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

As AI-driven sensing infrastructures reorganise urban environments, artistic research is increasingly confronted with a shift from representation to operation. Cameras, predictive models, and distributed cloud architectures do not merely image the city but actively participate in its governance and navigation (Brattton; Gabrys; Crawford; Parikka). This roundtable contribution proposes to examine how artistic intelligence can operate within such planetary-scale computational infrastructures. Building on ecological models of technics (Guattari) and critical AI studies, the session introduces an eco-operational framework distinguishing epistemic, infrastructural, and operational dimensions of AI in artistic research production environments. Here, artistic intelligence is understood not as individual creativity augmented by AI, but as a situated capacity to recognise, intervene in, and reconfigure the relations through which automated perception operates. Rather than focusing on finished artworks, the discussion centres on sensing architectures, predictive modelling, and latency as sites where perception becomes computationally distributed.

What forms of collective agency remain possible when reflection is compressed into real-time calculation? How might artistic research function as critical infrastructure within automated systems? And what conceptual tools are required when knowledge production itself becomes entangled with planetary-scale computation? This roundtable contribution invites interdisciplinary dialogue on artistic research as an embedded and relational practice capable of sustaining temporal, perceptual, and ecological complexity within AI-driven environments.