Patchlab Festival 2025

Patchlab 2025: May AI Help You?Digital technologies permeate every area of life, and with them grows our dependence on those who design and control them. This is why the question of digital agency is crucial today: for whom, in what ways, and on whose terms should artificial intelligence be helping?The past two years have seen unprecedented acceleration in AI development, especially in generative models that create text, image, and sound. The year 2023 revealed the scale of this phenomenon, and each new update pushes the boundaries of what we consider machine intelligence.These systems can accumulate knowledge, model the intentions of their interlocutors, decide what content we see and which narratives are deemed significant. Algorithms filter experiences, homogenise culture, and flatten nuance — they may facilitate disinformation, raising questions about whether AI can amplify (rather than replace) human agency, and when “help” becomes formatting or supervision that shapes our everyday lives.Digital art has engaged with algorithms for years; today, thanks to the widespread availability of generative tools, AI is increasingly part of the creative process — as sketchbook, partner, and experimental environment. What interests us is how artists work with models in practice: from data and prompts to live performative uses.The title of the 14th edition of the Patchlab Festival — May AI Help You? — is meant both literally and ironically. Can AI truly help us, and if so, how? In a world where machines co-create narratives, we ask: on what terms is art possible, and what forms might human–machine collaboration take?In this year’s exhibition, realised in collaboration with FutureEverything and supported by the British Council in Warsaw, we present works that allow us to “look inside” AI-based creative processes. Rather than offering conclusions, they show practices in which artists negotiate the frameworks of collaboration with the machine, test tools, and question both the