2026 PNCA Symposium: Art, Aura & the Algorithm

Language artist Sasha Stiles explores poetry as a living technology shaped by memory, collaboration, and the tools we use to make meaning. Moving from oral tradition and writing to computation and generative AI, this participatory workshop invites students inside A LIVING POEM, Stiles’s generative artwork recently presented at MoMA in New York. Participants will contribute fragments of language and watch them evolve, recombine, and take on unexpected forms, exploring what happens when human and algorithmic imaginations meet inside the machine of poetry.

What happens to artistic presence when making becomes increasingly mediated by machines, networks, and systems of reproduction? And what might it mean to return to the immediacy of making by hand?

As part of Portland Textile Month and PNCA’s annual symposium, Art, Aura & the Algorithm, join us for an in-person, artist-led sewing circle exploring creativity, connection, and the value of making together.

This year’s symposium looks at “aura”, or artistic presence, in a world shaped by AI, digital reproduction, and algorithms—systems that increasingly influence what we see, choose, and create. In contrast, the sewing circle offers a space for a more immediate kind of creative experience: gathering around a table, sharing materials, learning from one another, and letting the process unfold.

Sewing is a practice rooted in exchange. A stitch can carry a memory, a technique can be passed from one person to another, and a shared pattern can become something entirely different in each maker’s hands. Through conversation, experimentation, and collaboration, the work takes shape collectively.

Within the sewing circle, there is no algorithm directing the outcome. Instead, we’ll create a space to embrace the slower pace of handwork, leaving room for mistakes, improvisation, and unexpected connections. The sewing circle invites us to consider what happens when creativity is rooted in physical presence and shared experience.

No sewing experience is necessary. Come as you are, bring your curiosity, and join us for an evening of making together.

Led by Isabella Saavedra, Tori Nickles & Art Gang

As artificial intelligence and platform-mediated algorithm saturated networks reshape artistic production and visual culture, “aura” perhaps undergoes a transformation rather than an obsolescence. This panel brings together theorists, curators, and interdisciplinary artists to examine how algorithmic systems alter our understanding of human agency, sacred iconography, and cultural value. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for human creativity, the participants interrogate the conditions under which computational tools operate, shift authority, and interact with established human frameworks of belief and social/political practice.

• Derek Barker-Ciganik
• Mark Burchick
• Christian Vittorio Maria Garavello
• Davangi Pathak
• Moderated by Vienna D’Angelo Patricio

*This panel will be presented virtually on PNCA's Youtube channel

More than just a technological development, artificial intelligence both questions and makes newly visible foundational assumptions about human agency, cultural production, and the future. Bringing together practicing artists and academics, this interdisciplinary panel considers AI as a site where questions of autonomy, authorship, and cultural power are being renegotiated. These presentations examine the possibility of artificial subjecthood, alongside the ways AI systems reproduce, appropriate, and transform existing cultural imaginaries. Together, they probe how AI complicates longstanding distinctions between human and machine agency while raising questions about whose knowledge, creativity, and vision of the future are most legible within emerging technological infrastructures.

• Robert Clarke
• Christopher Michlig
• Moderated by Sloane McNulty

What happens to the claim of art once the labor that created it becomes optional?

Is it possible for an iterative persona to contain and/or transmit an aura?

When reproduction is the aura-creating element within an art form, how will it conflict with copyright law?

Has authorship ever belonged to a single body?

BY WHOSE AUTHORITY? is a graduate student-led panel focused upon exploring themes surrounding the state of aura when such questions arise that challenge the authorship and authority of art in this age of AI. Panelists unpack and examine the complex web of authorship and authority through vehicles such as; war/conflict photography, algorithmic aesthetics of social media, necro-assemblage resurrection, and playing tabletop role-playing games.

• Ryan-Ashley Anderson
• Aminn Obermayer
• Brighid Schlenz
• Avital Meshi
• Moderated by Tori Nickles

Participants write the names of those who have passed away on white cards and hand them to artist Avital Meshi, seated as a medium at a candlelit table. Wearing a DIY AI device, she calls each name and speaks aloud the response generated in her earpiece. Rather than claiming to contact the dead, the piece stages questions of memory, presence, and authorship — drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of aura and Michel Foucault's notion of the author as function. The AI assembles a voice from public traces rather than retrieving a self, producing a presence that belongs to no one alone, but emerges between archive, algorithm, performer, and audience.

Information will be posted soon, please check back.