Eryk Salvaggio

Eryk Salvaggio:
AI researcher, writer, and Artist Examining how generative AI shapes culture.

I am a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge exploring artificial intelligence, ideology and culture through traditional methods of research that shapes and is shaped by a critical creative practice. My work connects technical architectures, archives, and the ideologies embedded into technology that manifests across text, image and sound in generative AI, particularly large language models and latent diffusion models.

In addition to my artistic work and video essays, I have published in Patterns, Critical AI, Leonardo, Images, with book chapters and publications in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Tech Policy Press, and Interactions of the ACM.

My work has been mentioned in The Atlantic, Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the BBC, among others. A full list of invited talks can be found in my CV.

In 2025 I was named a Gates Scholar for PhD research into Critical AI and the Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, UK. I am an affiliated researcher with the Max Planck Institute’s Machine Visual Culture Research Group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, part of the Critical Digital Theory Lab at NYU, and previously connected to the metaLab (at) Harvard. I was a 2024 Flickr Foundation Research Fellow and a 2025 writing fellow for Tech Policy Press, where my writing on tech’s social impacts is among the most often read and cited.

My creative practice engages with generative AI to engage critically with the technology I study. Human Movie (2025) is an award-winning film (sometimes presented as a performance). It premiered at the National Communication Museum, Melbourne, and has exhibited at Fotografiska Stockholm and the Jeu de Paume, Paris. I was a co-curator for the “Signal to Noise” exhibition at the National Communications Museum in Melbourne; which included SWIM (2024), which premiered at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and took home a prize from the CVPR conference, a gathering of computer vision researchers. Flowers Blooming Backward Into Noise (2023) has been shown internationally as a film and exhibited video art piece; notably it was performed with live score by Dublin Sound Lab and shown at the CCCB, Barcelona. Earlier work or talks have taken place at the New Museum, the Photographers' Gallery, the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the AI Village at DEFCON 31 and SXSW.