Talks, Podcasts & Lectures

The Hypothetical Image: Reading the Artifacts of Generative AI (2025)

An invited talk at The Photographer’s Gallery, London. How might we "read" the media produced by generative artificial intelligence? Eryk Salvaggio ‪suggests we engage them as infographics: data visualisations of archives and datasets that strives for plausibility rather than expression or documentation. In a presentation blending artistic research into images, video, and sound, Salvaggio examines the ways artists can hijack the spectacle of AI to engage more critically with its politics and dangers of AI ordering the world on our behalf.

Signal to Noise: In Conversation with the Curators | National Communication Museum (NCM) 2025.

National Communication Museum (Melbourne) Artistic Director & Co-CEO Emily Siddons, in conversation with co-curators Eryk Salvaggio and Joel Stern, take you behind the scenes of Signal to Noise — a major new exhibition at the National Communication Museum (NCM). In an age where information is no longer scarce but overwhelming, Signal to Noise explores how artists respond to our technologically saturated world. From glitch aesthetics and machine listening, to reimagined historical tech and AI-generated sound, this exhibition spans decades of media, art, and radical thought. Discover how vintage radios, cloned voices, digital debris and woven data tapestries come together in this exhibition to explore the noisy, chaotic, and often beautiful ways we communicate.

The Age of Noise (2024).

Performance lecture for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia. An argument that Artificial Intelligence marks the end of the information age. The information age was about finding data. Now we live in an age where information is abundant - and we build technologies to sort through it on our behalf. What does that mean for those tasked with preserving information?

Glitching AI Systems (2024)

A practical artist’s talk the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed, Bristol, UK. This talk explores the role of noise in generative AI systems: Noise is required to make these systems work, but too much noise can make them unsteady. We discuss the technical and cultural noise of AI to critique assumptions about "humanity" that have informed the way they operate.

The Pervasive Media Studio is a partnership between the Watershed, University of the West of England and University of Bristol. The lunchtime talks are partly supported by MyWorld, a project led by the University of Bristol to support creative industries in the region. Watershed is supported by Arts Council England.

Creative Misuse of AI (2024)

As part of the Big Ideas in Art and Culture lecture series presented by Musagetes and CAFKA, artist and academic Eryk Salvaggio presented a talk titled “Creative Misuse of A.I.” at the Art Gallery of Guelph. Can you use A.I. to resist A.I.? In the video below, Eryk Salvaggio describes his engagement with A.I. from the perspective of “creative misuse,” pushing A.I. image and sound tools to move beyond often exploitative and incomplete datasets to critique surveillance capitalism. How can artists use and critique technology at the same time? How do we make sense of the messy entanglements between culture, surveillance, and labour at the heart of A.I.?

Screens, Machines & Dreams: AI is Imaginary (2023)

(Skip to 1m43s). Delivered for the Center for Digital Play at the University of Copenhagen in November 2023. (How can video game studies contribute to the field of generative AI? In this presentation, artist, researcher and RIT game design instructor Eryk Salvaggio connects ideas of play, art, interfaces and the imaginary to highlight AI as a cybernetic circuit: a magic circle co-created between the user and the machine. By shifting the lens of generative AI from productivity to play, Salvaggio proposes that we can expand the way we design, interact, and use AI with greater agency and reflexivity. Talk given at the Center for Digital Play (digitalplay.itu.dk), IT University of Copenhagen, in November 2023.

How to Read an AI Image (2023)

Delivered for Aarhus University in 2023. How might we "read" an AI image? What does it mean for these images to be "infographics about the dataset?" In this talk, Eryk Salvaggio links his artistic practice to generated media. Using straightforward, non-technical language to describe how AI diffusion models for images work, Salvaggio walks us through the maxim that "Generative AI is a process of constraining noise toward the central tendencies of assembled data, using bias to steer."

You can read the essay discussed in this lecture here.

Responsible Bytes Podcast with Zena Assaad — Unpacking AI Narratives: The Myth of Systems From Nowhere with Eryk Salvaggio (2026)

"The system from nowhere" is a way of talking about AI systems that excludes its origin as a consciously, human-designed product. It treats AI as if it were a spontaneously emerging force, but it is a reflection of where an observer draws the system’s boundary when they look at it. It’s also a rhetorical magic trick that makes both AI companies, labor and the underlying material infrastructure disappear. 

I discuss this concept with Dr. Zena Assaad of ANU.

Phantom Power with Mack Hagood — Are AI art and music really just noise?

In this episode of Phantom Power, host Mack Hagood dives into the world of AI-generated music and art with digital artist and theorist Eryk Salvaggio. The conversation explores technical and philosophical aspects of AI art, its impact on culture, and the 'age of noise' it has ushered in. AI dissolves sounds and images into literal noise, subsequently reversing the process to create new "hypothetical" sounds and images. The kinds of cultural specificities that archivists struggle to preserve are stripped away when we treat human culture as data in this way. 

Pondering AI with Kimberly Nevala — AI Myths and Mythos

Eryk joined Kimberly to discuss myths and metaphors in GenAI design; the illusion of control; if AI saves time and what for; not relying on futuristic AI to solve problems; the fallacy of scale; the dehumanizing narrative of human equivalence; positive biases toward AI; why asking ‘is the machine creative’ misses the mark; creative expression and meaning making; what AI generated art represents; distinguishing archives from datasets; curation as an act of care; representation and context in generated media; the Orwellian view of mass surveillance as anonymity; complicity and critique of GenAI tools; abstraction and noise; and what we aren’t doing when we use GenAI. 

Computer Says Maybe with Alix Dunn — “The Age of Noise” (2024)

This week, Alix interviewed Eryk Salvaggio, who shares his ideas around how we are moving away from ‘the age of information’ and into an age of noise, where we’ve progressed so far into a paradigm of easy and frictionless information sharing, that information has transformed into an overwhelming wall of noise.

Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani: Chat with Caroline Sinders & Eryk Salvaggio (2024)

What role do artists actually play in society? What about in the development of AI? It’s easy to speak in vague, grandiose terms about the power of art, but when do the actual actions, techniques, and interventions of artists amount to real-world impact? For this conversation, we discuss ARRG!, the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group, which has as its goal to explore the creative misuse of Generative AI, Machine Learning, and other automated data analysis systems.

Nobody is Always Watching You: From Big Brother to Big Data (2021)

Keynote for the New Commons Project, recorded at the University of Memphis in 2021. Addresses the links between Orwell’s “1984” and the regimes of machine learning and algorithmic surveillance.