Hype Studies Conference 10-12th September 2025 - Abstract Booklet

Abstract Booklet HYPE STUDIES CONFERENCE 10 — 12th September 2025 Universitat Oberta de Cataluny Barcelona (Don’t) believe the hype! 1 2 6 7 ................................................................................................................7 10th of September, 10:30-12:30 ......................................................................................7 ................................................................... 7 Jacek Manko ............................................................................................................................... 7 Dan Kotliar ................................................................................................................................... 8 Tianqi Kou; Dana Calacci; Nasser Eledroos .............................................................................. 8 Kat Fuller ...................................................................................................................................... 9 ...................................................... 10 Isabella Wilkinson ..................................................................................................................... 10 Diwakar Kumar .......................................................................................................................... 10 Masafumi Nishi.......................................................................................................................... 11 Adam Svensson ........................................................................................................................ 11 ..................................................... 13 Quentin Gervasoni.................................................................................................................... 13 Yu-Won Youn ............................................................................................................................ 13 Hernán Borisonik ....................................................................................................................... 14 ............ 15 Shawn Skelton........................................................................................................................... 15 Isa Luiten ................................................................................................................................... 15 Sebastian Roberts .................................................................................................................... 16 ................................................................................. 17 Mathieu Fechant ....................................................................................................................... 17 Muhammad Unggul Karami...................................................................................................... 17 Ivan Flis ...................................................................................................................................... 18 Tomás Criado; Brais Estévez Vilariño ..................................................................................... 18 ............................................................................................................. 20 11th of September, 9:00-11:00 ....................................................................................... 20 .................................................................. 20 Thomas Tsakalakis.................................................................................................................... 20 Gili Yaron; Violet Petit-Steeghs............................................................................................... 20 Roanne van Voorst ................................................................................................................... 21 Sofie Kronberger ....................................................................................................................... 21 Albina Abzalova......................................................................................................................... 22 ........................................................... 23 Anna Kraher; Lars Pinkwart ...................................................................................................... 23 Muhammad Osama Shafiq; Sadia Baqar ................................................................................ 23 Ozan Altan Altinok .................................................................................................................... 24 Salvatore Romano..................................................................................................................... 24 .......................................................................... 25 Maximilan Roßmann ................................................................................................................. 25 Sun-ha Hong ............................................................................................................................. 25 Anthony Stagliano .................................................................................................................... 26 ............................................................................................ 27 Oksana Dorofeeva; Dominic Lammar ..................................................................................... 27 Aishik Saha; Yash Sharma; Raqib Naik .................................................................................... 27 Khushi Agarwal; Vijayansh Wasson......................................................................................... 28 .................. 29 Darja Aksjonova ........................................................................................................................ 29 Sara Milkes Espinosa ................................................................................................................ 29 Sandeep Mertia......................................................................................................................... 30 Jack Stilgoe ............................................................................................................................... 30 3 ............................................................................................................. 31 11th of September, 11:30-13:30 ....................................................................................... 31 ....................................................................... 31 Ola Michalec; Cian O'Donovan; Joshua Moon ....................................................................... 31 Émile Pronovost ........................................................................................................................ 