Slow AI aims to foster a critical, ethical, and sustainable relationship with AI by reimagining how we engage with these technologies in our societies, helping us speculate alternative presents and futures with AI technologies. 

Beyond reducing the speed of technological processes, “Slow AI” is a conceptual and practical approach that challenges the current ways our interactions with AI are scripted. Through artistic research, this two-year project concentrates on how engaging with AI technologies from a material perspective can help us arrive at new ‘modes of engagement’ that resist notions of speed, efficiency and optimisation rooted in colonial and extractive histories. Helping us reimagine our relationship with AI technologies and how they are embedded in our societies. In this context, “Slow AI” can be seen as an anti-colonial movement, which, beyond just a temporal measure, represents a more ethical, critical, and sustainable relationship with the technology.

Slow AI centres artistic research through Material Playgrounds to explore these new modes of engagement, incorporating concepts such as planetary health, kinship with non-humans, and deep listening. Researchers at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences collaborate with the Institute for Sound and Vision to investigate how these methods can address the biases and colonial histories present in AI technologies and cultural collections.

This project in the research programme Innovation and Networks is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Inte Gloerich (PhD) critically and creatively researches emerging technology from decolonial, feminist, and ecological perspectives, and collaboratively reimagines sociotechnical futures, for example by exploring uncertainty and enchantment.

She recently published her first monograph, Imaginaries of Immutable Truth: The Cultural Politics of Blockchain (Institute of Network Cultures, 2026), which interrogates blockchain culture’s technomystical promises of immutable truth, and how artistic-activist engagements can disrupt these logics, opening pathways to plural and situated forms of knowledge.

Her practice often takes collaborative, experimental forms: in 2020, she co-created the Feminist Finance Zine and Syllabus with Amateur Cities, bringing members of the international MoneyLab network together to create a shared resource for economic futures centred on radical care. With Ania Molenda and Denise Thwaites, she is developing See You There, a series of interlinked postcards and webpages that poetically prompt reflection on humanity’s place within earthly and cosmic ecosystems.

Currently, as postdoctoral researcher for Slow AI, Inte collaborates with artists, designers, and researchers to reimagine our relationship with AI through practices that reject speed, efficiency, and optimisation. She is developing a postcard exchange practice to facilitate slow reflection on AI and create space for collective meaning-making. Curious to contribute or collaborate? Reach out at [i.gloerich@hva.nl].