Eyebeam’s next residencies ask what AI leaves us to decide

The first deadline is this Sunday. Eyebeam's open call for its AGENCY residencies closes the virtual round on Oct. 11 at 11:59 p.m. ET: six US-based artists outside New York, $2,000 each, 12 weeks online from Nov. 4 to Feb. 12 at three to four hours a week. The New York round runs on its own clock, with applications due Nov. 15 for six NYC artists at $5,000 each, in residence March 15 to June 11. Individuals only, no application fee, and the call is explicit that projects do not need to use AI at all.

As software starts acting, deciding, and carrying out tasks on our behalf, Eyebeam is asking: "How do we preserve human agency as these systems become more capable of shaping human behavior?" The brief pushes past the individual too, framing agency as collective, relational, entangled, and more-than-human. That is a research agenda, not a residency garnish.

What put it on my radar was Nora N. Khan's announcement post, which is really a short memoir: fired from a Boston research job in 2016 for writing on company hours, the critic applied to Eyebeam the same week and moved the whole operation to Sunset Park. "Eyebeam took a chance on me when I was writing weird essays on sound in games and the language we use about the future, written for no one in particular." A decade later, that bet looks obvious (at least to us!). It did not look obvious then, which is the point of a residency.

Killscreen has been watching this institution since at least 2012, back when Eyebeam was hunting for a bigger building. Now helmed by Julia Kaganskiy, who we collaborated with for the groundbreaking Versions conference on arts in virtual reality, the residency's through-line holds: when an art-and-technology organization sets its brief, the people writing and building strangely about games should read it as addressed to them.