17 Feb 2026 6 min read

Call of the Void, trying new things, prototyping, artists' working capital

The Call of the Void is a phenomenon in which a person experiences a sudden, intrusive urge to do something dangerous or destructive, such as jumping off a cliff. This intrusive urge vanishes as quickly as it appears.

This post has been cross-posted on my LinkedIn. If you feel like I'm trying to sell things—I am.

I finally had time to reflect on the first iteration of Call of the Void, which grew out of a project I haven’t been able to close for years—on AI, ecology, and the accelerating race to the bottom we’re all participating in. The focus isn’t on using the tools. Most media artists out there do better with these tools than I do. It's philosophical, aimed at reorienting our actions when these tools are no longer the same as the noodle hands in 2023, and the gap to negotiate safety has shrunk considerably over the years. It is also poetic, as I want the underlying aesthetic to be rooted in the idea that art can be a vessel for discussions about the less hopeful side of technology during a time of uncertainty.

What changed with Call of the Void for UKAI Projects was that it broke the usual pattern of ideation, grant application, a 5–8-month wait, and letting a jury decide whether the program would proceed. We were able to offer the small-group program because participants were willing to invest in it up front. The raised stake created a different dynamic. Participation was more lively than in lower-cost programs in the past or instances where participants were paid a stipend. We completed a successful work trade in which the program fees were 100% covered by producing a weekly digest to bridge the sessions for participants. In a more optimistic light, validation from Call of the Void bolstered confidence in rolling a small amount of "seed money" into a new experiment without first applying for a grant, without waiting for certainty.

Of the total income, approximately 10% went to running ads, another roughly 10% to various platform fees, and 15% was set aside to cover the promotional costs of attracting a new cohort. The remaining amount, which would have been my facilitator fee, I’ve decided to roll into the new UKAI General Store (we will talk about prototyping a framework for artists’ working capital, based on diasporic/immigrant family networks, in a future post) as the starting fund for the time being, about $500 and change. The facilitator fee is considerably lower than it would have been if we had received a grant, but it is a fair trade-off for moving swiftly with an experiment and bypassing the gruesome feat of grantwriting.

To put it more bluntly, UKAI receives no operational funding, and everyone who now represents this name works gig to gig. If you want to see experimental projects in the arts produced and led by independent artists, the most direct ways to keep our lights on are to work with us on co-productions, join our programs, and, in due time, buy from our store.

To not derail the topic, let’s go back to Artificial Intelligence. I still use AI tools. They fill different roles in my workflow and are partly why a small organization like UKAI can do more with less. More broadly, many arts administrators use them to boost productivity in roughly the same way. The alternative would be to secure funding to pay another person, which, in this funding landscape, would require either a miracle, a considerable donation, or a persistent endowment—luxuries we don’t have. It is between using ChatGPT and quietly doing the invisible labour no one wants to do.

There are still things I stubbornly refuse to delegate to a bot. But I know that window is closing. Every time we reach what feels like the bottom, another trapdoor opens, and a deeper one awaits.

The problem with AI is no longer technical. It’s not even primarily ethical. There is barely a choice left. Even companies branding themselves as “responsible” operate on the same infrastructure. The term “NVIDIA-state” sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. When corporations control compute, energy, distribution, and narrative, they function less like companies and more like soft states.

Arguing about whether artists should use AI or about what adoption of such tools can do for our productivity, in the face of a system-wide loss of vision for alternative futures, feels increasingly irrelevant.

"The illusion of consent greets me every time I enter a grocery store." — digest from the January cohort of Call of the Void by Deniz Yilmaz

The issue is not whether an individual should adopt AI tools. The role of imagining futures has shifted. Artists once proposed new conditions of living. Now corporations prototype them first, and we adapt (poorly). Human labour becomes a service tier. Art becomes something you do when you receive funding. If the condition is that artists are becoming either coin-operated content factories or opportunistic micro-entrepreneurs, then no labour is cheaper than a machine that doesn’t need food or shelter. Efficiency and productivity are only temporarily beneficial. We are still in this race to the bottom for cheaper art, cheaper fun, and cheaper language that no longer mean anything.

This realization partly inspired Goblin Market as a rehearsal space for economic imagination. If the race to the bottom reduces value to efficiency, scale, and speed, Goblin Market experiments with slowness, barter, mentorship, and embodied exchange. What if artists designed the marketplace instead of optimizing ourselves for it? Each iteration is a small step toward finding new ways. It is small. It is awkward. It is financially inefficient. It forces cooperation and communication. When arts funding has become a contest to see who can beg louder, what we need is not more subsidies.

Similarly, Intelligent Terrain was never about “AI and ecological art” as a trend. It emerged from a more uncomfortable question: what happens when algorithmic systems mediate our relationship to land, ecology, time, and each other? Being informed about climate collapse is different from being directly affected by its consequences. Ecologist Yuvan Aves noted that, in cataloguing the vocabulary of land in Tamil, with over 40 distinct words describing the different states “land” can be in, none refers to waste. The idea of a wasteland or an unproductive property was introduced by the British and etched into colonial law. Reframing the idea of waste is increasingly relevant in the culture of hyperproductivity enabled by the speed at which AI can produce more and more refined outcomes—to what end?

Surveying the narratives surrounding AI, we find a messy landscape of positions often falling on the familiar spectrum between fear-mongering and romanticizing.— digest from the January cohort of Call of the Void by Deniz Yilmaz

Running these programs is extremely resource-intensive, and when the payout is minimal, it’s easy to dismiss the work as a waste of energy and time. It was fine when nobody made any money, and it was okay when everyone could draw from an abundant source. But constantly scraping by with just enough, while knowing that industry rates are generally much higher than what’s permissible under grant funding, breeds resentment. That’s a quieter danger than artists using AI to write grants. The art sector itself made the arts cheaper through its own culture of squeezing every dime and everyone involved. All while Canadian industry leaders and prestigious organizations gather by closed invitation to discuss AI in culture, with little crossover to the lived reality of working artists and producers. This determines the kind of future we will eventually get, in the sector, and broadly in everyday life as AI continues to proliferate.

AI is already front and centre in many of the apps we use and is already built into our daily lives—is consent still possible?— digest from the January cohort of Call of the Void by Deniz Yilmaz

Arts and culture cut across society more broadly than most sectors. They are powerful arenas for reshaping social dynamics. Authoritarian regimes have always acted on this opportunity. In 1930s Italy, cultural production—from fashion to media to the Venice Biennale—was shaped as a state infrastructure under the fascist regime. Today, AI companies wrap themselves in the language of creativity. The incentive of instant output in language, image, and music aligns their products with our longing for expression and our fear of irrelevance.

What we risk is our collective ability to negotiate even a small choice.

When a city parking meter disappears and is replaced by an app requiring preloaded funds, a credit card, and an account, you comply. It’s only $20, and it’s not a big hassle. Besides, who could you have talked to when the decision was made before you even noticed?

You could track city procurement. You could intervene. But as an individual, how many of these infrastructural decisions can you realistically follow?

The diminishing room for negotiation—in culture, in infrastructure, and in what safety looks like when it feels like we have no more choice left—is the premise of Call of the Void. AI is part of it. Navigating it requires clarity, reorientation, and the willingness to build small infrastructures as larger ones close in.