31 Pietro Autorino.......................................................................................................................... 32 .................................................................... 33 Mirna Zeman.............................................................................................................................. 33 Rebecca DeWael ...................................................................................................................... 33 Eileen Stephens ........................................................................................................................ 34 Natalia Stanusch ....................................................................................................................... 34 ................................................................................................ 36 Shiming Shen............................................................................................................................. 36 Michael Senters ........................................................................................................................ 36 Carolina Cavalcanti Falcão ...................................................................................................... 37 Ana Belen Rojo Ojados ............................................................................................................. 37 ....................................................................................... 39 Fabio Morreale .......................................................................................................................... 39 Mark Higgins .............................................................................................................................. 39 Gabriel Gutierrez ...................................................................................................................... 40 Ilja Mirsky ................................................................................................................................... 40 ..................................................... 42 Jasmine Erdener ....................................................................................................................... 42 Jascha Bareis ............................................................................................................................ 42 Endalkachew Abera Mekuriya ................................................................................................. 43 Emerson Johnston.................................................................................................................... 43 ............................................................................................................. 45 12th of September, 10:00-12:00 .................................................................................... 45 ......................................... 45 Anees M ..................................................................................................................................... 45 Roselinde Bon ........................................................................................................................... 45 Mallika Dharmaraj ..................................................................................................................... 46 Matin Yusun Cheng................................................................................................................... 46 .......................................................... 48 Amelia Moore ............................................................................................................................ 48 Jacob Pleasants; Dan Krutka; Marie Heath ............................................................................ 48 Ariadna Angulo-Brunet; Maria Teresa Soto-Sanfiel; Chin-Wen Chong .............................. 49 Giulia Villanucci......................................................................................................................... 49 ....................................................................................... 51 Charles Pidgeon ........................................................................................................................ 51 Jimi DePriest ............................................................................................................................. 51 Eugenia Stamboliev .................................................................................................................. 52 Emre Altindag............................................................................................................................ 52 ................................................................. 53 Wenzel Mehnert ........................................................................................................................ 53 Giuseppina Debbi ..................................................................................................................... 53 Clemens Ackerl; Jascha Bareis; Reinhard Heil ....................................................................... 54 Luigia Tricase; Alice Mattoni.................................................................................................... 54 Felix De Backer.......................................................................................................................... 55 ........................................................................ 56 Aaron Pagel ............................................................................................................................... 56 Andreu Belsunces Goncalves.................................................................................................. 56 Santtu Räisänen; Zhuo Chen; Tuukka Lehtiniemi................................................................... 57 58 4 .............................................................................. 58 10th of September, 14:00-15:30 .................................................................................... 58 Sophia Bazile - Hype, Human FlourishingTM and its Discontents" (online workshop) ........ 58 Ezequiel Soriano - Shitpublishing Workshop (in person workshop) ................................... 59 Shawn Skelton; Anna Brandenberger; Anna Knörr; Jaime Redondo-Yuste; Manu Srivastava - A Quantum of Hope (in person workshop) ............................................................................... 59 Robin Williams and Neil Pollock – After Hype (book pre-launch hybrid event)................ 60 Tania Duarte (We and AI) - Exploring metaphors of AI: Visualisations, narratives and perception (online panel) ............................................................................................................................ 