A letter for collective imaginaries of ai,

they call it "intelligent". they say it is everywhere. yet no one has ever seen it.

so what happens when many possible shapes of ai are imagined together?

this experimental archive is a playful invitation to build a collective imaginary of ai. Not by asking what artificial intelligence really is, but by attending to the different shapes through which it becomes imaginable, and to the affects that gather around them.

...it began from a conversation with a group of high school students in the south of switzerland in october 2026.

before explaining how ai works, where its infrastructures are located, or what systems sustain it, i asked them a different question: “what shape does ai have, for you? and what emotion comes with it?”

they drew robots. computers. black boxes. eyes. tangled lines. a smiling sun.

some gave ai a body. others imagined the machines that might contain it. some could not give it a shape at all.

fear, fragility, obsession, insecurity and the unknown circulated through the drawings, suggesting a reciprocal movement between formandaffect. giving ai a shape seemed to materialise otherwise diffuse feelings around it, while those same affects, in turn, appeared to contour the very forms through which ai became imaginable.

ai is often presented as something immaterialandplaceless. an interface appears. an answer arrives. meanwhile, the infrastructures, labour and classificatory choices that make it possible recede from view.

what cannot be seen becomes harder to locate. what cannot be located becomes harder to question.

these drawings are not representations of what ai is. they are traces of how ai is already being imagined, felt and culturally assembled before technical explanation begins.

this collection starts from that experiment with high school students, but it is not meant to stay there. i want it to travel elsewhere, to accumulate other perspectives, other visual languages and other ways of relating to ai.

what shape does ai have, for you?
what emotion does it carry?

draw it. give it a name, if you like.
it will float here with the others.

my hope is that, amid the current intensity of ai hype, this archive can open a necessary pause from the forms and expectations already taking hold around us, and make room to ask what ai becomes when imagined from our own situated experiences.

a space where affects and forms can gather, and where ai can be encountered again through the plural imaginaries we make of it.

thanks for your imaginaries ,
antonella

for any inquiry, or just to drop a line: antonella.autuori@supsi.ch