How can we trace a nonlinear, discontinuous genealogy of artificial intelligence—not as a singular technological evolution, but as multiple and queered histories shaped by cultural, political, and artistic interventions? Drawing from cyberfeminist strategies and DIY AI practices, among others, this theme interrogates the framing of AI as a neutral, inevitable outcome. Instead, it foregrounds alternative imaginaries: from local grassroots initiatives that reclaim agency in machine learning development to parallel connections between early internet subcultures and our current moment of AI acceleration, typified by uneven access to technology, linguistic and cultural diversity, labour precarity, and environmental harm. Through the metaphor of roots, rhizomes, and branching structures, this theme considers the anatomy of AI as a tangled assemblage of power, language, and affect. It asks: What would it mean to queer the history of AI—to see it as messy, performative, collaborative, and deeply embodied?

In the intersection of planetary ecological crisis and artificial intelligence advancement, trans-species care emerges as a challenging task. AI is often framed as either a solution or a threat. This theme invites a rethinking of AI through the lens of care—not as a soft supplement to rational systems, but as entangled, diffractive, and affectively charged. Under this theme, we ask: What might it mean to develop AI with, through, or even as care? We explore how care translates/trans-relates across species boundaries, computational infrastructures, human and nonhuman entanglements, and planetary disturbances. Through a diffractive methodology that highlights mutual interference, we challenge the extractive AI paradigm and imagine pluriversal AI attuned to trans-relationality, vulnerability, and co-becoming. We cannot envision AI as a universal technology without addressing the planetary exploitation of natural resources. The term “planetary extraction” describes the process of converting the living world into computational resources, with benefits monopolized by distant centers of technological and financial power. Therefore, the question is not simply whether AI can become passionate, but whether we can ensure that AI’s infrastructure stops treating life on Earth as an infinitely exploitable resource.

This theme foregrounds the question of where AI is developed, trained, and deployed—examining how locality, language, and geopolitics shape what AI is, and who it serves. With Taiwan as both a technological powerhouse and a site of geopolitical friction, we ask: What does it mean to design AI from Asia, and for Asia, rather than merely adapting systems built elsewhere? How do local histories, linguistic ecologies, indigenous knowledges, and cultural protocols reconfigure assumptions built into AI systems? Drawing from Taiwan’s unique position—technologically advanced, linguistically rich, politically complex—this theme engages the uneven distribution of computational power and the cultural erasures embedded in dominant AI models. It inquires into how practices in art, design, and the humanities can make visible the infrastructural and ideological layers of AI, contributing to the development of systems that are regionally grounded, ethically attuned, and culturally specific.

Cultural institutions today are not only spaces for preservation and display but sites where artists and publics come together to make, discuss, and reimagine their relationship to technologies. They are places for embodied engagement, where critical and creative encounters with AI open up new ways of thinking about intelligence as affective, unpredictable, and relational. This theme explores evolving definitions of intelligence—human, animal, and artificial—through artistic practices rooted in diverse cultural lineages. Some of these practices draw specifically from Southeast and East Asian philosophical traditions, where care, interdependence, and impermanence shape understandings of knowledge and being. Rather than viewing machines as inert tools or existential threats, we ask: Can AI know, feel, or create? What if care and sentience were central to intelligence rather than exceptions? In challenging Western anxieties about the boundaries between human and machine, we propose AI not as a rupture, but as a continuation of the human evolutionary story—material, embodied, and culturally situated.