"Culture has constituted itself as a defense system against technics," Simondon proclaimed in his seminal book on the theory of technology On the mode of existence of technical objects Simondon in 1958, offering a profound diagnosis of the relationship between culture and technics. The outlined defensive stance has not changed much since the mid-20th century, when culture still functioned as a (technicised) culture industry which impoverished human experience due to the unintelligence of the technology involved, as pointed out by critics from Adorno to Stiegler. In contrast, in the 21st century, with the development of autonomous machine intelligence in the form of generative artificial intelligence based on deep learning, technics itself has been cultivated and has become a culture parallel to the one generated by humans.

Technology today is no longer – if it ever really was – in an instrumental relation to culture, as something that culture (as a supposedly exclusively human activity) uses to varying effects, while the real creativity is on the side of the human. Today, machines use natural language and generate cultural content autonomously, making 20th-century forms of cultural critique no longer relevant for understanding and critically engaging with today's culture. The problem (intellectual and practical) is no longer that culture is technical, but that technology has become cultural; and this in turn entirely transforms the terrain of cultural critique and the theory of technology.

The conference aims to address precisely this turn and its theoretical, cultural, economic and other effects, and welcomes contributions from sociology of culture, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy, linguistics, theory (and practice) of contemporary art and design, computer and information science and others. We are interested in both theoretical as well as empirical and methodological contributions and their intersections, i.e. how to think and research new forms of technologically generated culture and how to overcome prejudice and defunct notions, tied to past forms of culture and technology, in the process.

The official languages of the conference will be Slovenian and English. The conference will be free of charge, open to the public.