60 .................................................................................................... 62 11th of September, 15:00-16:30 ..................................................................................... 62 Elizabeth Resor; Courtney Wittekind - Locating Hype: Digital qualitative methods across sites and forms (an in person open discussion).................................................................................... 62 Tyler West - Humbling Tech Hype: Assessing Change and Continuity (in person workshop) 62 Anne-Laure Oberson - A collective critical cartography of hype (in person workshop) 63 Christo Buschek - Investigating Datasets - The underbelly of the AI hype (in person workshop) .................................................................................................................................................... 64 Danae Lois; Julieta Groshaus and Valentina Marún - Hype Was Here: Tracing the ghosts of collective excitement (in person workshop)......................................................................... 64 .................................................................................................... 65 12th of September, 15:00-16:30 .................................................................................... 65 Grace Turlte - Queering Hype: A Playable Workshop for Trans/forming Predictive AI (in person workshop).................................................................................................................................. 65 Ron Bronson - When Hype Breaks the City (online workshop)........................................... 65 Lourdes Rodriguez - Detectives of the Hype: Surfacing Bias and Worldviews in Our Sensemaking Processes (in person workshop) ............................................................................................ 66 Patricia von Papstein - I want to be a Caring Trickster! - An Emo Hype with Potential? (online workshop).................................................................................................................................. 66 Caitlin Keeley; Keely Adler (RADAR community) - Digging into Hype: Multiplayer Mining for Meaning (online workshop) ..................................................................................................... 67 68 Displayed in the Art hall (open throughout the conference)...................................... 68 Lucas Kuster - Saliva Collection Container ........................................................................... 68 Citlali Hernandez; Roger Pibernat; Andreus Costa - Smoke Vending Machine (SVM)...... 68 DiSect - (Don’t) believe the hype........................................................................................... 69 Carla de la Torre - Oblique manoeuvres (for innovators).................................................... 70 Berk Alkoç - Nothing But the Truth (And a Lot of Hype): An Archive of Imaginary AI Startups That Say the Quiet Part Out Loud ................................................................................................... 70 Emre Altindag - Visualizing Otherwise: A Wordless Artistic Inquiry into Surveillance and Dispossession ........................................................................................................................... 71 Donato Ricci; Tommaso Prinetti; Gabriel Alcaras; Zoé de Vries - Tedium: effects and consequences of LLMs boredom ........................................................................................... 71 Hailey Hannigan; Sofia Mari Surkau; Katarina Vrablova - Arenas of Artificial General Intelligence Hype: A visual database of AGI hype discourse ................................................................... 72 ............................................... 72 Prayas Abhinav ; Satya - A Workshop Engaging Indian Design Students to Design a Tool to Examine the Epistemic Role of Hype in the Design Process ............................................... 72 Kate Colley - Unwind, a short film........................................................................................... 73 Rut Guardia, Maria Antunes, Tara Monheim - The AGI Hype Break down Nobody Asked For 73 5 Max Sabitzer - Copper Promises of Immediate Realities .................................................... 74 75 Gemma Milne – Hype and the Age of Badness (10th of September, 17.00-18.30) .... 75 75 Christo Buschek, Oksana Dorofeeva, Dr. Ola Michalec, Gemma Milne and Prof. Jack Stilgoe (11th of September, 17.00-18.30) ...................................................................... 75 77 6 The Hype Studies Conference is an experiment in collective thinking and doing. As researchers, designers, and practitioners, we are all curious about hype, not just as exaggeration, but as a force that composes and directs attention, markets, politics, emotions, and imaginations. We're here to share our ideas about how hype shapes technologies, economies, and cultures, with real consequences for how the future is imagined and acted upon. As you'll see, the programme brings together a heady mix of talks, a keynote, a plenary panel session, workshops, video art, and installations. Through these sessions (as well as through informal moments and exchanges), we hope you'll be able to explore hype as a performative force, reflect on its mechanisms and effects, and share ways of understanding (and intervening in) the politics of hype. The idea of this event is to provide an open space, whether you’re an academic, student, artist, policymaker, technologist, journalist, student, or just hype-curious: We welcome you to join in, connect, contribute, and experiment with us. For more information about the conference and party venue, responsibilities, and other conference activities, make sure to download our Conference Programme! 