REFRESH Keynote: Algorithmic Entanglements – Digital Literacy
How can research and artistic explorations contribute to building digital literacy and thus break with the hype cycle of current technological developments in times of social friction and ecological crises? Join us at Swissnex in San Francisco for the third day of REFRESH 2026.
REFRESH 2026 is a 4-day festival featuring keynotes, masterclasses and an exhibition running until April 12, bringing together acclaimed designers, artists, and researchers from Switzerland and the US to envision possible futures and new fields of action for design and the arts.
Discover all REFRESH Festival events:
REFRESH Luma Calendar - Register here for all Festival events
REFRESH Festival Overview - Read more about the artists and artwork
Program
6:00pm // Doors Open
6:30pm // Echo Disco Foxtrot
Keynote by Dr. Joëlle Bitton
We run on echoes—signals bouncing back from the past, materials extracted elsewhere, labour rendered invisible. The future has already happened, but it is still used as an excuse to snub the present. AI makes us wonder where we are going, all the while we are here and now ignoring the intelligence of others – animals, plants, minerals, rarely wondering where they are going. Whether we deem them useful or useless too often steers our actions. We trade commodities as if fairness is built into the system or we’re just happy pretending it is.
So let’s dance: in the talk «Echo Disco Foxtrot», usefulness wobbles, agency gets distributed across clay and AI, trade gets redesigned, and we relish changing our minds.
7pm // Blobsters, Slop and Hyper-Events: Negotiating Visual Trust in a Post-Optical Era
Keynote by Martyna Marciniak
In early 2023 a series of highly realistic synthetic images produced by newly advanced, generative tools marked the perceived ‘beginning of the end of visual truth’. Any image from now on would fall into two categories: real or fake. Identifying the fake, as the argument goes, is our best defense against the possibility of a mass misinformation event… Yet, could there be a value in ‘staying with the fake’? Can it reveal something much more meaningful about our collective beliefs and misconceptions around the aesthetics of visual evidence?
In this keynote talk Martyna Marciniak will unpack the complex landscape of synthetic image misinformation using a collection of images from 2018 until now. The talk will use her recent research and artistic explorations as a strategy to navigate the tension between the techno-doom on one hand, and AI ‘gold rush’ optimism on the other. Approaching synthetic images as exaggerated portrayals of our past visual language, the talk will unpack selected case studies as a pretext to reconsider and organise the visual language of trust, evidence and attention.
The second part of the talk will question the AI misinformation panic as a potentially dishonest reversal, ignoring existing problems of visual evidencing and policies, while potentially inflating the value of the state of AI technology, ultimately acting as a market manipulation tool.
It’s time to reconsider the otherwise hidden mechanisms of synthetic image misinformation, and who benefits from them. Countering the prevailing dichotomy of the real vs fake, a dubious gift of post-trumpian political parlance, the talk will propose a new lexicon that names the nuances of the synthetic and evidentiary images and identifies their operational value, while undoing the harmful anthropomorphisation of AI concepts.
7:30pm // Networking, Drinks & Appetizers
8:30pm // Doors Close
Speakers
Dr. Joëlle Bitton, Lecturer, Researcher Subject Area in Interaction Design, Zurich University of the Arts
Martyna Marciniak, Artist, Researcher and 3D Designer
About REFRESH 2026
REFRESH 2026 is a partnership between the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and Swissnex in San Francisco.
The festival is an initiative of the Department of Design and the Immersive Arts Space of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and is traveling to the US for the first time.
This 7th edition of REFRESH focuses on “Algorithmic Entanglements”, reflecting the impact of digital technologies on society and the planetary well-being. The line up highlights the crucial role of creative practitioners and thinkers engaging critically and responsibly with digital transformation.
Identity / Motion Design: Abhash Mittal. © ZHdK
About Swissnex in San Francisco
Swissnex in San Francisco is an initiative of the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). Our vision at Swissnex in San Francisco is to connect tomorrow by empowering the next generation of innovators to collaborate and create futures where the planet and society thrive.
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