TechnoMirage
An Event Series on Creative AI Futures
Underground Art and Design (UAAD) and Liminal, a design futures agency, are co-presenting TechnoMirage, an Event Series on Creative AI and Speculative Futures.
TechnoMirage names the illusion of progress projected by AI—Beneath its polished interface lie extractive logics, optimization myths, ghosted authorship, stolen identities, machinic hallucinations of neutrality, and others rendered invisible.
Spanning NYC and global programs, this series invites artists to puncture the illusion—reclaiming the future as a space for refusal, reworlding, and radical play.
As two platforms committed to cultivating speculative, participatory, and radical practices across digital and physical realms, together, we are assembling:
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control.
But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see.In this open call, we welcome artists, designers, technologists, researchers, writers, worldbuilders, and collectives whose work critically engages AI and algorithms and resonates with this statement.
A two-part panel series exploring speculative technofutures, AI ethics, and cultural agency.
It unfolds across two distinct events:
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an in-person session in New York City led by Liminal, and
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a global online conversation co-hosted with Parsons School of Design.
We are interested in works that:
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Grapple with the ethical, ecological, and socio-political harms of AI (e.g. labor exploitation, environmental damage, algorithmic traps, IP theft, misinformation).
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Investigate AI as an agent of transformation, particularly in the hands of alienated or marginalized communities.
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Embody queer, feminist, decolonial, ecological, and non-human perspectives on agency and collaboration.
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Offer tools, prompts, creative methodologies, or speculative frameworks for working with AI in accessible, non-extractive, or playful ways.
Panelists will be selected from the general open call or based on invitations to present their work and engage in dialogue with our public attendees. The venue for the event in New York City will be announced in September.
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Held in-person alongside the NYC panel talk, this interactive session invites participants to co-create speculative visions and toolkits for AI as a collective, liberatory force.
Following UAAD’s previous formats—Alt-Alterity and Matrix of the Not-Yet—artists selected for the virtual exhibition Ghost in the Feedback Loop will receive a text-based interview of 6–8 questions focused on their work and practice.
In addition to featured artworks and interviews, the publication will include:
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Highlights from the panel discussions
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Creative strategies, prompts, and outcomes from the community workshop
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Photo documentation of the in-person event
The publication will be released digitally, with potential limited physical editions. Conceived as a living archive, it will evolve with the event series and be published on both the UAAD website and Metalabel after the series concludes.
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NYC Event
A one-day event held in NYC including three parts:
Reclaim: In-person Panel
This panel brings together artists and cultural practitioners who refuse the default narratives of AI as neutral or inevitable.
We’re looking for voices reclaiming AI from systems of extraction—surveillance, optimization, bias—and instead using it to tell stories of resistance, care, and agency, challenge norms, and build liberatory futures.
Reimagine: Speculative Workshop
This workshop, facilitated by Liminal, invites artists and designers to co-create speculative artifacts that reflect their visions of preferable AI futures. Through guided prompts and collective making, participants will explore speculative visions of AI that reimagine roles for AI within creative practice. Outputs from the session will feed into the TechnoMirage publication and serve as a toolkit for envisioning what else AI could be, as a collective, liberatory force.
Rewire: Live Performance
To close the NYC gathering, we’re planning an intimate set of audiovisual performances.
We welcome artists working with sound, movement, live visuals, or other real-time media whose works distort, disrupt, or reframe machine logic—through noise, failure, feedback, improvisation, or other interventions—are especially encouraged.
Global Programs
A Permanent Virtual Exhibition on New Art City
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control.
But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see.In this open call, we welcome artists, designers, technologists, researchers, writers, worldbuilders, and collectives whose work critically engages AI and algorithms and resonates with this statement.
Broadcasted globally and co-hosted with Parsons School of Design, this virtual conversation centers on the future of creative labor in an AI-saturated world. Artists, designers, and technologists will share how they’re designing with AI—grappling with authorship, ethics, and access while inventing new collaborative processes. The panel invites global participants to reflect on the shifting role of creative agency in shaping technocultural futures.
