Jan 28 2026

Synthetic Legacies: Roundtable Discussion with Noam Segal, Shannon Mattern, and Sara O’ Keefe

Wed | 7PM

As part of the Synthetic Legacies series organized in collaboration with artist Davide Balula, SI presents Data Life, a conversation on legacy custodianship across living and computational entities. Curators Noam Segal and Sara O’Keefe and scholar Shannon Mattern join Davide Balula to examine the traces that collaborations with organic, mineral, and synthetic systems leave behind, and how those traces might persist, erode, or be rewritten over time.

“AI doesn’t remember the past; it fabricates the most probable versions of it. Those fabrications seep into catalogues, archives, feeds, and search results, quietly pre-editing art practices as they enter the record.

Probabilistic systems move faster than we can feel. It’s easy to trust them and grow addicted to the relief of letting them make decisions. The gain is speed. But the loss is a slow erosion of our cognitive capacity to sit with uncertainty, the unresolved turbulence that gives art its power. As these systems guess their way through redrawing the picture, how do we keep embodied interpretation from slipping out of the record?

Archives are metabolic systems, not repositories; they grow, they rot. In such environments, maintenance becomes a creative act. Stewardship may lie in preserving ruptures and silences, human friction, irregularity, and intervals that keep an archive from flattening into a dataset or history from sliding into automated narratives.

If doubt is a productive form of knowledge, what happens when we outsource it to systems built to favor the consensus over the critical? What if history’s most consequential moments aren’t driven by probable patterns at all, but by outliers that tip the whole structure: the fault line that finally gives, the drop that breaks the surface tension?

Will we trust algorithms to settle these questions with us?”

– Davide Balula

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

A custom edible conceived by Balula will be served.

Dr. Noam Segal is the LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she leads the LG Guggenheim Art & Technology Initiative and chairs the LG Guggenheim Award jury. A curator, scholar, and academic, she has worked on major projects including the Aurora Biennial (2020), the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), FRONT International (2022), and the 15th Gwangju Biennale Symposium (2024). Formerly Director of Curatorial Research at SVA’s Curatorial Studies MA program, she has held visiting positions at NYU and VCU. Her recent publications include work for Pompeii Commitment, Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems 2024, e-flux Film, and Phaidon’s CryptoPunks book.

Sara O’Keeffe is a curator based in New York and is cofounder of the Pippa Garner Foundation with Fiona Alison Duncan and Christopher Schwartz. Since 2022, she has been Senior Curator at Art Omi, where she curated Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF (2023), Garner’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York and edited its accompanying catalogue, copublished by Art Omi and Pioneer Works Press. She previously held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum and New Museum, where she co-curated Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (with Johanna Burton and Natalie Bell), was on the curatorial team for the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience (with Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin), and has curated projects with Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Sable Elyse Smith, Morgan Bassichis, and Nathan Young, among others.

Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held tenured full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of four books and the (co-)editor of four collections about media architecture, urban technology, knowledge infrastructures, and maps. She was the 2025 Kluge Chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress.

Davide Balula is an artist and animal trainer based in New York.  His work is often developed in collaboration with algae, fungi, A.I. systems, fire, chefs or dancers, merging both organic and synthetic ecologies. Since 2018, he has trained various A.I. surrogates in collaboration with philosophers, artists, critics, and poets. He is a co-founder and active participant in various community-based environmental initiatives, and also edits the online poetry publication Viseu.Us.

Image: Davide Balula, Synthetic Legacies: Data Bloom Cycle (Ginkgo Nutmeat), 2025.