and naturalistic representation. Instead of painting what the eye sees, they painted multiple perspectives at once. They painted memory, structure, and inner perception.

Photography pushed painting inward.

It liberated artists from imitation and invited them into interpretation.

Pistoletto’s Crisis and the Mirror

Born in 1933 in Biella, Italy, Michelangelo Pistoletto emerged in the early 1960s during another period of artistic uncertainty. Painting, as traditionally practiced, no longer felt sufficient.

Rather than abandon painting, he redefined it.

He began creating what became known as the Quadri Specchianti (Mirror Paintings): life-sized photographic images transferred onto polished stainless steel surfaces.

The effect was radical.

The viewer’s reflection became part of the artwork.

The surrounding environment entered the composition.

Time itself moved through the piece.

The artwork was no longer a static image. It was a living relationship.

Pistoletto later became a central figure in Arte Povera, a movement that rejected traditional hierarchies and embraced everyday materials and conceptual experimentation. But the mirror works were foundational — not just aesthetically, but philosophically.

They asked:

• Where does art end and life begin?

• Who completes the artwork?

• Is the viewer separate from the work — or inside it?

The mirror did not compete with photography.

It used photography — and surpassed it.

Instead of capturing a frozen image of reality, it reflected living presence.

In a moment of artistic crisis, the mirror became a tool of reflection — literally and metaphorically.

Beyond Representation: Art as Social Practice

Pistoletto’s thinking did not stop at the gallery.

In 1998, he founded Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, an interdisciplinary laboratory connecting art with education, economics, ecology, politics, and social transformation.

For him, art was not isolated from society.

It was a catalyst within it.

The mirror expanded from a physical surface to a societal one.

AI as the New Mirror

Today, artificial intelligence confronts artists with a similar tension.

AI can generate images, text, music, and video in seconds. It can emulate styles, remix aesthetics, and simulate creative processes that once required years of practice.

Again, artists ask:

If a machine can generate images, what is left for us?

History suggests the answer is not retreat — but depth.

Just as photography freed painting from representation, AI may free artists from surface production.

AI can reproduce.

But it does not experience.

AI can simulate.

But it does not embody.

The opportunity, then, is not to compete with the machine on speed or volume — but to move into territory it cannot inhabit:

Embodied experience.

Ethical responsibility.

Contextual meaning.

Human intention.

AI becomes a reflective surface — much like Pistoletto’s mirror.

When we interact with generative models, we see reflections of our datasets, our culture, our biases, our imagination. The machine reflects us back to ourselves at scale.

And like any mirror, it can provoke discomfort — or insight.

The New Human: A Space for Reflection

At CODAME, as we explore The New Human, we are not asking whether AI will replace artists.

We are asking how artists, technologists, and thinkers respond creatively to this inflection point.

Just as Pistoletto used the mirror to confront his own artistic crisis and transform it into a new language, we now stand before a different kind of reflective surface.

The New Human Creative Hackathon is an invitation to step into that reflection.

Not to race against AI.

Not to fear it.

But to explore what it reveals.

• What does authorship mean in the age of generative systems?

• How does participation evolve?

• How do we design responsibly?

• What remains profoundly human?

Photography once pushed artists toward abstraction and interiority.

The mirror turned the viewer into co-creator.

AI now challenges us to redefine creativity itself.

The hackathon becomes a living laboratory — much like Pistoletto’s mirror — where technology is not an endpoint, but a surface for inquiry.

The future doesn’t arrive all at once.

It emerges through how we respond.

And just as Pistoletto once stood before a mirror and discovered a new artistic language, we now have the opportunity to stand before AI — to reflect, to question, to build — and perhaps shape the next movement.

The movement of the New Human.

Lukacs suggests that while “rewiring” implies the engineered precision of a circuit board, the brain is actually more akin to a forest—a living, breathing, and messy ecosystem that grows and adapts in ways far more complex than simple toggles or cables.

Why this matters for The New Human:
The theme of this year’s CODAME festival posits that the future is built from the “debris of the past—a coral reef of human traces, layered into new bodies, minds, and worlds.” If we view ourselves only as machines to be reconfigured, we lose the organic, emergent quality of what makes us human.

⬩ From Circuitry to Ecology: “The New Human” isn’t just a hardware update. It’s an exploration of how we evolve when we embrace our biological complexity alongside our technological tools.

⬩ Art as Inquiry: Just as Lukacs calls for better metaphors to understand our minds, our artists use tech to challenge the rigid definitions of humanity, moving beyond “fixed paths” toward “dynamic connectivity.”

Are we “rewiring” ourselves, or are we growing into something entirely different? Join us at the CODAME ART+TECH Festival as we peel back the metaphors and build the future of the human experience.

Explore the theme: The New Human

Read Peter Lukacs essay on Aeon: Can you rewire your brain?

Michael Bervell’s Untitled (Booth #513) wasn’t a stunt.
It was a philosophical intervention.

At the National Retail Federation’s annual conference, TestParty nearly got kicked out—not for disrupting the event, but for exposing an assumption no one wanted to name.

