AI Ecologies: Ecological-Technological Entanglements.
Art-A-Hack™ Rapid Prototyping Workshop with Ellen Pearlman

Workshop dates: 13, 14, 20 and 21 September 2025, 10am-6pm
Pre-event social: Friday, 12 September (evening)

Academic Conference Center, Husova 4a, Prague 1 (entrance through the Institute of Philosophy in Jilská 1). 

Call for Participation already closed. Late registration possible upon request here.

Join us for Art-A-Hack™ - AI Ecologies: Ecological-Technological Entanglements, a creative and interdisciplinary rapid prototyping workshop hosted by the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague (CETE-P). This workshop is aimed at students, academics, artists, designers, engineers, technologists, activists and creative professionals to explore together the entanglement of technology and ecology in the world today. Across four immersive days in September 2025, selected participants will be matched into multidisciplinary teams to prototype projects that explore the interrelations of AI and natural environments. This workshop is open to all regardless of their tech-skills or artistic experience.

About the theme of the workshop AI Ecologies: Climate crisis and AI are two most important challenges of our contemporary age. Soon AI and its concurrent data centers will be competing against humans for everyday resources like water and energy grids. At the same time, climate crisis dramatically transforms how we use our newest technologies, whether it is geoengineering or AI-assisted large-scale agricultural projects. We can only address these challenges effectively if we think about AI as inextricably related to natural and social ecologies. This, however, has not been the usual approach so far. Climate crisis and AI are two spheres that are usually considered separately. Traditionally, nature and technology were considered not only incompatible but also inherently antagonistic. With human-induced climate change and rapid developments of newest technologies that are reliant on depleting natural resources, this clear-cut distinction does not hold anymore. In fact, such a traditional approach is a stumbling block to a much-needed fundamental rethinking of our world today. This workshop explores the ecological and technological entanglements of our world. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship between AI and natural environments. The workshop provides an open space for experimentation and artistic intervention. Selected projects are eligible for inclusion for Days of AI Prague (3-16 November 2025).

About Art-A-Hack™: Each year, Art-A-Hack™ groups people together around the most compelling proposals. This means your specific idea may not be selected, in which case we will try to find you a team and a project that matches your skills and interests. This is an ad-hoc process, and we can’t always match everybody to teams, but we work hard to create aligned teams and have had great results from this process in the past.

Visit https://artahack.github.io/ for previous projects and alumni.

The workshop is led by Ellen Pearlman, who is a Fulbright Specialist with CETE-P in September 2025. The workshop has been funded by J. W. Fulbright Commission in the Czech Republic.

For any questions, please contact cetep@flu.cas.cz.

Ellen Pearlman is a new media artist, critic, curator and writer who created Noor: A Brain Opera, the world’s first immersive interactive brain opera in a 360-degree theater. Ellen has a PhD from the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University, where her thesis was awarded Highest Honours Internationally by Leonardo LABS Abstracts. She is Visiting Research Scholar at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and a Senior Researcher, Assistant Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia. A Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology she is also an EU Vertigo STARTS Horizon 2020 Laureate, a Zero1 American Arts Incubator Fellow in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a contributing editor to Performance Arts Journal (PAJ) MIT Press. Ellen is also President of Art-A-Hack™ and Director and Curator of the New York Volumetric Society. You can find out more about Ellen’s work here.