Wesley Goatley
@wesleygoatley.bsky.social
Critical artist + researcher. Analysing AI's impact on climate, art, and technopolitics. PhD in critical tech & art. Programme Director of Interaction Design and Visual Communication at University of the Arts London. http://lnk.bio/wesleygoatley
Some upcoming winter talks in Berlin, Cambridge, and Amsterdam this month:
November 13, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Some upcoming winter talks in Berlin, Cambridge, and Amsterdam this month:
The evening of the September 20th will feature a performance of my short film FIVE ECHOES, featuring a live score of dissected and recomposed AI assistant voices. Details here: luga.lu/en/experienc...
September 15, 2025 at 8:37 PM
The evening of the September 20th will feature a performance of my short film FIVE ECHOES, featuring a live score of dissected and recomposed AI assistant voices. Details here: luga.lu/en/experienc...
This weekend my next work opens in Luxembourg: PLACE ECHOES, five sound sculptures made from 50 discarded smart speakers and half a tonne of soil. Each sculpture features voices from the speakers reading short eco-socio-technical fiction about near futures with and without this consumer trash.
September 15, 2025 at 8:33 PM
This weekend my next work opens in Luxembourg: PLACE ECHOES, five sound sculptures made from 50 discarded smart speakers and half a tonne of soil. Each sculpture features voices from the speakers reading short eco-socio-technical fiction about near futures with and without this consumer trash.
The third is The Hope, which asks the question 'What if we thought of AI not as Artificial Intelligence but as Assistive Interface instead? What would this change mean for pur expectations of the tech, what it should do, who it should serve?
August 25, 2025 at 11:30 AM
The third is The Hope, which asks the question 'What if we thought of AI not as Artificial Intelligence but as Assistive Interface instead? What would this change mean for pur expectations of the tech, what it should do, who it should serve?
The second is The Horizon, which asks the question 'What if the current age of computational abundance comes to an end, and a lone engineer attempted to build a low powered AI assistant out of the scraps of the failed AI-age?'
August 25, 2025 at 11:26 AM
The second is The Horizon, which asks the question 'What if the current age of computational abundance comes to an end, and a lone engineer attempted to build a low powered AI assistant out of the scraps of the failed AI-age?'
The first of the three fully interactive devices is The Harbinger, which asks the question 'What if Palantir deepened their relationship with the NHS to "solve" it's crises by creating and deploying a medical smart assistant to replace GPs and "automate care"?'
August 25, 2025 at 11:24 AM
The first of the three fully interactive devices is The Harbinger, which asks the question 'What if Palantir deepened their relationship with the NHS to "solve" it's crises by creating and deploying a medical smart assistant to replace GPs and "automate care"?'
My new installation A Harbinger, A Horizon, and A Hope: Three Heralds of Possible AI Futures is now open at Inspace Gallery in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Festival.
It's three interactive devices each showing a glimpse at a different future for individuals and communities and their relation to AI.
It's three interactive devices each showing a glimpse at a different future for individuals and communities and their relation to AI.
August 25, 2025 at 11:21 AM
My new installation A Harbinger, A Horizon, and A Hope: Three Heralds of Possible AI Futures is now open at Inspace Gallery in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Festival.
It's three interactive devices each showing a glimpse at a different future for individuals and communities and their relation to AI.
It's three interactive devices each showing a glimpse at a different future for individuals and communities and their relation to AI.
10 days after this, Keir Starmer announced a drive to 'increase efficiency' in the NHS through, amongst other things, recommending that GPs use AI systems to transcribe their speech and notes.
July 5, 2025 at 1:18 PM
10 days after this, Keir Starmer announced a drive to 'increase efficiency' in the NHS through, amongst other things, recommending that GPs use AI systems to transcribe their speech and notes.
It's a desktop device and voice interface that listens to all patient & GP conversations, sends the info to a Palantir data center, and then returns a 'smart, AI-powered' diagnosis, without the opinion of the GP, whose only role now is to inspect the patient and report their findings to the system.
