The Artificial Mind: Art and Philosophy after AI

24–25 September 2026, National Galletry of Art, 22 Konstitucijos pr., Vilnius, Lithuania

The title “Artificial Mind” references Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (1962), in which he argues that “savage” and “civilized” thought share the same epistemological architecture – differing not in structure but in mode of operations. While the “civilized” engineer works with purpose-built tools toward a specific end, the “savage” bricoleur thinks with whatever is at hand, constructing new meanings from fragments. With the advent of AI, we might speak of a new variation of thought – the Artificial Mind – that confounds this distinction. Though AI is typically figured as the apotheosis of engineering, what it actually does resembles bricolage far more closely: repurposing and recombining existing anthropogenetic materials into heterogeneous assemblages rather than engineered constructions.

THE CONCEPT

Unsurprisingly, AI has provoked philosophy — across both its analytic and continental branches — into responses, reflections, and reservations ranging from careful conceptual revision to outright alarm. Perception, judgement, agency — domains previously considered exclusive to human reasoning — are now contested terrain. Phenomenology asks how mediation by artificial neural networks alters the structures of experience; ethics, the conditions of moral formation when the environments that shape us become generative; political philosophy, the institutional settings required when the capacities of judgement become automated.

The conference invites theoretical and empirical contributions on the tectonic transformations AI has introduced into the conceptual space of the post- — insofar as it pertains to the human. This rethinking necessitates a shift from anthropology toward postanthropology: a postanthropocentric revision of disciplines confronted with a non-human form of thought, and an interrogation of the Anthropos as the presumed center of agency, knowledge, and meaning-making.

This is not without tensions. The apparent radical alterity of the artificial mind remains deeply embedded in all-too-human systems — and is therefore implicated in their structures of exploitation, extraction, and control: capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism, among others.

AI is haunted by “the paradox of aesthetics and recursive algorithms that sustain the freedom of homo bioeconomicus through the prototype of the slave-machine.” — LUCIANA PARISI, 2023

In this sense, AI occupies an ambivalent position: it destabilizes the human/nonhuman distinction that has historically underpinned oppressive regimes, while simultaneously intensifying and rearticulating them.

At the same time, the artificial points toward artifice — the domain of art — where meaning has long been produced through bricolage: mediation, staging, and re/combination. AI and algorithmic art render these operations explicit, scalable, and programmable, problematizing the status of artistic production: what does it mean to make art after AI?

Rather than a eulogy for the human or for art, the conference is a platform of creative exchange between philosophical and artistic interventions — a collective attempt to think our posthuman, more-than-human futures, fostering practices that, with Yuk Hui, “maintain and reproduce biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity” under the homogenizing conditions of automation.

TOPICS

— AI and the transformation of mind, thought, — and cognition
— Post/Phenomenology of AI and the mediation of embodiment
— Art, technics, and creative practices in the age of AI and algorithms
— Agency, subjectivity, and authorship in human–machine assemblages
— Ethical, critical, and political perspectives on AI infrastructures
— Alternative technological imaginaries and technocultures
— Experimental, speculative, and situated approaches to AI

SUBMISSION

ABSTRACTS Up to 250 words to Denis Petrina (denis.petrina@lkti.lt) by 10 August 2026. Include speaker’s name & affiliation.
NOTIFICATION Accepted presenters notified by 25 August 2026.
PUBLICATION A thematic issue of Athena: Philosophical Studies planned for 2027.
FEE Free of charge; travel & accommodation covered by participants.
LANGUAGE English.

ORGANIZATION

ORGANIZER Lithuanian Culture Research Institute
PARTNERS National Gallery of Art, Vytautas Magnus University

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Danutė Bacevičiūtė
Kęstutis Mosakas
Laurynas Norus
Denis Petrina
Justas Petronis
Augustas Pinkevičius
Aistis Žekevičius
Audronė Žukauskaitė