PTEN
Trienal de 
Financed by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
https://www.eventbrite.pt/o/cada-6048405527
The 9th edition of Human Entities, culture in the age of artificial intelligence, returns to Lisbon in May and June 2025. An initiative of the art groupCADA, the programme of public talks is focused on technological change and its impacts – the ways technology and culture influence each other. Free entrance with registration here.
Jankspace is the leaking residual of the stack as it metabolises meatspace into hallucinogenic sludge. It's the Uber driver's chaotically impressive multi-display setup of knotted cables, flashing screens, and beeping notifications. It's literally us and our gorgeously fucked-up, uncomputable bodies that we know aren't quite programmed right and no amount of optimization is going to fix. In this artist talk Daniel will use the concept of jankspace to explore some of the central themes of his practice, namely, the aesthetic derangement of everyday digital culture, our unhinged mediated bodies, and the idiotic delusions of transhumanism.
Daniel Felstead is an academic and content producer whose practice focuses on the relationship between the body, technology, and culture. He is the course leader of MA Fashion Media & Communication at the London College of Fashion (UAL). Daniel has spoken and exhibited internationally including Architectural Association, Berlin Critics Week, Die Angewandte, Fundació Foto Colectania, Global Art Forum, MAPS, ICA, PAF, RCA, RISD, Shedhalle, Transmediale and V&A Museum. His PhD explored speculative modes of production, complex systems and the platform in relation to participatory art. Most recently Daniel has produced a series of critically acclaimed short film commissions that explore the myths, ideologies and realities of the metaverse, AI, biotech and neural media.
This way of approaching embodiment is informed by many years of studying chant, or joint speech, in which people assemble with common purpose and commune through the synchronous production of sounds that found collectives. Sharing time without clocks can orient us with respect to our ever-shifting allegiances, fluid identities and perhaps even sacred values. Leaving the dissociative characteristics of language behind, we will turn to the creative power of the voice, which the Māndukya Upanishad assures us is the origin of everything.
Fred Cummins has worked as an embodied cognitive scientist and a phonetician, seeking ways to understand ourselves as grounded in our bodies (not brains!). He has developed the study of Joint Speech, which is found wherever multiple people make the same sounds at the same time. This way of framing things allows rich consideration of common features of ritual (prayer, mantra), protest, sports participation and education in a manner that is not committed to the conventional partitioning of reality into distinct domains of the natural, the social and the cultural.
Caroline Busta is a co-founder of the critical media channel New Models. She was previously EIC of Texte zur Kunst, and an Assoc. Editor of Artforum. She co-edited Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst's survey catalogue, All Media is Training Data (2024, Serpentine/König) and her recent essay ‘Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content’ appears in the SS24 issue of Document journal.
Our conventional understanding of intelligence has long been shaped by human and animal models, leaving little room to consider the cognitive potential of plants. However, emerging research challenges this perspective, revealing that plants engage with their surroundings in ways that suggest problem-solving, flexible adaptation, and even anticipatory forms of behavior. In this talk, I will present key findings, exploring how plants process information, respond to stimuli, and coordinate their actions through sophisticated signaling mechanisms. Beyond the scientific discoveries, these insights prompt deeper philosophical questions. Why do we struggle to conceive of plants as more than passive organisms?
What assumptions shape our tendency to separate the human from the nonhuman, intelligence from instinct, or agency from environment? Our conceptual and linguistic frameworks are often ill-equipped to accommodate the possibility that plants, too, participate in the web of cognition. By questioning these biases, we open the door to a more expansive and inclusive view of life; one that recognizes intelligence as a broader, more distributed phenomenon across biological systems. This shift in perspective not only deepens our understanding of plants but also challenges us to rethink fundamental ideas about mind, perception, and the interconnected nature of all living beings.
Paco Calvo, professor of Philosophy of Science, Principal Investigator of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory (MINT Lab) at the University of Murcia (Spain). His research interests range broadly within the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on plant intelligence, ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science, robotics and AI. He uses time-lapse photography to explore perception-action and learning in plants. His scientific articles have appeared in Annals of Botany, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Journal of the Royal Society, Plant, Cell & Environment, Plant Signaling & Behavior, Scientific Reports, and Trends in Plant Science, among other journals. He is author of the popular science book Planta Sapiens: A Inteligência Secreta das Plantas (Editorial Presença, 2023; with Natalie Lawrence).
Culture in the age of artificial intelligence
by CADA (Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira)
Modernity has long proclaimed the human species as both the measure and the centre of reality. Here the world is understood through human exceptionalism, an ideological construct which reaches a crescendo with the act of separating nature from culture. Guided by science and reason, the project rejects the notion of anything existing beyond ‘the seen’ and techno-progressivism becomes our secular faith. And while the autonomous individual is not entirely framed outside the social, the promise of individual freedom and self-expression are enshrined at modernity’s heart. Despite postmodernism, the science wars and climatic upheaval, the ghost of modernity still haunts our underlying value systems – for better or for worse (often both).
Human Entities 2025 examines two interrelated concerns. First, how technoscientific ideologies, new AI structures and digital media’s usage combine to affect our perception, our cognition, and our emotions. Defined by hyper-individualism, online life inhabits a circulatory space where ‘culture’ becomes ‘content’ which, met by increasingly individualised profit-driven modelling, has a profound impact on the human psyche.
Secondly, the programme looks beyond our current metaphysical misconceptions into ideas of non-neural intelligence and whether or not consciousness is generated by the brain – while acknowledging what plants knew along, that all life is interconnected and that the human species was never at the centre of reality.