July 5, 2025 at 1:18 PM
It's a desktop device and voice interface that listens to all patient & GP conversations, sends the info to a Palantir data center, and then returns a 'smart, AI-powered' diagnosis, without the opinion of the GP, whose only role now is to inspect the patient and report their findings to the system.
This is The Harbinger, a new installation posting the question: what if Palantir continued and deepened their relationship with the NHS, and made their technology the center of a new era of 'automated care'? It's an 'AI GPs Assistant', deployed to every GP surgery in the UK.
July 5, 2025 at 1:18 PM
This is The Harbinger, a new installation posting the question: what if Palantir continued and deepened their relationship with the NHS, and made their technology the center of a new era of 'automated care'? It's an 'AI GPs Assistant', deployed to every GP surgery in the UK.
10 days after this, Keir Starmer announced a drive to 'increase efficiency' in the NHS through, amongst other things, recommending that GPs use AI systems to transcribe their speech and notes.
July 5, 2025 at 1:18 PM
10 days after this, Keir Starmer announced a drive to 'increase efficiency' in the NHS through, amongst other things, recommending that GPs use AI systems to transcribe their speech and notes.
It's a desktop device and voice interface that listens to all patient & GP conversations, sends the info to a Palantir data center, and then returns a 'smart, AI-powered' diagnosis, without the opinion of the GP, whose only role now is to inspect the patient and report their findings to the system.
July 5, 2025 at 1:18 PM
It's a desktop device and voice interface that listens to all patient & GP conversations, sends the info to a Palantir data center, and then returns a 'smart, AI-powered' diagnosis, without the opinion of the GP, whose only role now is to inspect the patient and report their findings to the system.
This is The Harbinger, a new installation posting the question: what if Palantir continued and deepened their relationship with the NHS, and made their technology the center of a new era of 'automated care'? It's an 'AI GPs Assistant', deployed to every GP surgery in the UK.
July 5, 2025 at 1:18 PM
This is The Harbinger, a new installation posting the question: what if Palantir continued and deepened their relationship with the NHS, and made their technology the center of a new era of 'automated care'? It's an 'AI GPs Assistant', deployed to every GP surgery in the UK.
I specifically wanted to expose the connections between spurious AI use and academic institutions who want to reduce their carbon footprint, and the frequent incompatibility of this. Which included critiquing AI art that pretends to care about Nature.
May 1, 2025 at 2:41 PM
I specifically wanted to expose the connections between spurious AI use and academic institutions who want to reduce their carbon footprint, and the frequent incompatibility of this. Which included critiquing AI art that pretends to care about Nature.
I gave some hostile examples from other practices as well as proposotional ones from my own practice of what an anti-capitalist AI art can look like, including some new work coming later this year. I believe there's a recording of the talk coming down the pipeline soon.
April 30, 2025 at 5:07 PM
I gave some hostile examples from other practices as well as proposotional ones from my own practice of what an anti-capitalist AI art can look like, including some new work coming later this year. I believe there's a recording of the talk coming down the pipeline soon.
My talk last night at the Edinburgh Futures Institute for the Doing AI Differently salon was about 'Doing AI Art Differently' , specifically why we should want to counter the normative practices that mislead audiences into believing techno-capitalism's favourite myth of machine intelligence.
April 30, 2025 at 5:06 PM
My talk last night at the Edinburgh Futures Institute for the Doing AI Differently salon was about 'Doing AI Art Differently' , specifically why we should want to counter the normative practices that mislead audiences into believing techno-capitalism's favourite myth of machine intelligence.
My latest substack is called I Don't Want OpenAI to Support The Arts, I Want Them To Stay The Fuck Away From It', which was a mini essay I wrote to support a group of artists who rejected OpenAI's offer of free access to the Sora tool in exchange for endorsements. Link to the full post is in my bio.