The booth didn’t look like a booth.

No LED monoliths.
No branded carpet.
No desperate swag.

Instead:
A table. Broken. Disassembled. Exposed.
Next to it, a sign: “Ceci n’est pas une booth.”

Inspired by René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, the work challenged a deceptively simple idea:

A representation of a thing is not the thing itself.

A painting of a pipe is not a pipe.
A pile of parts is not a booth.
And a website that cannot be navigated, read, or understood—
Is it really a website?

The reactions were immediate.

People stopped.
Stared.
Photographed it.

Some were amused. Others confused. A few angry.

Eventually, NRF staff intervened.
“This isn’t a booth,” they said.
“It’s unprofessional.”

That was the moment the work completed itself.

Because 96% of websites fail basic accessibility standards.
Screen readers can’t parse them.
Keyboard users can’t navigate them.

They are technically websites in the same way this was technically a booth.

The barriers are invisible to most users.
But for the 1.3 billion people living with disabilities worldwide, they determine who gets to exist in the modern economy at all.

This philosophy runs consistently through Michael’s work.

During a visit to the Picasso Museum in Málaga, he reflected on Picasso’s line:

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

In an AI-first world, execution is no longer scarce.
You don’t need to code.
You don’t need to design.
You don’t need to hire a team.

You can “vibe” your way from idea to reality.

Which means the real constraint is no longer capability—it’s imagination.

And imagination, for Michael, is not about novelty for novelty’s sake.
It’s about seeing what systems quietly normalize—and choosing to question them.

Untitled (Booth #513) reframes accessibility not as compliance theater, but as craft.

Not decoration, but foundation.
Not overlay, but infrastructure.
Not spectacle, but care.

The exposed table offers no place to hide.
Only structure.

Viewers are encouraged to approach.
The work is not complete without you.

Sometimes, to help people understand that something is broken, you have to stop pretending it’s whole.

Ceci n’est pas une booth.
And that’s the point.

The article is a timely meditation on how art, technology, and shared cultural spaces shape not only innovation, but meaning. Looking back at moments such as 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and Cybernetic Serendipity, it reminds us that some of the most transformative shifts in technology emerged when artists and technologists worked side by side, supported by environments that valued curiosity, embodiment, and collective imagination.

Rather than celebrating tools alone, the essay calls for the rebuilding of modern “cathedrals”: living cultural ecosystems where experimentation is protected, uncertainty is welcomed, and human values are allowed to evolve alongside machines.

This perspective deeply resonates with us at CODAME.

CODAME’s Contribution: A Living Practice Since 2010

Since our founding in San Francisco in 2010, CODAME has worked — often quietly, always collaboratively — to help sustain exactly the kinds of spaces the article describes.

Through our ART+TECH Festival, creative hackathons, performances, workshops, and installations, CODAME has consistently brought artists and technologists into shared, hands-on environments. These were not conferences or product launches, but temporary cultural commons: places to prototype ideas, relationships, and new creative languages together.

We’ve supported emerging artists in experimenting with code, sensors, sound, AI, and interactive systems — not as novelty, but as material for artistic inquiry. Just as importantly, we’ve emphasized artistic ownership, open exchange of knowledge, and community-driven learning, ensuring that technology serves expression rather than defining it.

Our contribution has never been about scale or spectacle. It has been about continuity — showing up year after year to create conditions where trust, experimentation, and collaboration can take root.

CODAME, Gray Area, and Shared Stewardship

CODAME is proud to be part of the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that continues to have a meaningful and positive impact on the city’s creative and cultural life through initiatives like the Gray Area Theater and its broader art + technology programs.

We are grateful to be in this ecosystem alongside people who actively shape these spaces. Barry Threw, co-author of the article, is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, and Scott Moore, co-author, serves on Gray Area’s Board of Directors. Together, Gray Area and its community have helped sustain San Francisco as a place where art, technology, and civic imagination remain deeply intertwined.

CODAME’s Perspective: Toward The New Human

Since the beginning, CODAME has believed that art and technology are not separate domains, but co-evolving forces that shape how we sense, think, and relate to one another.

As we move toward CODAME ART+TECH Festival 2026 — The New Human, the ideas in Cathedrals and the Silicon Soul feel especially urgent. The New Human is not a finished figure, but a being in motion — learning to co-create with intelligent systems, navigating hybrid physical and digital realities, and redefining authorship, presence, and agency.

CODAME gatherings function much like the cathedrals described in the article: living systems rather than fixed institutions. They evolve through participation. They privilege process over polish. They create room for bodies, machines, and ideas to encounter one another in real time.

In a moment when efficiency often outpaces reflection, we see this work not as nostalgia, but as preparation — rehearsal spaces for futures that are still being written.

With gratitude to Barry Threw and Scott Moore for articulating this vision so clearly, and to Gray Area for continuing to make it tangible in San Francisco.

Let’s keep building — not just technology, but the cultural spaces where The New Human can emerge.