Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI

University of Siegen | 8–12 September 2025 | extended deadline for submision: 30 June 2025

Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI is an international event that will explore the cultural, political, and methodological dimensions of generative AI and synthetic media through a combination of conference talks, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects. Topics include deepfakes, avatars, cultural biases in training data, feminist and postcolonial critiques, and the aesthetics of AI-generated content.

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About | Program Highlights | Proposal Submission | Venue | Program | Contact

About the Autumn School

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and synthetic media has profoundly reshaped how culture is produced, made sense of, and experienced today. To ‘synthesize’ is to assemble, collate, and compile, blending heterogeneous components into something new. Where there is synthesis, there is power at play. Synthetic media—as exemplified by the oddly prophetic early speech synthesizer demos—carry the logic of analog automation into digital cultures where human and algorithmic interventions converge. Much of the research in this area—spanning subjects as diverse as augmented reality, avatars, and deepfakes—has revolved around ideas of simulation, focusing on the manipulation of data and content people produce and consume. Meanwhile, generative AI and deep learning models, while central to debates on artificiality, raise political questions as part of a wider social ecosystem where technology is perpetually reimagined, negotiated, and contested: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations? 

The five-day event at the University of Siegen—organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation and Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture—explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant. By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. Imaginaries, in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. 

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and collaborative projects. With multiple opportunities for exchange across disciplines, we encourage especially early-career researchers and PhD students to present their ideas during the conference and join a project led by international facilitators and data designers. We invite submissions of short abstracts (max. 500 words) for presentations engaging with questions and provocations related—but not limited—to topics such as: 

Critical data studies perspectives on AI: how data infrastructures, labeling, and curation shape the outputs we call “synthetic”; Cultural afterlives of training data: how racialized, gendered, or colonial imaginaries persist in synthetic media outputs; Methodological uses of GenAI: the politics that we buy in when repurposing AI as a method, from inherited bias to epistemic tensions; Synthetic personhood and likeness: exploring deepfakes, AI-generated avatars, and the power of (in)authenticity; Online cultures and platforms: how AI-generated content circulates across platforms—from memes and art to fan fiction, music, and poetry; Postcolonial and feminist critiques of AI: challenging universalist assumptions in generative models and interrogating whose knowledge is made (in)visible; Clichés, formulas, and repetition in GenAI outputs: how AI-generated stories and images rely on familiar tropes, visual styles, and narrative conventions; The aesthetics of noise in AI-generated content: repetition, glitch, randomness, and their role in producing or disrupting meaning; GPTs as infrastructural components: how generative pretrained transformers operate as configurable, customizable, and task-oriented agents embedded in platform infrastructures; Prompting and/as probing: prompting as a form of critical intervention, shaping co-authorship, sense-making, and research design; The ethics of training AI: from historical records and religious texts to indigenous cosmologies and oral traditions—what are the implications of using culturally sensitive knowledge to train generative models? Generative AI and Memory: synthetic media as a means of reimagining the past—through deepfake testimonies, interactive historical simulations, and other forms of computational memory-making; Generative AI in activist contexts: can AI be used for resistance or reimagining community—in the face of its environmental footprint and complicity in extractive systems? 

Program highlights

The event blends three complementary formats:

Mix questions!

Monday, 8 September

Day one begins with a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg and opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. Each presentation will be set to 10 minutes to allow ample time for discussion, collective thinking, and exchange. The emphasis is on dialogue, not polished conclusions.  

Mix methods!

Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September 

The next three days—featuring a workshop by Gabriele De Seta and an artistic intervention by Ángeles Briones and DensityDesign Lab—are about exploring new methods—hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—whether as content creator, noise generator, hallucinator, research collaborator, data annotator, or style imitator. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. 

Synthesize!

Friday, 12 September  

The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods.

Proposal Submission

Please submit your proposal (max. 500 words) outlining how your work aligns with the event’s theme by 30.06.2025, using this form. Please note that the number of participants will be limited to maintain focused and engaging discussions. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen. Limited travel support is available (two to three stipends ranging from €500 to €700). Early-career researchers and PhD students are invited to apply; stipends will be awarded by the NFDI4Culture consortium based on the strength of the justification, particularly concerning critical ethical engagement with AI research data, as well as the distance and cost of travel. Short summaries of the presented work will be published on the NFDI4Culture website.

A certificate of participation will be issued for both the conference presentation and the hands-on workshop sessions.

Updated Timeline with extended deadline:
Submit your proposal by 30 June 2025.
Notification of acceptance by July 15 2025.
Registration by August 1 2025.

Venue

Universität Siegen
Campus Herrengarten
AH-A 217/18
Herrengarten 3
57072 Siegen

Contact

Dr. Elena Pilipets
elena.pilipets[at]uni-siegen.de
ecreadigitalculture[æt]gmail.com

The Autumn School is organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers 1187 Media of Cooperation and 1472 Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture.

