Master's programmes organise conference: A Crisis of Fabulation?
2 December 2025
First-year students from four specialisations of the KABK’s Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design (MAFAD) will come together for a new, interdisciplinary project week that explores the intersections of technology and art in the age of AI. The event takes place from 6 to 9 January 2026 at KABK.
A Crisis of Fabulation? The Shifting Roles of Art, Design, and Critical Thinking in a Pre-Emptive AI Knowledge Regime
MAFAD unites the master’s programmes in Artistic Research, Industrial Design, Non Linear Narrative, and Photography & Society. The goal of the joint initiative is to emphasise connections across these disciplinary programmes and to find commonalities in approaches to education, research, and critical thinking.
As an intradepartmental initiative of Jasper Coppes, Maaike Roozenburg, Niels Schrader, and Shadman Shahid, MAFAD students and staff will now have the chance to immerse themselves in an issue of broad and urgent social concern. Together the programmes will benefit from the input of invited experts and develop critical ways of working and resisting as a learning community. In 2026, that concern is how we make art and design within an AI knowledge regime.
Keynote lectures
The 2026 MAFAD project week consists of four keynote lectures by Eleanor Dare, Femke Herregraven, Afaina de Jong, and Ali Shobeiri alongside related in-person workshops by leading and critical thinkers and makers in the professional world. These sessions invite us to consider how machine learning technologies influence collective memory, identity, and societal change. The workshop format encourages collaboration across the departments and includes plenty of hands-on engagement with the topic. Their focus for the MAFAD week is on making and doing via experimentation and iteration by, for example, reflecting and reading collectively on the topic in focus, or engaging directly with the hardware and software to assemble your own AI framework. Confirmed workshop leads are Rob Bothof, Aleksandra Chargeshvili and Timo Bega, Mariana Fernández Mora, and Dina Mohamed.
Femke Herregraven’s (1982, NL) artwork explores the effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and daily life. Her research into the interaction between financial markets, risks, and the physical world forms the foundation for her iterative sculptures, drawings, films, and hybrid installations. In 2024, Herregraven received the third-cycle title of Creator Doctus from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam following a three-year research trajectory.
An Artistic Appraoch to Self-Organising Systems
Artist Femke Herregraven discusses her research on the modelling and financialisation of the future. She shares her artistic approaches to AI, specifically with respect to the financial, geological, and climatological self-organising systems that shape and disrupt daily life. The artist unpacks how she employs textual, computational, and gestural languages, expressed through image, sound, drawing, speculative fiction, and simulation. In so doing she reflects on how contemporary future models shape the experience of reality and the ground on which it stands.
Eleanor Dare (1965, UK) is the Convenor of the Cambridge Data Schools, Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) at the University of Cambridge, and AI Forensics Post Doctoral Research Associate at CDH. More recent work, such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Digital Good project, Rear Windows, and Monstrous, have developed responses to AI, human, and other animal/land rights/ethics via performance, writing, interfaces, and workshops. With Professor Dylan Yamada-Rice, in 2022, Dare co-founded the Design Research Studio X||dinary Stories: consultancy for digital & immersive storytelling. Dare was Reader in Digital Media and Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art in London and has a background in practice investigation of AI, interaction design, and digital education. Dare received a PhD in Arts & Computational Technology from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Knowledge Beyond Compression: Slime Mould, Latent Variables, AI Research, and Analogue Drawing
Eleanor Dare offers an interactive session for which the audience is asked to bring a writing utensil and piece of paper (just a small sheet and humble pencil are fine). Together with Dare the audience takes part in a drawing exercise to consider how images are generated and why it matters by deconstructing a key aspect of ‘Generative AI’ – the act of encoding and coding – through practice. You will then go on a non-linear journey down the River Ravensbourne in South London, taking in the sights and hearing about non-linear storytelling, drawing, games, and experimental methodologies for design and wider research. The keynote asks: What can we learn about our own cultural processes? How is ‘AI’, probably, the opposite of innovation? Recommended resources include Dan McQuillan on knowledge beyond compression in ‘Decomputing as Resistance’ (2025); ‘Computing Within Limits’ (2018) by Bonnie Nardi et al.; as well as no tech low tech, slime mould, and drawing.
Afaina de Jong (1977, NL) is an architect and artist based in Amsterdam. De Jong works at the boundary of architecture and art. Her practice is deeply connected to representing people and cultural movements that are not traditionally represented in spatial form. She situates her work in the public realm as part of the collective imaginary, and her discourse is international and intersectional, connecting art and counterculture with space. Her studio AFARAI, founded in 2005, specializes in spatial design and has worked for institutions such as the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Venice Biennale, and the United Nations in New York. De Jong is the head of the Contextual Design MA department at Design Academy Eindhoven.
The Embodied Restoration Lab
Architect and artist Afaina de Jong focusses on her project The Embodied Restoration Lab, asking us to imagine a new kind of AI model that recognizes resource scarcity among various ecosystems, prioritizes oral or diasporic knowledge, considers accessibility needs, and moves away from paradigms of colonialism towards a more equitable future. As the founder of AFARAI, an Amsterdam-based studio rooted in feminist practices, de Jong has long considered how the ways in which we imagine as humans, as designers, and as architects is unmistakably tied to the technologies that we use and their inherent values. She proposes that if we change the algorithmic tools from which we learn, we can perhaps fundamentally change the world around us.
Ali Shobeiri (1984, NL / IR) is a researcher, educator, and photographer, and since 2018, Assistant Professor of Photography and Visual Culture at Leiden University. He previously taught Cultural Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen and Photography at KABK and co-supervises practice-based PhDs at PhDArts. His interdisciplinary research bridges visual and material culture, philosophy, aesthetics, and geography. In 2021 he published the monograph Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography with Leiden University Press. His recent co-edited books include Oikography: Homemaking through Photography (Leiden University Press, 2025), Virtual Photography: Artificial Intelligence, In-game, and Extended Reality (transcript, 2024), Psychosomatic Imagery: Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders (Leiden University Press, 2023), and Animation and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Forthcoming works include the co-edited volume Photography / Intensity / Measure and the co-authored volume Aquatic Thinking. Shobeiri has designed and taught numerous BA and MA courses in media and cultural studies, and has supervised theses at undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels across art, media, and humanities programmes.
Virtual Photography – Artificial Intelligence, In-Game, and Extended Reality
While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualisations of photography, this talk proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework. Virtual photography is defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting that efficiency and function in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.
