Learning Machines

// Research-creation Project // 2024-2025

Learning Machines is a research-creation project that examines the entanglements between emerging technologies—AI, algorithms, machine learning, and computation—and the machinic formations of subjectivity that shape how pedagogy is perceived, structured, and valued within contemporary education.

Through experimental research-creation practices and productions, we craft pedagogical fabulations that explore intelligence, artificiality, embodied cognition, and techno-human relations. By bridging theory and practice, Learning Machines seeks to reorient approaches to accessibility in the context of today’s computational turn, offering speculative and practical frameworks for reimagining art education in an era of algorithmic assimilation.

This project is funded by Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts Faculty Research Development Program (FRDP) and is supported by a team of PhD and MA students, including Jihane Mossalim, Sarah Bélanger-Martel, Natalie Pavlik, and Azza Hussein.

Project Website - Check it out here! >>>

Learning Machines: Live from the Black Box!

On Saturday, February 8, 2024, from 1–2 PM EST, the learning machines presented a one-hour live-streamed performance that dove headfirst into the enigmatic world of AI, algorithms, and computational tools.

During a week-long research-creation residency at Concordia University’s Black Box, we experimented with the unseen mechanisms that shape today’s learning machines—systems that simultaneously reveal and conceal how knowledge is made and how we, as subjects, are formed.

The performance featured a dynamic mix of energetic demands, virtual manifestations, recursive loops, glitched imaginations, machinic dreams, and warped memories as we explored what it means to learn, think, and create alongside today’s algorithmic learning machines.