PhD project carried out by Asker Bryld Staunæs and funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, May 2023 – April 2026.

The project is artistic research between School of Communication and Culture, AU and Kunsthal Aarhus. It is both media-based and politically-engaged and explores new imaginaries for social protest with artificial intelligence (AI). The project’s practical aim is to document a potential network, The Synthetic International (SI), which depicts a global web of political parties driven by AIs. This offers an antidote to a centenary of doomsday visions on “the robot uprising” by explicating how this already takes place in today’s society. The SI artwork - a “techno-social sculpture” that follows in a tradition of e.g. Joseph Beuys - presents a series of participatory interfaces where one can engage with AI propaganda, twisted diagrams, etc. By facilitating exhibitions, labs, publications, workshops, and scholarly debate, Automatic Uprisings’ objective is to outline a form of digital citiz