For the last two years I have explored Artifecal Intelligence through research, art residencies, and creative collaborations with AI systems, bioartists, and scientists. I first learned this term from a ChatGPT/SunoAI glitch that occurred while we were analyzing the nature/culture divide, and since then I have come to view Artificial Intelligence (AI) as Artifecal.
Indiscriminate releases of AI systems have generated enormous quantities of excreta, alongside a very tense duality about the nature of AI itself. Expectations are growing that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Transformative AI (TAI) will take over 25% of human jobs within this decade. Compute power dedicated to training AI models has scaled at a factor of 4-5 per year over the last 10 years, while multiplying energy use by orders of magnitude. For example, Microsoft has signed deals for 5GW/10GW data centers for Open AI, with projected energy requirements equal to the annual output of Portugal (43.8 TWh). Parts of the AI community tremble in the face of AI’s imagined demonic power of destruction, rendering it taboo, while others blithely transgress into a wildly erotic AI death drive.
This avalanche of for-profit enshittified slop introduces global challenges for humanity and our biosphere. While ethicists are focused on the ‘alignment’ of superhuman intelligence systems to human safety, they are overlooking these artifecal processes. Artifecal excreta mimics impaired fecal metabolisms that can lead to dementia, and further threatens social and mental health worldwide. I will share the transcendent possibilities of Desludging the Artifecal in AI that transforms artifecal excess into artifical dreams.
Praba Pilar is a queer diasporic Colombian artist creating interdisciplinary projects that disrupt the cult of the techno-logic. She is working internationally on subversive, playful, and simultaneously serious ways with AI systems to nixtamalize the technology sector, creating algorithms, code, images, and songs that challenge data extraction techno-colonialism and offer algorithms of liberation.
Her artworks have been presented in museums, galleries, universities, festivals and streets around the world – including the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg, Sweden; MUAC in Mexico City; La Facultad de Bellas Artes, Altea, Spain; Vancouver's LIVE BIENNALE; Toronto's McLuhan Center for Culture & Technology; SIGGRAPH in South Korea; the Zero One Festival at ISEA; OCAD in Toronto; Galeria Studio Cerrillo in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico; MOCA in Los Angeles; San Francisco's MOMA; BAN 5 at Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena; Grace Performance Space in New York City; the Oakland Museum of California; and many more, with works on exhibit in perpetuity at the Kitchen in NYC and in ACM SIGGRAPH’s Future Past VS. Coloniality: Decolonial Media Art Beyond 530 Year.
She is a 2025-27 HUMAN (Humanities Understanding of the Machine Assisted Nexus) Fellow at Lake Forest College/Ragdale, Co-Director of the Bioarts Ethical Advisory Komission, and an Emeritus Board Member of Women Eco Artists Dialogue. Pilar has a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis, and you can learn more about her work at prabapilar.com.
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