WAIT (Workshop for AI Troubles)

The New School
2 West 13th Street
Room 906
New York, NY

WAIT (Workshop on AI Trouble) is a monthly, cross-disciplinary work-in-progress series that convenes graduate students and faculty from across The New School to share and discuss emerging research and creative practice engaging artificial intelligence. Each session features one or two presenters (typically a faculty member and a graduate student) who circulate work in advance, ranging from academic papers, proposals, and dissertation chapters to films, artworks, sound pieces, performances, code-based projects, and other multimodal experiments. Participants are expected to arrive having read, viewed, or listened to the materials, making each gathering a space for substantive, sustained exchange.

Importantly, the term “Trouble” signals not opposition to artificial intelligence, but a critical and generative orientation toward it. We use it as a verb. To “trouble” AI is to slow it down, puzzle through it, and creatively unsettle its assumptions, which includes examining its social, political, aesthetic, technical, and ethical dimensions. The series welcomes projects that analyze AI systems, interrogate their cultural impact, experiment with them as artistic collaborators, rethink their design, or speculate on alternative futures. By bringing together perspectives from across design, social research, the humanities, the performing arts, media, policy, technology, and beyond, WAIT cultivates a shared vocabulary for engaging with AI as both a tool and a terrain of inquiry.

All graduate students and faculty across The New School are invited to participate, whether as presenters or engaged attendees. The workshop is intentionally inclusive of varied levels of familiarity with AI, from technical practitioners to critical theorists to creative experimenters. WAIT aims to foster a collaborative environment where ideas are tested in progress, feedback is thoughtful and constructive, and collective inquiry expands what AI can mean and become, within research, teaching, and creative practice.

March 12, 2026
12-1:30 PM

Sareeta Amrute

Presenting theses on AI, labor, and power.

Koray Caliskan

Co-presenting with Seniha Koksal and Burak Arikan Us on autonomous AI agents and art economies.

Lizabeth Dijkstra

Presenting a work-in-progress paper on the notion of semantic responsibility in the context of LLMs. I will argue why the inherent lack of normativity and self-regulation in LLMs is a moral problem, and will critically discuss the two philosophical accounts that centralize this concern.

Selected Works

F(r)ictions SymposiumCoalition

AI ReaderResearch

AI + Creative FrictionResearch

Creative AI MagnifierExperimentation

We investigate how AI transforms the conditions, politics, and value of creative work.