10.–12. September 2026
eikones Forum, Rheinsprung 11, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

With a retrospective look on the long media history of artificial intelligence focussing on scholars/literary authors and their writing aids, we will sound out the differences as well as the similarities between historical ways of interacting with »intelligent« devices (such as slip boxes, card catalogs, filing systems and alike) and the strategies of current interactions with AI models. While taking a look at the foundations of (electronic) computability as well as at varying constellations in which an actor, using specific rules and strategies, enters into an intellectual dialogue with a device in order to jointly arrive at new thoughts, the workshop indulges in different genealogies of devices to think with, surveying case studies, scenarios, histories and analytical accounts of intellectual furniture from the early modern period to the presence in order to discuss different types of »large language models« before and within the era of today’s AI models.

How can we conceive and describe the ways of interacting between author and the intellectual furniture as a dialogue partner while finding new constellations of knowledge? Which theoretical approaches prove to be most promising to analyze the (mechanical) intelligence built into the devices? What concepts of agency help to scrutinize the emergence of inspiration during the human-machine-interaction?

The workshop brings together scholars and historians of note-taking and media devices with curators and art historians with an expertise in writing desks and intellectual furniture of all kind in order to carve out the main lines and avenues of the precursors of today’s large language models.

Full program and registration: https://www.assisted-thinking.ch/posts/intellectual-furniture/