Call & Response: Wilding AI (Beth Coleman & Debashis Sinha)

Presented by the Goethe-Institut Toronto
Part of the CONTACT Photography Festival

Call & Response <> is the Goethe-Institut Toronto's newly framed series of contextualising events and gatherings illuminating our core programming questions.

Toronto Wilding AI members and collaborators Beth Coleman and Debashis Sinha are sharing their thoughts on tech disruption with audiences through a participatory "exhibition walk" through Frankfurt photographer Lilly Lulay's CONTACT Photography Festival exhibition at the Goethe Space.

Wilding AI is an international nomadic and polymorphic research-creation lab. It questions the current domestication of artificial intelligence into predefined operational modes, aiming instead to foster new avenues for creative expression, particularly in spatial audio. As a collective of artist-researchers, WAI rejects the commodification of technology. Instead, they engage with it poetically and experimentally by (mis)using, hijacking, or outright breaking machine-learning media generators to explore new forms of human-machine collaboration. Wilding AI were accepted into the Goethe-Institut's global Co-Production Fund in 2024 to work from Berlin to Amsterdam and further afield.

Dr. Beth Coleman is an artist and research scientist working across text, sound, and visuality with a generative aesthetic. Her work explores technology, aesthetics, and formulations of power and agency. Coleman has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Pioneer Works, and Centre International des Récollets Paris. She is an associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, is the director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute,  and holds a graduate faculty appointment at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

Debashis Sinha is an artist and researcher whose speculative mythology-driven sound practice spans collaborative and solo projects internationally. His work entangles sonic arts, storytelling, machine learning, and cultural transmission, presented at venues like MUTEK Montreal, Mexico and Tokyo, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, and Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Art. A mainstay in Canadian theatre for over two decades, he has received multiple Dora Awards and is a 2024 Siminovitch Prize finalist. He is an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Contextualising program:
Soft Errors, Hard Truths
Opening Reception with artist Lilly Lulay
Collective Cuts
Call & Response: Vedran Dzebic on Design, Creativity & Empathic AI
Call & Response <> Mark Campbell

Part of the program (re)Open Minds: Adapting to the Future 2026
Presented by the Goethe-Institut Toronto
Curated by Jutta Brendemühl & Sanjay Khanna
Under the auspices of Prof. Gesche Joost, President of the Goethe-Institut
 

Related links:
Wilding AI
Wilding AI - Towards an Undercommons for Sonic AI Futures - Goethe-Institut
Beth Coleman
Debashis Sinha – radical sonic futures
Lilly Lulay
CONTACT