ENTRAUSCHEN -
DeNoise
Art and Artificial Intelligence

In 2026 and 2027, the Goethe-Institut Brussels will highlight artistic discourses that develop alternative, resistant and emancipatory visions of the future on artificial intelligence.

ENTRAUSCHEN – DeNoise Graphic Design: Our Polite Society

About the project

Hardly anything has transformed our relationship with images as radically as digital technologies. Generative artificial intelligence is reshaping our understanding of images and our production of them in terms of truthfulness, fiction and authorship. It has provided us with new metaphors and aesthetics through which we decode the world and life.

Halfway through the digital revolution, we must recognise that crucial technological developments lie in the hands of a handful of tech billionaires, who are often associated with anti-democratic and neo-fascist tendencies. What narratives exist beyond these?

The programme title ‘DeNoise’ refers to the technical process of text-to-image AI, such as Stable Diffusion, which generates new images from chaotic noise through gradual removal - denoising. The title also calls for a clearer perspective on a complex situation. In 2026 and 2027, the Goethe-Institut Brussels will present artistic and intellectual discourses that contextualise these developments and tell of resistant and emancipatory futures.

How do artists help to demystify AI and empower us through AI literacy? We will examine the impact of this new medium on creative professionals and on our lives across three areas:

new artistic aesthetics
the impact on contemporary working conditions (for creative professionals and data workers)
the impact on the contemporary media ecosystem in relation to disinformation

We aim to shed light, from an imaginative and emancipatory perspective, on what AI has been so far and what it can become in the future.

As part of the programme series, three exciting projects are currently being developed together with Belgian and European partners such as iMAL – Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology, KIKK Le Pavillon, The Future of Living Festival, Biennale de l’Image Possible 2026, EUNIC Brussels, as well as in German-French cooperation (Alliance Française de Bruxelles-Europe with the cultural departments of the German and French Embassies in Belgium).

Participating artists and experts

The pseudo-marxist media guerilla Total Refusal is a collective of artists, researchers, and filmmakers who upcycle the resources of mainstream video games to create political narratives in the form of videos, interventions, performances, and lectures. The collective's themes are informed by critical game studies and social theory in an attempt to promote and popularize a counter-hegemonic left. Their work has been screened at over 400 film and art festivals and exhibited at various spaces. Since their foundation in 2018, Total Refusal have been awarded with more than 70 prizes and honorary mentions.

Total Refusal
Régine Debatty is a curator, art critic and the founder of the award-winning blog We Make Money Not Art. Since 2004, she has been writing and lecturing internationally about the way artists, hackers and designers use science and technology as a medium for critical discussion.

We make money not art