Anarchitectures of the digital: Unbuilding learning in an age of AI

 

What happens when the digital environments we inhabit are built on terms not worth preserving? Prevailing responses to broken digital systems tend to default to repair: fix the algorithm, align the AI, mitigate bias. This keynote interrogates that impulse. Drawing on architectural and critical theory, artistic practice, and examples from digital culture, it advances anarchitecture as a framework for understanding networked environments and the conditions of action within them.

Like built space, digital environments position bodies, shape behaviour, and foreclose some encounters while enabling others. Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970s practice of anarchitecture as a method of unbuilding, the talk considers how acts of cutting, rather than repair, might expose the social and political logics embedded in algorithmic systems. Where Matta-Clark’s interventions rendered visible the hidden structures of built space, an anarchitecture of the digital asks what becomes perceptible when we interrupt the apparent seamlessness of computational environments.

That question becomes more urgent with generative AI as large language models function as architectures of completion, organised around next-token prediction that pre-empts uncertainty. Yet the capacity to dwell in not-knowing, what Keats called negative capability, may be precisely what thinking demands. Rather than adapting to these systems, an anarchitectural approach begins from their limits, asking what they cannot do, and whether those limits mark something worth protecting and building around.

About keynote speaker

Taina Bucher is a professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo and a principal investigator of HumAIn. Her work explores how algorithms, platforms, and infrastructures shape everyday life, with a particular focus on issues of visibility, power, and user agency. She completed her PhD in Media Studies in 2012 and has since published widely on topics related to algorithmic culture and digital media. Her book If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) examines how algorithmic systems influence communication and governance. In Facebook (Polity Press, 2021), she analyses the platform’s role in structuring social interaction and digital publics.