December 19, 2024 at 6:46 PM
My latest substack is called I Don't Want OpenAI to Support The Arts, I Want Them To Stay The Fuck Away From It', which was a mini essay I wrote to support a group of artists who rejected OpenAI's offer of free access to the Sora tool in exchange for endorsements. Link to the full post is in my bio.
Doing some new work on where art practice can meaningfully probe into hidden systems, thinking back to Echo REIGN, a project I made in 2018 proposing what Amazon's work in making voice assistants for the US military might look like (shown at Glassroom San Francisco for Tactical Tech)
November 17, 2024 at 12:12 PM
Doing some new work on where art practice can meaningfully probe into hidden systems, thinking back to Echo REIGN, a project I made in 2018 proposing what Amazon's work in making voice assistants for the US military might look like (shown at Glassroom San Francisco for Tactical Tech)
In the studio today, developing a new series of works memorialising the de-valued and discarded artifacts of extractive capitalism.
November 16, 2024 at 4:31 PM
In the studio today, developing a new series of works memorialising the de-valued and discarded artifacts of extractive capitalism.
My recent talk 'DEMAND NO AUTOMATION', about the trends in AI art and design that reinforce the worst narratives of AI techno-capitalism and how we can make art that rejects these poisonous myths, can be watched in full here:
www.youtube.com/live/NHLXmEY...
www.youtube.com/live/NHLXmEY...
November 13, 2024 at 5:02 PM
My recent talk 'DEMAND NO AUTOMATION', about the trends in AI art and design that reinforce the worst narratives of AI techno-capitalism and how we can make art that rejects these poisonous myths, can be watched in full here:
www.youtube.com/live/NHLXmEY...
www.youtube.com/live/NHLXmEY...
Some of these stories are futures we might want, and some are futures we should work to avoid. None of the stories involve thinking machines or self aware computers, and all of them talk about human hopes, anxities, frustrations and agency. wesleygoatley.bandcamp.com/album/newly-...
October 25, 2024 at 2:15 PM
Some of these stories are futures we might want, and some are futures we should work to avoid. None of the stories involve thinking machines or self aware computers, and all of them talk about human hopes, anxities, frustrations and agency. wesleygoatley.bandcamp.com/album/newly-...
Each story is told by a different AI voice assistant, and soundtracked by a score composed from the voices themselves, which have been deconstructed and recomposed into new forms that highlight the dis-human nature of the synthetic voice.
October 25, 2024 at 2:13 PM
Each story is told by a different AI voice assistant, and soundtracked by a score composed from the voices themselves, which have been deconstructed and recomposed into new forms that highlight the dis-human nature of the synthetic voice.
My new album/audiobook has just been released, titled Newly Forgotten Technologies: Stories From AI-Free Futures. It's a collection of audio fiction about different near-futures where we might abandon, ban, ignore or forget AI, and the worlds this might make possible.
October 25, 2024 at 2:12 PM
My new album/audiobook has just been released, titled Newly Forgotten Technologies: Stories From AI-Free Futures. It's a collection of audio fiction about different near-futures where we might abandon, ban, ignore or forget AI, and the worlds this might make possible.
New substack post:
#4: Against Automation
Discussing the myth of automation in image generation, and what a critical use of these tools can be that rejects automation entirely.
As with all my substack posts, it includes a speculative sonic fiction on AI culture. http://wesleygoatley.substack.com
#4: Against Automation
Discussing the myth of automation in image generation, and what a critical use of these tools can be that rejects automation entirely.
As with all my substack posts, it includes a speculative sonic fiction on AI culture. http://wesleygoatley.substack.com
August 5, 2023 at 9:01 AM
New substack post:
#4: Against Automation
Discussing the myth of automation in image generation, and what a critical use of these tools can be that rejects automation entirely.
As with all my substack posts, it includes a speculative sonic fiction on AI culture. http://wesleygoatley.substack.com
#4: Against Automation
Discussing the myth of automation in image generation, and what a critical use of these tools can be that rejects automation entirely.
As with all my substack posts, it includes a speculative sonic fiction on AI culture. http://wesleygoatley.substack.com