Personal Information
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Given name: Synne Tollerud









Surname: Bull









Email: synnetollerud.bull@kristiania.no









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Your contribution
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Title: Artistic Intelligence and Infrastructural AI: Reframing Urban Perception in Automated Environments









Format: Roundtable contribution (5)









Main language: English









Abstract:
Artificial intelligence is reshaping urban environments at a scale and speed that outpaces critical understanding. Cameras, sensors, and predictive systems increasingly determine how cities are navigated and known, producing urban knowledge organised around computational legibility at the expense of situated experience. Through the ongoing artistic research project Time to Reflect Reality (TTRR; Bull.Miletic, 2020–) we investigate this transformation, taking the tram network, from its electrified origins to its instrumentation toward autonomy, as our point of departure. The project forms part of AI Ecologies, which approaches AI not as a singular technology to be adopted or resisted, but as a complex environment of interwoven material, energetic, and algorithmic systems. Building on Guattari's three ecologies, the group develops a multi-scale framework tracking AI across three mutually determining registers: infrastructural, epistemic, and operational. In TTRR, we trace a genealogy of urban machine vision from the early phantom ride and the perceptual experience of mechanized urban movement we have conceptualized as cinéma trouvé to contemporary autonomous sensing. In the prototype installation, a self-driving vehicle navigates the gallery projecting archival tram footage, while a second, orbital projection holds the street-level gaze in tension with the planetary scale of remote sensing. We ask how artistic research can hold open the interval between sensing and interpretation that automated systems are designed to eliminate. What forms of collective agency remain possible when reflection is compressed into real-time calculation? Can artistic research strengthen a society's capacity to engage with technological and ecological change while operating from within the infrastructures it questions? And what conceptual tools are required when knowledge production becomes entangled with planetary-scale computation?










Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/416/Trondheim1908.png









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Synne Tollerud Bull is Professor of Media Art and Pro Dean of Research at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences. Working as the artist duo Bull.Miletic with Dragan Miletic since 2001, her practice-based research examines artistic intelligence, AI infrastructures, and media ecologies through moving image, installation, and the concept of cinéma trouvé. Recent publications include Proxistant Vision (MIT Press, 2025) and the co-edited volume Media Seas and the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2026). She co-leads WP2 in MishMash – Centre for AI and Creativity, serves as co-Director of the Kristiania AI Centre (KAI), and leads an Art and AI project funded by Arts Council Norway.










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
Selected earlier iterations of Time to Reflect Reality were presented between 2020 and 2021, including the CAA 109th Annual Conference, the International Latsis Symposium at EPFL, and the Urban Ecologies project at ROM, Oslo. Those presentations focused on the prototype installation and its genealogy of machine vision. The present roundtable reflects a new research phase (v2.0) turning toward AI infrastructures, predictive modelling, and the material conditions of computational vision.














Requirements
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Additional information:
As a participant in the roundtable, I will contribute a short input drawing on the ongoing development of TTRR (v2.0), introducing the multi-scale framework (infrastructural, epistemic, and operational dimensions of AI) developed within AI Ecologies and situating the project within debates on artistic intelligence and planetary-scale computation. I will bring short visual excerpts from the work to support the discussion and to open questions for exchange with the other participants and the moderator.










Spatial and technical requirements :
Projector with HDMI connection and audio playback for short visual excerpts. Internet access if available, but not essential.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
My contribution discusses AI infrastructures, sensing systems, and extractive technological supply chains but does not involve personal data, human subjects, or sensitive material. No specific ethical risks are anticipated.










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