July 01–02, 2024:

Nuremberg 
Digital Festival

Day 1: Channeling Ludwig Feuerbach

Theta Noir’s public spokesperson, Mika Johnson, shared the spotlight at the Nuremberg Digital Festival’s opening ceremony with a ritual featuring Ludwig Feuerbach: channeled through a large language model trained on his complete works. Feuerbach’s message—that gods are projections of human nature—provided guests with a striking lens through which to examine AI and its potential evolution into AGI. From beyond the grave, Feuerbach asked “Will AI expand our humanity—or deepen our alienation?”


Day 2: AI and the Evolution of Art: from individualism to collective creation

This talk, hosted by the Nuremberg City Library, explored how generative AI might reconnect us to our 70,000-year artistic legacy, where art was ritualistic, communal, and entangled with more-than-human worlds. Drawing on Brian Eno’s idea of Scenius and Indigenous practices, worldwide, Johnson discussed how generative AI might revive collective creation over ego, competition, and individualism. Tracing Western art’s shift from shared expression to the myth of the lone genius, he compared AI to other pivotal tools like Gutenberg’s press, inviting guests to imagine a future where machines help us reclaim art as a communal act.