AI Halftime

As AI evolves in increasingly autonomous and difficult-to-govern ways, it has become clear that we are no longer at an early moment of experimentation. AI halftime presents a suspended moment within an unfolding transformation.

Challenging the divide between technology and nature, the book argues that technology is not an external force but part of the hybrid ecology we inhabit, evolving in continuous intra-action with biological, social, and perceptual systems.

This book investigates the roles, embodiments, and agencies AI assumes within artistic practice. It explores emerging hybrid ecologies shaped by multiple intelligences and asks: How can artistic practices intervene structurally, reshaping the trajectories of technological evolution and redefining what intelligence might become?

• Reframes AI as part of a hybrid ecology
• New perspectives on AI and artistic practice

Autorentext

Zeynep Aksöz is an artist, researcher, architect, creative coder, and curator working at the intersection of spatial practice and artificial intelligence. Her work examines AI as an embodied and politically charged actor within performative and spatial environments, investigating how digital systems shape perception, agency, and behavior. She earned her PhD as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and has co-led research projects including Vibrant Fields (FWF PEEK) and Morphology of Sound (INTRA). Her installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts and Vienna Design Week, and she has presented her work at venues such as COAC Madrid and BOZAR Brussels. She received the Research Prize of the Austrian National Chamber of Architects and AI in Arts funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts. Across installations, performances, and curatorial formats, she investigates AI as part of relational ecosystems of human and nonhuman actors.

Margarete Jahrmann is an internationally renowned artist, researcher, and Professor of Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2025 she was awarded the Austrian Media Art Prize, following the Media Art Prize of the City of Vienna in 2020 in recognition of her sustained contributions to critical media practice and ludic art. Her work has been presented in major international contexts, including a comprehensive solo exhibition at AIL Vienna, as well as appearances at the Biennale de La Habana (2021), re:publica (2022/2024), AMAZE Berlin (2023), and the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2024). In 2026 she published the monograph KOPFGELD and Other Ludic Experiments, which brings together her research at the intersection of artistic inquiry, neuroscience, cognition and media art. Working collaboratively and across disciplines, Jahrmann developed the LUDIC method, an approach that investigates entanglements between human and non-human agencies, cognition and affect, and their ecological and socio-political dimensions. Her practice centers on playable, performative, and installation-based formats that examine artificial intelligence, its social impact, role-play, and the porous boundaries between fiction and technologically mediated realities.