PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents

In light of the disruptive presence of AI tools, we met for the PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents summer school from 21-24 July in AVU (Prague, CZ) as part of the Ars Biologica Independent Studies program, within the broader context of the Budweis – European Capital of Culture 2028 project.

Taking permaculture principles (and the problems + frictions that accompany them) as a critical and generative framework, we experimented with co-creative forms of prompting and AI agent design to explore whether everyday human–AI use can be oriented towards (more-than) human interdependence and contextual sensitivity, rather than productivity and scale.

Perma/PromptFest

Guided by an international, interdisciplinary team of tutors, we spent 4 days exploring and reflecting on AI prompting—the process of steering genAI systems like ChatGPT—not only as a tool for creativity and connection, but also as a practice entangled with control, exclusion, manipulation, and environmental costs. The program included lectures, workshops and other experimental activities such as Ramón Alvarado’s talk What is an Agent?; Jana Bernartová & Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková collab session From System Prompts to PermaPrompting with A°D°A – Virtual Futurologist; Andrej Boleslavský’s tooling lab for crafting agents; Lenka Hámošová’s embodied workshop Rituals for Tuning Human–Machine Intuitions; Markéta Dolejšová’s talk and discussion on Practising Feralities, the performative lecture Monkey See Monkey Do by Štěpán Kleník and Artur Magrot.

The summer school culminated in the Perma~PromptFest, a public event in AVU Veletržní Hall where slime molds expanded into .exe dimensions, soil chromatograms conversed with human irises, deepfake tripped into the depths of plumbing and language, volcanoes erupted pop songs, pollinators played garden soundtracks, Prague mythologies included invasive species, and Pong went feral.

(AI)gents Repository

Documentation and most outcomes and AI Agents from the summer school are gathered in the public repository: https://github.com/EnriqueKi/PermaPrompting. It is compiled by Enrique Encinas and includes contributions by PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents tutors and participants Ramón Alvarado, Andrej Boleslavský, Markéta Dolejšová, Jana Bernartová, Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková, Štěpán Kleník, Artur Magrot, Lenka Hámošová, Alexa Steinbrück, Alaz Okudan, Yash Bhut, Magdalena Wutkowska, Jan Pokorny, Luca Cacini, Andrej Kučera, Rastislav Kubica, Alexander Cohen, Giliam Ganzevles, and Lamija Čehajić. Special thanks to Magdalena Wutkowska and Alexa Steinbrück for joining the summer school and then presenting their work in the Ars Biologica Pavilion.

PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents was part of the 2025 Ars Biologica Independent Studies program alongside three other summer schools — Perma~cultural Thinking in Multispecies Research, Permacomputing and Digital Infrastructures, and Pomalé Obvody / Slow Circuits. More information about the entire program is available here.

This summer school wouldn’t have been possible without the generous support of the AVU – Academy of Fine Arts Prague, which opened its studios and facilities to us. Thanks also to the Ars Biologica and ECOC2028 teams in Budweis and to the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

If you’d like to get in touch and/or add anything to the summer school’s little repo/archive, you can reach us here :: enrique@uroboros.design