OPEN CALL :: PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents
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24 Jul Thu 18:00 CEST
Summer School
SUMMER SCHOOL Event: July 21-24 2025
APPLY BEFORE June 20 2025
AI prompting—the act of shaping how AI systems like ChatGPT generate content—is becoming a widespread everyday practice for creativity and connection, but also control, exclusion, manipulation and environmental devastation. In light of the disruptive presence of AI tools, how do we build literacy around their inner workings and develop collective strategies that challenge proprietary infrastructures?
Machine learning use, transform or refuse?
Co-organised by the Ars Biologica Independent Study Program (ABIS) of the Budweis – European Capital of Culture 2028, the Doctoral Research Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), and the Uroboros collective, this 4-day summer school invites artists, designers, researchers, and students of varied backgrounds to experiment with co-creative approaches to prompting and building AI agents. Taking permaculture principles as a critical and generative framework, we will explore whether everyday human–AI interactions can be reimagined through the lenses of interdependence and contextual sensitivity, rather than personal efficiency and scale.
Guided by an interdisciplinary group of tutors from different parts of the world, participants will work with their preferred AI data-materials (see Application Guidelines below) and co-create custom feral AI agents–algorithmic entities operating at the edges of utility to explore meanings emerging through spontaneous yet careful engagements with diverse (more-than)human contexts and data. AVU Veletržní Hall will serve as the summer school venue and a living stage where these feral agents will act and react publicly during workshops, lectures, discussions and embodied experiments such as social prompting sessions, clay meditations or performative dérives. The summer school will culminate in a public event, where participants collectively decide how feral agents will contribute to the Ars Biologica Permaculture Symposium in late August.
Dates: July 21st to July 24th 2025
Venue: AVU Veletržní Hall, Prague (Veletržní 826, Prague 7, 17000)
Language: English communication skills are required, but there will be tutors who also speak Czech.
Tutors: Enrique Encinas, Denisa Kera, Lenka Hámošová, Markéta Dolejšová
Participants: max. 15 – 20 people selected via an open call.
Fee: Participation is free of charge, but accommodation and travel costs are self-funded by the participants. Let us know if you need recommendations for affordable accommodation in Prague.
Application Guidelines: Technical knowledge of AI is not required to participate; only experience with generative AI on a user level is needed.
To apply, please submit the following materials (in English):
- Motivation statement (max 200 words) describing why you are interested in participating and what you would like to explore during the summer school
- Short Bio (max 200 words) including a brief description of your background and creative research practice, as well as any other relevant experiences.
- Micro-Portfolio (optional but encouraged) with a link to your website and/or 2 or 3 selected works. These do not have to be AI-related.
- Proposed Data Source(s). We invite each participant to bring their data along to use as a prompt or input for the workshop activities. These can be anything digital or not: a text archive of your ChatGPT history, random images, scribbled napkin ideas, neural vids encoding dreams, Andalusian food recipes, or something entirely different. Briefly describe what you might bring and why.
Application Deadline: Submit to: enrique.encinas@aho.no, no later than June 20th 2025
Notifications on acceptance will be sent back by June 27th 2025
Partners: Ars Biologica Independent Study Program (ABIS) of the Budweis – European Capital of Culture 2028, Doctoral Research Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU), Uroboros collective, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Technical University Liberec
Contact: If you have any questions about the summer school event or the application process, please contact us at: enrique.encinas@uroboros.design or marketa.dolejsova@avu.cz
We are looking forward to your proposals!
Enrique Encinas
Enrique Encinas is a design researcher exploring the patterns and textures formed by (other than)humans and technologies through creative, critical and collaborative practices. He works as Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). They have co-lead projects involving governmental, artistic and educational institutions such as the European Union Policy Lab, the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB) or SpeculativeEDU.
Denisa Reshef Kera
Denisa Kera is an AI agent-meddler, machine shaman, and experimental policymaker who plays with LLM-based agent simulations to see what happens when machines negotiate rules and deliberate on our behalf. As an Associate Professor at Bar Ilan University, she runs the Design & Policy Lab and serves as the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs alternate AI expert, keeping an eye on the fine line between governance and machine mischief. Her global and interdisciplinary work on the experimental governance of emerging infrastructures, such as open hardware, blockchain/DLTs, and AI, is explored in her book, ";Algorithms and Automation: Governance over Rituals, Machines and Prototypes from Sundials to Blockchain" (https://www.routledge.com/Algorithms-and-Automation-Governance-over-Rituals-
Machines-and-Proto/Kera/p/book/9781032038636), her repo and projects are at https://github.com/anonette/ , papers https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Denisa_Kera2/ and previous work https://dando.design/
Lenka Hámošová
Lenka Hámošová is a visual artist and researcher focusing on synthetic media and the use of artificial intelligence in artistic practice. As part of her PhD at the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, she is specifically interested in the collective perspectives of human-AI co-creation and experimentation with participatory approach for AI-assisted media synthesis. She also explores ways of interdisciplinary collaboration in her educational and research activities related to the activities of the Uroboros collective (Uroboros Festival), of which she is a co-founder.
She graduated from the Master’s programme in Design at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and Visual Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. She has initiated creative AI meet-ups in Prague, designed an educational set of brainstorming AI/ML cards Collective Vision of Synthetic Reality and is starting teaching her own course on AI in artistic practice at Centre for Audiovisual Arts at FAMU Prague. In the past she has taught at various visual arts programmes such as MA Future Design at Prague City University and Digital Arts at Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.
Markéta Dolejšová
Markéta Dolejšová is a practice-based researcher experimenting with co-creative and embodied experiences in multispecies contexts. Her recent focus has been on ferality and feral eco-systems, exploring what relations, intuitions, and ways of knowing can emerge in the liminal spaces between the wild and the domesticated, the familiar and unknown, the serendipitous and intentional. She is also an Assistant Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she acts as the Head of Doctoral Research Department, and recently finished her postdoctoral research fellowship at Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture (2020-24). In 2020-22, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures project, where she led the Laboratory of Experimental Productions and co-created the CreaTures Framework setting out how creative practices can stimulate action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures. She co-founded several art & design research initiatives, including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the HotKarot & OpenSauce.