9:30 AM–10 AM: Registration; Tea/Coffee

10 AM–10:15 AM: Opening Remarks by Pooja Sood

10:15 AM–11:30 AM: Keynote 1 (45-min Presentation, 20-min Response, and 10-min QnA)

The Arts and Politics of Immersion: Sensing, Bodies, and Machines by Chris Salter
Respondent: Ashish Rajadhyaksha

The history and practices of ‘immersion’ in the arts has long focused on the senses being transformed through melding them with technologies embedded into the actual physical world. As the French actor and theatre writer Antonin Artaud wrote in 1938, the theatre would be a virtual reality (réalité virtuel)–a doubling of or ‘stand-in’ for reality. But now, the next wave of immersion seeks the opposite: to capture the senses in order to render a synthetic world that is ‘realer’ than the physical one. In the words of computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland who invented the first head-mounted artificial reality display in 1965, such an ‘ultimate display’ would need to ‘serve as many senses as possible.’ Thus, contrary to the idea that the senses are simply to be replaced by the prosthetics of artificial sensors, a different story seems to be emerging. Our senses are needed to drive and feed ever-new immersive experiences by being interfaced to the simulated world that we increasingly inhabit.

11:30 AM–12 PM: Break

12 PM–1:30 PM: Panel 1 (10-min Artist Presentation, 50-min Panelist Presentation, 20-min QnA)

The Insensibility of Our Infrastructures 
The planet is girdled by a network of undersea cables, cloud data centres, rare-earth mines, chip factories, mobile towers. Every swipe on a feed, every query to ChatGPT, triggers a vast, hidden machine, insensible by design. How to narrate, diagram, embody, map, sensualize, make concrete this apparatus of power, materiality, and labour?

Panelists

1. Aarti Sunder
2. Padmini Ray Murray
3. Ritam Sengupta
4. Vladen Joler

Moderator: Mila T. Samdub

1:30 PM– 2:30 PM: Lunch 

2:30 PM–4:30 PM: Panel 2 (10-min Artist Presentation, 50-min Panelist Presentation, 20-min QnA)

Affective Terrains
Some of us are falling for love scams, others are doomscrolling violent horrors. Some of us are confessing our deepest secrets to ChatGPT, others are mildly amused by reels. How do we navigate the radical co-presence of such varied experiences? What are the affective terrains of the digital today?

Panelists:

1. Ali Akbar Mehta
2. Bishakha Dutta
3. Escher Tsai
4. Shabani Hassanwalia
5. Snigdha Poonam

Moderator: Nishant Shah

4:30 PM–5 PM: Break

5 PM–6:15 PM: Closing Keynote (45-min Presentation, 20-min Response, and 10-min QnA)

Intelligence, Creativity, Empathy: Technointimacy as the Third Wave of AI by Micaela Mantegna
The first and second waves of AI sought to replicate attributes once thought uniquely human: the ability to think and to create. Generative AI disrupted our understanding of creativity and the legal frameworks that govern it, forcing us to question originality, authorship, and plagiarism. This monumental shift exposed the fragility of copyright’s philosophical foundations, revealing how rationales of scarcity collapse in digital environments that are infinitely replicable by nature.

Now, a third wave emerges: systems that try to simulate empathy. 

Through Mantegna’s framework of ‘Technointimacy Capitalism’, this keynote exposes the deep ethical tensions and inner contradictions of artificial care. How AI companions, assistants, and virtual partners prey on and monetize human emotions, while being built upon the real trauma behind AI labour. 

In a ‘subscription society,’ behind synthetic affection lies a political economy of extraction: data, attention, and emotional bonds become resources to be mined. What happens when a meaningful relationship is kidnapped by a monthly payment? 

At the interplay of data, digital decay, and intellectual property, these systems deliver ‘attachment-as-a-service,’ offering companionship, comfort, and emotional labour on demand, with a heavy ethical price.

10:30 AM–11 AM: Registration; Tea/Coffee

11 AM–12:15 PM: Keynote 2 (45-min Presentation, 20-min Response, and 10-min QnA)

Prompt, Regenerate, Conceal: Post-search Habits of Large Language Models by Nishant Shah
Respondent: Maya Indira Ganesh 

In this talk, Shah proposes that with the rapid rise and proliferation of LLM-driven agents and systems (Generative AI), we are witnessing the dismantling of search as the foundational paradigm of digital and computational networks (Internet). Mapping a quick history of the Googlization of the world, Shah looks at what has changed in the age of information overload, and how we are developing new habits of informationality as we naturalize Large Language Models, which shift us from revelation to concealment as the new aesthetic of being digital. 

12:15 PM–12:30 PM: Break

12:30 PM–2 PM: Panel 3 (10-min Artist Presentation, 50-min Panelist Presentation, 20-min QnA)

In the time of gig work…
In the time of gig work amid the timelessness of caste, new circuits are rewiring relations between markets, capital, and labour. How are digital interfaces mediating the latest chapter in a continuing battle between the creativity of labour and the creativity of capital?

Panelists: 

1. Aditi Surie
2. David Brazier
3. Tara Kelton
4. Yatharth

Moderator: Shuddhabrata Sengupta

2 PM–3 PM: Lunch

3 PM–5 PM: Panel 4 (10-min Artist Presentation, 50-min Panelist Presentation, 20-min QnA)

A Future Digital
For all the hype from Silicon Valley and Bangalore, in many respects the digital future bears a striking resemblance to the analogue past, remediating the old tensions of coloniality, caste, and extraction. Alternative, speculative, possible practices of technology—a future digital—offer visions, prototypes, and demands for more just, reparative, and emancipatory worlds to come.

Panelists: 

1. Dan McQuillan
2. José Antonio Magalhães
3. Puneet Jain
4. Stefanie Wuschitz & Patrícia J. Reis

Moderator: Padmini Ray Murray 

5 PM–5:15 PM: Closing Remarks