Wie „smart“ ist Ihr Zuhause?

Eine Forschungsstudie von Stephan Habscheid, Dagmar Hoffmann, Tim Hector, Niklas Strüver (alle Universität Siegen, SFB 1187)

Das Projektteam von B06 „Un-/erbetene Beobachtung in Interaktion“ sucht Teilnehmer*innen für ihre Forschungsstudie zu „Smart Homes“. Sie haben ein „Smart Home“ oder wollen sich bald erste Smart Home-Geräte anschaffen? Dann nehmen Sie an der Forschungsstudie teil!

→ Zur Website des Teilprojekts B06

Über die Studie

Wir wollen mehr über Ihren ‚smarten‘ Alltag erfahren. Um nähere Einblicke in den Alltag mit smarten Geräten zu erhalten, möchten wir Sie bei der Einrichtung und Nutzung Ihrer Smart Home-Geräte begleiten und auf Video aufzeichnen. Die Ergebnisse und Daten nutzen wir ausschließlich zu Forschungszwecken. Die gesammelten Daten werden nach höchsten datenschutzrechtlichen Standards vertraulich verarbeitet. Bei Veröffentlichungen wird auf eine strenge Anonymisierung bzw. Verfremdung der Teilnehmer*innen geachtet.

Für die Studie suchen wir

• Haushalte mit Smart Speaker, smarten Küchengeräten (z.B. ein Thermomix), vernetzter Elektronik (z.B. Glühbirnen, Thermostate, Türschlösser oder Steckdosen), digitalen Energiekontrollen für ein Solarpanel oder ähnlichen Geräten/Anwendungen
• Haushalte, die noch keine solchen Geräte einsetzen, aber die Anschaffung planen und uns bei der Einrichtung und Nutzung dessen mitnehmen möchten.

Bei einer Teilnahme bieten wir Ihnen eine Aufwandsentschädigung, die je nach Umfang der Teilnahme zwischen 30 und 180 Euro betragen kann.

Bei einer Teilnahme erwartet Sie:

• Die Video-Aufnahme der Nutzung von Smart Home-Geräten in bestimmten Situationen, z.B. beim Kochen und Spielen, bei alltäglichen Unterhaltungen oder bei Besuchen von Freunden und Bekannten.
• Wenn möglich die Video-Aufnahme der Ersteinrichtung von Smart Home-Geräten (Auspacken, Installation, Verbinden mit dem Smartphone und Platzierung in der Wohnung).
• Die Erfassung aller Smart Home-Anwendungen in Ihrer Wohnung sowie verschiedene Interviews mit Ihnen sowie mit anderen Haushaltsmitgliedern.
• Um die Verbindung zwischen dem Smart Home-Gerät und Ihrem Smartphone zu ermitteln soll außerdem in bestimmten Situationen ein Screen-Recording durchgeführt werden.

Kameras und Audio-Aufnahmegeräte werden von uns zur Verfügung gestellt.

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen: Alle Mitglieder Ihres Haushaltes müssen mindestens 16 Jahre alt sein.

Kontakt

Bei Fragen schreiben Sie gerne eine Mail an das Projektteam: ipa-studie[æt]uni-siegen.de.

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Co-Design Workshop on “Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic”

by Shadan Sadeghian (University of Siegen) and Md Akib Shahriar Khan (University of Siegen)

Are you interested in sharing your experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems? We seek participants for our user study on „Co-Design Workshop on Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Traffic“, led .

Central Information

Da️te: Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Time: 1.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Location: University of Siegen,  Kohlbettstraße 15, 57072 Siegen

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About the workshop

This Co-Design Workshop will explore how road users – pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and others – interact in semi-automated traffic environments. Through creative and interactive activities, participants can share their experiences, ideas, and perspectives on communication and collaboration in evolving traffic systems.

Who can participate?

How to apply?

To appreciate your time and contributions, participants will receive a compensation of €40. Spots are limited, so please register as soon as possible using the following link: ➞ register here. 

Selected participants will be contacted with further details.

“Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking”

organisiert von Julia Bee (Ruhr-Universität Bochumd) und der Arbeitsgruppe Research at Risk

Wie prägen Medien unser Verständnis der Klimakrise? Welche Rolle spielen sie für Aktivismus und politische Mobilisierung? Die Spring School „Media Climate Justice: Research, Skillsharing, Hacking“ lädt vom 11. bis 13. April 2025 in Bochum dazu ein, diese Fragen praxisnah zu diskutieren. Die Spring School bietet Workshops, Inputs und Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten für alle Interessierten aus Wissenschaft, Journalismus, Aktivismus und Kunst.

➞ Summer School Webseite

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