On 15 May 2025, we gathered for the Slow AI Symposium: Practices of Thinking, Sensing, and Refusing at FramerFramed.

On this day-long event, we reimagined artificial intelligence through artistic practice and the lenses of ethics, relationality, and refusal. Artists, theorists, designers, and technologists were brought together to discuss AI not as an inevitable force or a tool to be optimised, but as a cultural and relational object that entangles with our ecological, political, and cultural environments.

The program featured contributions by Elki Boerdam, Sofía Fernández Blanco, Dorin Budușan, and Mariana Lanari, and conversations with Carlo De Gaetano, Janine Armin, Zachary Formwalt, Flavia Dzodan, Pablo Nuñez Palma, and Christian Olesen. The event was moderated by Sabine Niederer, Mariana Fernández Mora, and Inte Gloerich.

The day closed with the launch of Restless Grounds: Speculative Futures on Algorithmic Technologies, a publication and podcast exploring slowness as a speculative, critical, and embodied mode of engaging with algorithmic technologies. The first episode of the podcast, Unicorns, Forgetting, and Algorithmic Histories is now available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In the spring of 2024, the Slow AI project launched a series of material-based research workshops that took the form of Material Playgrounds, borrowing the term and building on the work of Socrates Professor Erik Rietveld. These workshops aim to collectively explore different ways of engaging with AI through material investigations that allow for playful exploration and experimentation.

‍Slow AI focuses on developing strategies to address colonial and extractive histories embedded in current AI systems by applying the concept of ‘slowness’ to a fast technology. It is a project initiated by artist and researcher Mariana Fernández Mora and a collaboration between the Visual Methodologies Collective (HvA) and the Sandberg Institute (GRA). In collaboration with the Artificial Worlds group at ARIAS Amsterdam and generously funded by the Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation, Slow AI aims to contribute to a more equitable and sustainable technological landscape.