Call of the Void | January Program Digests
Reporting from the void
Journal entry #1 | January 17, 2026
Deniz Yilmaz
Today was our first session in the void. That webless space where the laws and conventions of everything you thought you knew start to dissolve. Everyone in the group carefully lowered themselves into the pit, which is neither up or down but somewhere in between, not knowing how strong their harnesses were or how far they could actually go. A sense of fear coupled with vague hope trailed behind us. Exchanging warm smiles and curious glances through the screens facilitating our conversation, in the face of something so large and disorienting, I was glad to be part of a team rather than alone.
The analogy of spelunking into the unknown is not particularly unique to this epoch of rapid technological change. History teaches us that something new emerging from the old is often accompanied by the messy violence of ruptures and sutures. Surveying the narratives surrounding AI, we find a messy landscape of positions often falling on the familiar spectrum between fear-mongering and romanticizing. While taking seriously claims of its ‘unprecedented’ danger, there is a pressing need to historicize AI and its clickbait-y narratives, situating them in centuries-old systems of human exploitation and the contemporary (and hopefully temporary) moment of hopelessness.
As we lowered ourselves further into the pit, there was a point where every cell in my body begged to climb back up the rope. A rippling sensation of self-preservation. Something uncanny and contrary to the world I came from was seething back at me. I would kill my digital self, I made a mental note in response, I would lay it to rest in a digital tombstone. But then what? Isn’t there always a trace left behind? Ashes once scattered, can rarely be retrieved.
At this time of constant surveillance and data harvesting, many of us are grappling with how visible we want to be—is it even possible to be opaque anymore? What are the benefits and costs of opacity? Of transparency? Whether it’s the personal decision to opt out of social media or to refuse legibility in other ways, the predicament is a collective one, which seems to rely on increasingly abstract and obfuscated technological expertise.
Questions of agency make me desperately want to tug on that rope. We have more questions than answers at this point. What does legibility matter when language is imperfect? What does it mean to build AI off the imperfect approximator of human language? What does it mean to use that language to command? What does commanding someone or something do to us? If fearmongering feeds the machine, how much are we allowed to be afraid anyway?
Amidst the confusion and doubt, there was some resemblance of clarity. A common concern, perhaps the most common concern, with one another and with each other’s wellbeing. We will have to keep exploring these depths together. I do not know where the laws—those familiar laws which teach a child why an apple falls and why we can’t ask for more than we’re given—will be suspended along the way. Today’s was a careful foray, something that resembled exploration, science, art, performance, and bed-making all at once.
Reporting from the void
Journal entry #2 | January 24, 2026
Deniz Yilmaz
Somewhere along the way, we take a quick pitstop at home. Each of us has a different place to go, and sometimes, home is barely a place at all. It’s a series of connections, displacements, searches, structures, movements, placeholders, songs, and stories.
Home can be intergenerational, both in its ability to root into place and in its ability to defy containment. It can be mutated into something unrecognizable—deemed “wasteland” or “excess” or “empty”, labels that assist in rendering a place ‘productive’ (or unproductive) by those forces which have the power to draw lots and build things where they wish.
Marking the boundary between inside and outside, here and there, safe and unsafe is a familiar task, however delusional it may be. Even in this tightly wound machine, I know there isn’t really a pure ‘inside’. We are leaky bodies after all, as described by Margrit Shildrick. Seeping, oozing, spurting, inhaling, consuming, evaporating. Permeability, ranging from the cellular to the structural level, is the empty space on which our social contracts are written. Decisions, agreements, and rules ripple from multiple nodes of power, upheld by a mixture of consent and coercion.
The illusion of consent greets me every time I enter a grocery store. Arguing with myself over which loaf of bread is better is an absurd reality when they’re all owned by the same food retailer. There are so many options, the free market mutates my need for nutrition into a cheap desire.
What do we really need?
How can you know if your needs and wants are manufactured?
Can you feel a collective need?
We’re told that AI is “needed” to be productive and competitive. Questions of consent loom heavy here. AI is already front and centre in many of the apps we use and is already built into our daily lives—is consent still possible? A politics of refusal seems inane, but at the same time, like a necessary protective membrane. I know the journey through the void is inevitable, and hear its hum through the walls of this place.
Home is a pitstop in permeability, a moment to reflect on “this body, this place, and these people”.
Reporting from the void
Journal entry #3 | January 31, 2026
Deniz Yilmaz
What is precious? What are you prepared to sacrifice?
These questions invoke a compass, map, or whatever one uses to navigate unfamiliar terrain. That thing, place or person which guides us on our journeys. There’s diverging opinions on what is “precious”, not only in terms of what is precious to each person, but regarding the definition of the concept itself. It’s difficult to parse out whether “precious” involves guardianship or ownership. Comedic images of Gollam come to mind, crouched in his cave trapped by the thing he wants most. The precious is carried, cherished, and longed for. But must we own something for it to be precious?
Ranging from personal autonomy and health to collective self-determination, the spectre of free will haunts the group’s reflection on the precious. Do we choose what is precious or does it exert an uncontrollable pull on us? There’s both enchantment and disenchantment with individual choice, and looming in the distance is the question of whether one can really choose how to live. Unsaid is how the machine chooses who gets to die and how, reminiscent of Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism.
Value systems can diverge while preserving a longing, perhaps desperation, to work together. Agreement is possible only where humility marks a path. How necessary does it feel to say, I don’t know, leaving space for the unknown and the unknowable when certainty is too painful.
There’s an expressed desire for alternative AI mythologies, which seem increasingly relevant in the face of cultish narratives. A desire for mythology is also a desire for literacy, potentially by building new understanding, even new words. Not treating AI as a monolith requires specificity—calling it by its name like a magical incantation that bursts apparitions.
Right now our work may look more like building an index, a compendium of thoughts, feelings, divergences, and convergences. Transcription and translation will be needed, and reckoning with what we may give up when we choose one definition over another.
Upcoming Program:
At a moment when Artificial Intelligence saturates every part of life: work, creativity, story, and identity, Call of the Void offers a deep cultural reframing to reorient how we relate to it.
Call of the Void is for thinkers, artists, cultural workers, and professionals who want to explore technology not as a tool to continue driving endless exploitation, but as a cultural force we inhabit and interrogate.
Over the 4 sessions, we invite participants to:
Surface assumptions about technology, nature, and culture
Explore how culture and technology shape each other
Develop personal frameworks for ecological storytelling
Cultivate sincerity, relationality, and generosity over efficiency and extraction
Participants in Call of the Void will work towards:
A clearer sense of their personal and cultural relationship with Artificial Intelligence
Tools to articulate critical perspectives on technology’s ecological and social impact
A framework for meaningful, non-instrumental engagement with complex systems
A community of peers exploring similar questions
