2025 Retreat
How can the sensory capacities of art help us navigate the shifting contours of perception and personhood?
The inaugural AIR Retreat is a closed-door, artist-led gathering of approximately thirty thinkers conceived in collaboration with artists Paul Chan and Aria Dean, poet and economist Zoë Hitzig, and writer Evan Calder Williams. The Retreat is designed as a space to explore the limits and possibilities of new technological tools and the emergent architectures of consciousness they bring into being.
Focusing on the possibilities of artistic practice in a moment when we are regularly interacting with entities that may not be who—or what—they claim to be, the Retreat will unfold over a series of workshops designed to think through critical questions around authentication, identification, and proof that emerge from Zoë Hitzig’s research into the near-future necessity for new forms of “personhood credentials.”
AIR Retreat 2025 is convened in partnership with Aspen Institute’s Arts Program, the Doris Duke Foundation’s Creative Labor, Creative Conditions initiative, and e-flux Journal, in which writings that emerge from the conversations will appear.
The retreat is curated by Vic Brooks, AIR Curator at Large, and Anisa Jackson, Curator at Large, with the AIR Retreat Working Group: Paul Chan, Aria Dean, Zoë Hitzig, and Evan Calder Williams, and in collaboration with Danielle Baussan, Vice President for Policy Programs and Director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program; Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, Senior Program Manager at the Aspen Institute Arts Program; and Ashley Ferro-Murray, Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Foundation.
Evan Calder Williams
Author, Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and contributing editor of e-flux Journal.
Nabil Ahmed
Founder and co-director of INTERPRT, a research agency that pursues environmental justice through spatial and visual investigations.
Sophia Al-Maria
Artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work envisions revisionist histories and alternative narratives about the future.
Isabel Quinzaños Alonso
Theater director, producer and Senior Program Officer for the Arts at the Doris Duke Foundation.
J. Bob Alotta
Radical philanthropist and nonprofit executive whose work shifts funding and power to the communities making digital technology more just.
Clemens Apprich
Professor of Media Theory and History at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Director of the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures and Vice-President for Research and Digitality.
Peter Born
Director, composer, and designer of performances, often in collaboration with artists David Thompson and Okwui Okpokwasili.
Sarah Brown
Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Tech:NYC, a network of tech leaders working to foster a dynamic, diverse, and creative New York.
Alice Bucknell
Artist, writer, and educator whose work focuses on speculative fiction strategies and the affective dimensions of game worlds.
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen
Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Paul Chan
Multidisciplinary artist whose work spans animation, video, drawing, writing, publishing, performance, and sculpture.
José Esparza Chong Cuy
Curator, writer, and Executive Director and Chief Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Aria Dean
Artist, writer, and filmmaker whose work investigates structures of race, power, and representational systems.
Jynne Dilling
Poet, and Vice President and Deputy Publisher at Riverhead Books.
Álvaro Enrigue
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer best known for his speculative fiction.
Dana Farouki
Curator and advocate of Middle Eastern artists and cultural initiatives.
Ashley Ferro-Murray
Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Foundation and curator and scholar of performing arts and technology.
Andrea Fraser
Artist whose work investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural fields, institutions, and groups.
Stefanie Hessler
Curator, writer, editor, and director of Swiss Institute.
Zoë Hitzig
Zoë Hitzig is a poet, economist and technologist who works on building algorithmic systems that protect human values.
Lily Hu
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University focusing on causal inference in social science and machine learning theory.
Tung-Hui Hu
Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and award-winning poet and scholar of digital media.
Angie Kim
President and CEO for the Center for Cultural Innovation, a knowledge and financial services incubator for artists.
Jaron Lanier
Computer scientist, artist, author, and musician known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality and writings on the social impact of technology.
Cannupa Hanska Luger
Multidisciplinary artist known for monumental works that communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity.
Aimé Iglesias Lukin
Art historian, curator, and Director and Chief Curator of Art at Americas Society.
Peter N. Miller
Historian and President of the American Academy in Rome
Okwui Okpokwasili
Artist, performer, choreographer, and writer known for multidisciplinary performances merging dance, theatre, and installation.
Philip Ording
Professor of Mathematics at Sarah Lawrence College and consultant in art and design studios throughout New York.
Samora Pinderhughes
Multidisciplinary artist, composer, and filmmaker, and Artistic and Executive Director of the Healing Project.
Nelly Y. Pinkrah
Scholar, writer, and political organizer based at the Technical University of Dresden focused on Black studies and the histories and politics of language and technology.
Lucy Raven
Artist whose multidisciplinary work explores infrastructural systems and the dynamics of changing material states.
Anil Seth
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and leading expert on perception and consciousness.
P. Staff
Interdisciplinary artist whose work across video installation, sculpture and poetry explores biopolitics, queer and trans theory, and disability.
Yancey Strickler
Writer, entrepreneur, and cofounder of Metalabel and Artist Corporations, whose work supports artists and creative people.
Martine Syms
Artist and filmmaker whose pioneering work with digital technologies combines humor with sharp social critique.
Sara Imari Walker
Author, astrobiologist, theoretical physicist, and Associate Professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
Jamieson Webster
Psychoanalyst, professor, and writer whose work combines psychoanalytic theory with philosophy, literature, film, and cultural criticism.
Brian Kuan Wood
Writer and founding editor of e-flux Journal, and teaches in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts.