Jelena Guga
https://doi.org/10.60152/3o4uxyvb
Abstract: In contemporary postdigital condition, algorithmic infrastructures increasingly shape the contours of everyday life. From data extraction and classification to predictive modeling and decision-making, artificial intelligence systems function as invisible architectures that structure perception, behavior, and access. This talk explores how critical AI art practices interrogate these algorithmic frameworks, revealing their embedded biases, socio-technical entanglements, and implications for power, agency, and social organization. By exposing and disrupting the logics of automation, surveillance, and optimization, artists reclaim agency within systems that otherwise obscure the conditions of their own operation. The central argument is that algorithmic systems should be understood as a form of spatial and architectural design, not only shaping digital environments but also structuring how we inhabit and navigate physical and social realities. Critical AI artworks function as counter-architectural practices: they map, destabilize, and reimagine the infrastructures that increasingly define identity, labor, and governance. Rather than treating these systems as neutral tools, such works foreground their aesthetic, ethical, and structural dimensions, challenging viewers to engage with the material and societal stakes of datafication. Drawing on postdigital and new media frameworks, the talk considers how algorithmic architectures operate at the intersections of code, culture, and space. It reflects on how these systems produce not only representations but also lived conditions, redefining the boundaries between art, politics, and infrastructure. By tracing how artists conceptualize, expose, and rework the logics of AI, the paper shows how such practices create a critical vocabulary for engaging with contemporary technopolitical environments. They offer speculative imaginaries and situated interventions that help us reimagine how digital systems could be repurposed toward more transparent, equitable, and collectively shaped futures.
Keywords: Critical AI art, Postdigital aesthetics, Datafication, Algorithmic spatialities, Machine vision politics
How to cite this Paper (Harvard referencing style):
Guga, J. (2025) ‘Algorithmic Architectures: Spatial Politics of Critical Art in the Age of AI‘, in R. Bogdanović (ed.) On Architecture — Crosscutting and Fusion of Disciplines, Proceedings. Belgrade, Serbia: STRAND, pp. 89–95.
See publication On Architecture (2025) Conference Proceedings