Master's programmes organise conference: A Crisis of Fabulation?
6 januari 2026
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.
MAFAD conference, ‘A Crisis of Fabulation?’
Due to inclement weather conditions, severe disruptions to public transport, and dangerous black ice on the roads, we have decided to move the MAFAD conference, ‘A Crisis of Fabulation?’ online. We regret any inconvenience caused by this late change but hope to host an exciting series of discussions in a way that remains accessible to everyone involved.
The keynote lectures will be scheduled as follows:
Conference program - Tuesday 6 January
---
10:00 – 10:10 brief welcome by Edwin Jacobs, Director KABK
10:10 – 10:15 introduction by moderator Roosmarijn Hompe
---
An Artistic Approach to Self-Organising Systems
10:15 – 10:55: Talk 1 – Femke Herregraven
10:55 – 11:05: 10 min Q&A
---
Virtual Photography – Artificial Intelligence, In-Game, and Extended Reality
11:05 – 11:45: Talk 2 – Ali Shobeiri
11:45 – 11:55: 10 min Q&A
---
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch break
----
Knowledge Beyond Compression
13:05 – 13:45: Talk 3 – Eleanor Dare
13:45 – 13:55: 10 min Q&A
---
13.55 – 14:10 Conference wrap-up and info about workshops
Keynote lectures
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Master of Art & Design project week
The 2026 MAFAD project week (6-9 January) consists of 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.