“PermaPrompting Feral AI Agents” Summerschool in Prague (July 2025)
The city of Prague has become my second home, and it’s also where I connected with a group of artists/designers and researchers of the Uroboros collective. The events they organise offer quite unusual perspectives on technology and society, guided by a more-than-human worldview. One of their recurring themes, especially researched by Lenka Hamosova, is “embodiment”, an aspect so often neglected in common tech discourses, and one I instinctively connect to and know will become crucial in the future.
So when this community announced that they are organising a summer school with the curious name of “PermaPrompting Feral AI Agents”, I had to be a part of it!
An intriguing crossover
The title of this summer school alone was packed with fascinatingly complex concepts:
- AI Agents – the emergent (and hyped) paradigm where generative AI systems get enhanced with more decision-making capabilities and access to tools to interact with other systems. It’s also criticised by people such as Signal founder Meredith Whittaker.
- Permaculture – which I knew very vaguely but was eager to learn more about! And what was PermaPrompting about?!
- Feral – a word that I had encountered before at Uroboros events, especially through Markéta Dolejšová’s research work on multi-species research and more-than-human ecologies.
As someone with degrees in both AI and Fine Arts who worked at the intersection for more than a decade, these kinds of interdisciplinary conferences and surprising cross-overs are exactly where I live. I didn’t know how permaculture would fit into that yet, though :-)
And then there was that provocative line in the description of the summer school: “Machine learning use, transform or refuse”? This hit right at the heart of the question I’ve been struggling with since the hype of generative AI: Whether there can be emancipatory and responsible uses of a technology which might be fundamentally unethical at its core. I also observed during the last months that there is a more mainstream movement emerging to “refuse AI” altogether.
The Programme
From July 21–24, we gathered in a building of the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague’s Letná district. The participants were impressively international: they came from Turkey, India, Bosnia, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Mexico, the USA, Ireland, Germany (me) and of course the Czech Republic. Their professions ranged from philosophy, microbiology, architecture, automotive design, photography, and more.
The goal was to build our own “agents” — however they chose to interpret that term (more on that later). We were supposed to bring our own datasets to work with.
Along this way, we were treated with inspiring talks, technical workshops and artistic lecture performances.
Day 1: Foundations and Philosophy
The first day opened with welcomes from organisers Enrique Encinas and Markéta Dolejšová. After participant introductions, philosopher Ramón Alvarado from the University of Oregon gave a talk on “What is an Agent” — exploring the concept of agency across different philosophical traditions.
Day 2: Python and Commandline
On the second day, we got hands-on experience with Smol Agents, a Python library by HuggingFace for building AI agents with just a few lines of code. After this, philosopher and designer Denisa Kera presented her research on conversing with datasets (such as satellite data) with the help of LLMs. She also talked briefly about her research on ergative languages and LLMs. The rest of the day was dedicated to independent work on our projects.
Day 3: Feralities and Intuition
The third day started with a presentation by Markéta Dolejšová on “Practising Feralities” and a workshop by Lenka Hamosova exploring the role of intuition and the body when interacting with generative AI technology.
Day 4: Presentations
The final day focused on wrapping up projects and presenting our work to the group. What projects were developed during the summer school? A web-based game mimicking a pollination garden for bees. A synthetic movie speculating about invasive plants in Prague. A “popstar generator” based on a dataset of natural volcanic behaviour. And more!
I got lucky to collaborate with Dutch designer Giliam Ganzevles during the summer school on an AI/web project. It all started with the data that Giliam brought to the summer school: “Circular soil chromatographs”. It was the first time I saw these kinds of images and got immediately hooked on their beauty and expressiveness (they are analogue datavisualisations!)
Together we built a web application that is half speculative art/AI project and half scientific image analysis – but that deserves its own blogpost!
The highlights
These were 4 extremely intense days, both intellectually, creatively and socially! Long days that started in the morning and ended in bars late at night. The interdisciplinary mix of people was so nice and something I would love to have more often in my life. The kind of conversations that emerged there is something that I wouldn’t find in pure technical spaces (like an “AI agent hackathon”) nor pure art contexts.
The tensions
That said, my dual background — technical AI knowledge and art practice — created some interesting tensions throughout the event. This is a common theme in interdisciplinary work, and I think these kinds of frictions are what make such gatherings valuable. Three specific points kept me thinking:
💥 Agent (Terminology)
Throughout the event, I watched the word “agent” get applied to everything with remarkable generosity. Simple chatbots? Agents. Basic LLMs with system prompts? Agents. A python programme that outputs something? Agents.
This drove me a bit nuts. I was aware that the term Agent has several meaning in different contexts (Philosophy, social science, psychology). But I thought when we speak about concrete technology, we should stick to the technical terminology?
💥 Including AI technology in the more-than-human discourse
It makes me deeply uncomfortable to see how the more-than-human discourse is extended to AI systems. Terms like “feral AI” seem to suggest that these systems possessed a genuine wildness or autonomy.
I’ve spend years arguing against AI anthropomorphisation. One of the myths we tackled on aimyths.org was literally “AI has agency”. The more-than-human discourse makes sense to me for actual non-human entities: animals, plants, and ecosystems are genuine actors. But extending this to AI seems to undo years of demystification work: treating prediction machines as autonomous beings and hiding the agency of the ones that make them such as companies like OpenAI.
I am probably missing a lot of nuances in the more-than-human (or New Materialism or Object Oriented Ontology) discourse, but applying it to AI and seems to me to play right into the hands of the big AI monopoly companies and their AGI and longtermists cult members.
💥 Blind Spots in “Critical AI”
I was expecting a critical art bubble discourse about AI, but was surprised about the lack of critical awareness when it comes to actually using the tools. Here we were, discussing AI resistance while casually burning through energy-intensive models. Video generation or computation-heavy reasoning processses in “agentic AI” — the ecological implications flew under the radar. Similar to the privacy implications, when uploading pictures of peoples faces or conversational notes to some “cloud”.
What I’m Taking Away
This was a precious event! Despite of these tensions described above — or rather, because of them I found this summer school to be incredibly inspiring and productive.
Uroboros collective again managed to create a safe space that encourages discovery, experimentation, bringing people from disciplines to the table. The overall atmosphere was so generous and creative, the participants were incredible, and Enrique’s warm moderation kept everything flowing beautifully.
Practicing interdisciplinary communication is always quite exhausting I guess. Reading everything that is being said twice with regard to different interpretations is quite energy-demanding. It seems almost like my body enters another state of metabolism due to it!
I definitely want to learn more about the more-than-human discourse and philosophy such as new materialism and object oriented ontology. And see how critical AI literacy would fit in there without sacrificing the crucial points.
And it was wonderful that I could bring my dog Lillet along, who was warmly welcomed despite her sometimes weird and socially awkward behaviour. This openness is just a nice side effect of the organizers’ genuine commitment to multi-species research :-)
The summer school “PermaPrompting Feral AI agents” (21-24.07.2025) is part of the “Ars Biologica” series of summer schools. The next event will take place in Budweis, CZ.
Links
- Open Call and Programme of the summer school: https://collective.uroboros.design/open-call-permaprompting/
- Uroboros collective (organizers of the summer school): https://collective.uroboros.design/
- Lenka Hamosova (founding member of Uroboros collective) on Medium: https://medium.com/@lenkahamosova
