What goes on in the kitchen of creative AI?: A conversation

How does one cook an AI?

What happens in the kitchen when one is preparing ingredients for different kinds of agencies?

What does it mean to move beyond instrumentalism; and what does an interaction look like when its design comes from a place of joy, curiosity, and experimentation?

We invite the Montreal community of creatives and thinkers who are interested in questions of machine agency, design process, and interactivity to join in on this event where they can share the details and experiences of working with machines—in their wonky, restless, and still delicious encounters.

This event is presented as part of Hexagram Network’s 2026 Interdisciplinary Encounters.

Schedule:

2 PM: The first part takes inspiration from MFK Fisher’s The Art of Eating to explore how cooking with machines engenders life worlds with heterogeneous agencies and sociability.

4 PM: The second part will be a Keynote presentation by Montreal-based artist Erin Gee.

Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of the “raw” and the “cooked,” and its feminist reinterpretation in sound studies by Jonathan Sterne and Tara Rodgers, Gee examines AI through a sonic lens to argue that when real-world phenomena are recorded as sound or data, they are never captured in a “raw” state. Grounded in her work on the documentation of musical biofeedback systems, the talk explores how processes of capture, selection, and transformation shape what can be heard and what can be known through technology. She contrasts musical AI systems, which tend to obscure or abstract these operations, with classic biofeedback practices that foregrounded them—revealing how different technologies organize, conceal, or expose their own forms of “cooking.”

After the Event:

Please join us at 5:30 p.m. for the official launch event of the Interdisciplinary Encounters.