The World and Everything! Philosophers and Other Machines at Fórum da Maia

Technology as malleable matter

The history of technological innovation can also be told through the women who transformed matter, symbols, code, and sound. From the Jealous Pot, evoked by Claude Lévi-Strauss, to the pioneering vision of Ada Lovelace, who imagined the computer as a machine capable of creating; from the women at Bletchley Park, who helped decipher Enigma, to the first programmers such as Grace Hopper; from the sonic experiments of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire to the multimedia work of Laurie Anderson, a genealogy of technological creativity is drawn that is often forgotten. This workshop draws on that tradition to explore artificial intelligence as an instrument of thought, creation, and critical autonomy. It is not about learning to “use AI,” but about understanding how to engage with it, question it, and integrate it into a conscious creative process.