Following UAAD’s previous formats—Alt-Alterity and Matrix of the Not-Yet—artists selected for the virtual exhibition will receive a text-based interview of 6–8 questions focused on their work and practice.
In addition, the publication will include highlights from the panel discussions and outcomes from the speculative workshop.
The publication will be released digitally, with potential limited physical editions. Conceived as a living archive, it will evolve with the event series and be published on both the UAAD website and Metalabel after the series concludes.
Selected artists have been notified by email. Applicants who do not hear from us by 23:59 ET on August 12 have not been selected.
Jul 8 — Open call launches (For Virtual Exhibition, Publication, Panel and Live Performance)
Aug 8 — Open call closes at 23:59 EDT
Aug 12 — Selection Results Notified
Sep 8 — Virtual Exhibition OpensSep 21 — TechnoMirage IRL @Index (120 Walker St., NYC)
The following events’ date and location will be announced in a separate post:
Mid Oct — Virtual Panel (Global )
We are calling for artists, designers, technologists, researchers, writers, worldbuilders, and collective practitioners from any discipline or background.
All mediums welcome, including but not limited to:
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Generative art and design
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Code-based experiments
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Narrative fiction
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Poetry
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AI-assisted Photography and film
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Animation
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Interactive web pieces
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Sound art
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Game Design/ Virtual Environements / World-building
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Mixed/hybrid forms
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All selected participants will receive:
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A feature on UAAD’s website, reaching audiences in 103 countries
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Dedicated social media features (reels + feed posts)
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A spotlight in our weekly newsletter (6,000+ subscribers)
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Media exposure through distribution on major U.S. platforms
Additional benefits per program:
Virtual Exhibition
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Inclusion in a permanent online exhibition (New Art City)
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A text-based interview published in the TechnoMirage publication
There is no application fee. If selected, a $65 participation fee per artist or collective helps cover the production of the virtual exhibition (platform fees, documentation, and editorial work).
In-Person Panel (NYC)
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Artist honorarium ($75-100)
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Live conversation and networking opportunity with NYC audiences
Virtual Panel (Global)
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Artist honorarium ($75-100)
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Broadcasted globally and co-hosted with Parsons School of Design
Live Performance:
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Artist honorarium (ticket revenue share)
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Photo and Video Documentation
If you have any questions regarding the application, please email hello@uaad.art.
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IRL Event Line-up
Program
RECLAIM
An artist panel featuring Carrie Wang, Luca Lee, and Munus Shih, who challenge extractive AI narratives and reclaim the technology as a tool for resistance, care, and agency.
REIMAGINE
A speculative workshop led by Liminal, where we’ll explore how creatives might live, work, and relate to AI in the future—centering critical imagination, plurality, and collective visioning.
REWIRE
A live sonic performance by Mason Youngblood, weaving together archival recordings with interacting artificial agents to evoke echoes of vanished voices in a speculative soundscape. And throughout the afternoon: Octologue by Interactive Items — eight AI-augmented figures, continuously present as living philosophical voices, from stoicism to mysticism, debating and reimagining human wisdom in real time.
Virtual Exhibition
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control.
But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see.
Virtual Panel x Parsons
Publication
TechnoMirage: The Publication is UAAD’s latest publication exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series, including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, panels, and performances, the publication extends these conversations into an archive.
It features in-depth artist interviews, highlights from two panels, and a speculative workshop toolkit with outcomes contributed by participants. Together, these materials examine how artists and communities are reimagining AI not as an extractive tool of technocracy but as a site for resistance, solidarity, and cultural renewal. Like the virtual spaces from which it arose, TechnoMirage frames publishing as worldbuilding: an open invitation to rethink our shared technological futures.
Organizors
Liminal is a design futures agency that brings foresight to life. We combine strategic foresight, systems thinking, and design methodologies to help organizations look 5–20 years ahead, question short-term assumptions, and prepare for what’s next. Our work enables creative, resilient responses to a rapidly changing world.