Nora Lefa, Ema Alihodžić Jašarović, Sara Stojkanović
https://doi.org/10.60152/o7nsk274
Abstract: Since AI is increasingly complementing, and moreover, substituting for human intelligence in every aspect of our lives, it is bound to do so in the management of land. However positive a well-informed approach to administrating human beings’ most precious of natural resources can be, the drawbacks cannot be ignored: acting solely on typified logic, unhinged from human sympathy and emotions, can lead to monstrous results. Algorithms and learning processes alone, providing for the input on which AI operates, can lead to humans being turned to appurtenances of the land they rely on, the natural intelligence being unable to articulate substantial arguments against. We must trust visceral intelligence in counteracting rationality detached from humanity in order to harness the advantages the reliance on a multifaceted intelligence can offer. These ideas are put to the test in an exhibition entitled Do Not Touch Yugoslavia! A Visceral Response in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, following the Montenegrin call for participation in the competition for the selection of the national representative at the 2025 Venice Biennial of Architecture. Unmediated, direct emotional reactions to the stimuli provided by encounter with Montenegrin land and soil, is the Janus’ face of paradise and hell. The epistemology of the encounter could be illustrated through ten days of paradise in Montenegro, symbolically depicted through memories of the Yugoslav train. Such accumulated memories, created by bodily experience in contact with the earth (body memory), will build an anthropological experience in space, and such a connection with a place (insidness) is irreplaceable. Equally important is the psycho-geography that we associate with artificial post-Yugoslav landscapes (,,toxic beauty’’), the construction of which encodes the memories and feelings of an unknown worker, who disappeared in the anonymity of Yugoslav ideology..
Keywords: Viscelar intelligence, Yugoslavia, body memory, post Yugoslav landscapes, insidness
How to cite this Paper (Harvard referencing style):
Lefa, N., Alihodžić Jašarović, E. and Stojkanović, S. (2025) ‘Do Not Touch Yugoslavia! A Visceral Response in the Era of Artificial Intelligence‘, in R. Bogdanović (ed.) On Architecture — Crosscutting and Fusion of Disciplines, Proceedings. Belgrade, Serbia: STRAND, pp. 228–234.
See publication On Architecture (2025) Conference Proceedings