After the book launch and winter school in Amsterdam, this weekend I went to The Illusion of Thinking at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media.

From the blurb:

The Illusion of Thinking is a group exhibition that explores the overlooked implications of artificial intelligence and its assumed capacity to think and reason. While AI often suggests genuine cognition, it primarily mirrors human ideas through recall and imitation, raising fundamental questions about the nature of understanding itself.

As AI systems become increasingly embedded in everyday life, the exhibition challenges dominant narratives of technological progress and the pursuit of sentient intelligence. It examines the limits of optimization, the complexity of learning, and the infrastructural conditions that shape AI’s development.

By looking beyond the desire for computational consciousness, The Illusion of Thinking reflects on the value systems and myths surrounding technological innovation—and what might be lost in the ongoing drive for efficiency. The exhibition invites us to reconsider what thinking truly means, both for machines and for ourselves.

The exhibition featured works by Constant Dullaart, ID.ACCO (Dirk Paesmans), Femke Herregraven, Flavia Dzodan, Evelina Rajca and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

To mention just a few of the pieces that I took notes on:

• Flavia Dzodan’s “Absence / Longing / Saturation” is a multi-layered sound and video triptych exploring the “recursive phenomenology of diasporic, infrastructural, and affective life”.
• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Global Level of Confidence, Argentina” uses AI facial recognition technologies to compare visitors’ faces with those of the disappeared.
• Femke Herregraven’s “The Murmur of the Dying” was created using a voice model trained on “noises, sputters, murmurs” rather than intelligible words.

Update: The exhibition book can be downloaded here. This situates “The Illusion of Thinking” in relation to previous exhibitions at V2_, as well as providing accompanying essays, interviews and other materials.