The Only Lasting Truth is Change is a symposium by BEK, investigating how artistic practice and its methodologies are constantly changing in response to the shifting political, technological and ecological landscapes we live in. For the 2023 edition, the symposium engages notions of Hallucinating, Computing and Collapsing to examine how different perceptions of reality arise and collide in our steadily more automated world.

With contributions from: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, N. Katherine Hayles, Jennifer Gabrys, Haig Aivazian, Jenna Sutela, Damien Roach, patten, Ibiye Camp, Michele Elam, Tung-Hui Hu, Suzanne Kite, Bahar Noorizadeh, Klara Kofen, Magnhild Øen Nordahl, Gabriele de Seta, Nora Al-Badri, Lesia Vasylchenko, and Critical Craft Collective.

We take as our starting point the multiple readings of “hallucination” – from the perception of something that is not really there, to a terminology of glitches within large language models, and to a description of a clash between different epistemologies. We will look for the various intersections between the artificial and the real – between large scale statistics and local knowledge. Can complex experiences and more-than-human entities fit into datasets? How do forests perform computational functions? How can data be decolonized and standardising forces pushed back?

With talks, performances, workshops and immersive experiences, join us in asking – whether more-than-human, industrialised or automated – whose hallucination are we living within?