7 Online // In-person 10th of September, 10:30-12:30 Chair: Jacek Manko Jacek Manko AI narratives - between superintelligence and power Since its inception in the 1950s, artificial intelligence (AI) has been marked by ambiguity about its goals. Initially, AI aimed to computationally simulate intelligent behaviours, like playing logical games, Yet AI founders like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky boldly envisioned "fully intelligent machines" or ones with human-level intelligence. Today, even though AI focuses on statistical data processing via machine learning, yet bold visions persist. OpenAI, with its 2022 ChatGPT release, revived narratives of AI "surpassing humans," referencing vague concepts like artificial general intelligence (AGI) and "superintelligence," which loosely suggest technology exceeding human intellect. The study aims to examine contemporary forms of narratives regarding both the current state and further development of AI. Specifically, the study sought answers to the following questions: • How do the largest companies in the AI industry define AI? • How do they envision the further development of AI? • Does the way AI is defined translate into the way these companies operate on a business level? To this end, a qualitative content analysis method supported by virtual ethnography was applied. The analysis covered press releases, charters, or other public documents from major AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic or DeepMind. Preliminary findings suggest that AI companies often invoke visions of "AI surpassing human intellect" yet fail to clarify what this means. This vagueness is intentional, as the focus is not on the technology itself, but primarily on power. Therefore, such arguments appear to be used instrumentally. That is, they serve as tools - initially for grabbing symbolic and imaginative power by shaping a specific vision of an AI-determined future. This, in turn, facilitates the acquisition of tangible power, such as securing investment funding and/or favorable political regulations. 8 Dan Kotliar Can't Stop the Hype? Scrutinizing AI's Realities In recent years, we have been inundated with reports about the revolutions brought upon by AI. Nevertheless, much of our knowledge about such “revolutions” arises from media sensationalism, advertising clamor, or, in short – from AI hype. AI hype often also serves as our primary data source, but it can also act as a heavy smokescreen, obscuring the “true” socioalgorithmic phenomena before our eyes. Therefore, to understand the societal impacts of AI, we must first grapple with its hype and ask: what truly transpires in the "revolutions" allegedly brought upon by AI? And what role does hype play in them? This paper addresses this need by offering a methodological framework for studying AI – a way to scrutinize AI Hype while acknowledging its performative power. The STATE typology differentiates AI hype into five core categories: Social effects (claims about AI-driven societal transformations), Temporal promises (forecasts of imminent breakthroughs), Adoption narratives (assertions about widespread implementation), Technological assertions (statements emphasizing technical capabilities), and Economic projections (optimistic financial forecasts). Together, these categories provide a structured approach for analyzing discursive claims surrounding AI technologies. Complementing this typology, the paper proposes six heuristics for distinguishing substantive AI developments from exaggerated projections: A) rejecting technological determinism, B) suspecting unfounded temporal leaps, C) historically contextualizing claims, D) understanding the broader socioeconomic context, E) scrutinizing technological assertions, and F) identifying the power structures perpetuating hype. Finally, the paper advocates for a holistic ethnographic methodology, which integrates examinations of AI’s scientific foundations, algorithmic production processes, user experiences, and technological implementation. By combining the STATE typology, critical heuristics, and holistic empirical research, scholars can more effectively analyze AI’s realworld implications, uncover the sources and intentions behind AI hype, and achieve a nuanced understanding of AI's societal role, beyond sensationalist discourse. Tianqi Kou; Dana Calacci; Nasser Eledroos Tracing the Genealogy of Hype within the Supply Chain of AI-based Policing Tools - Case Studies on the Communicative Production of Technological Hype Hype plays a central role in the premature and inflated adoption of machine-learning (ML) technologies in high-stakes domains like policing. AI-based tools are frequently accompanied by sweeping capability claims that misalign their actual performance. While they face functional challenges such as inaccuracies, they also introduce ethically fraught issues including racial bias, opacity, and dislocated accountability. Efforts to mitigate these harms have largely been ex-post, addressing problems only after deployment. In a techno-solutionist culture driven by hype, such limitations have enabled a recurring cycle of overpromise and under-delivery. This project intervenes at the level of communicative production, seeking to trace and unsettle the lifecycle of these capability claims across the supply chain of AI-based policing tools. The project is situated at the intersection of two concerns: first, how hype is constituted as a communicative and epistemic phenomenon; and second, how different stakeholders engage with, produce, and experience hype in practice. It therefore speaks directly to two of the conference’s thematic tracks: Concepts and characteristics and Engaging. We examine 3 deployed AI-based policing tools, mapping their trajectories from research and development through deployment. For each case, we collect communication artifacts - research papers, press releases, 15 Chair: Sebastian Roberts Shawn Skelton Making Sense of Hype in Funding: A Quantum Technologies Case Study Within the philosophy of science, hype is usually understood as a science communication problem, relatively inconsequential in science funding. In science and technologies studies, it is agreed that hype is present in science funding, but disagreement remains as to whether it is intrinsically harmful. In practice, most working within the quantum ecosystem accept that hype is really present both within science communication and research. Grant applications are a direct site through which hype can enter into funding decisions. In this talk, I adopt an idealistic view of grant applications as the process whereby scientists suggest potential knowledge to society, and society exerts pressure on the direction of science. However, I suggest one concrete pathway to hype that directly targets physics funding. I identify a specific performative speech used by grant applicants for “basic/exploratory research” in physics, “technology by extrapolation” (TbE). I suggest that TbE is neutral and well understood within “basic/exploratory” science funding but can constitute hype when used in applications for “near-term, application-focused” research funding. I then give two case studies of hype in quantum applications of sustainable development goals. The first case study is a real-life example demonstrating hype in Quantum for SDGs. The second is hypothetical and engineered to illustrate an ethical disagreement in the physics community: Is it commendable to direct funding within a hyped topic towards a socially desirable goal, or do unlikely-to-succeed projects constitute an opportunity cost for socially important research? I will conclude that this remains an important but underlooked ethical divide within quantum technologies and suggest that the disagreement hinges on two practical judgments. First, whether grants are a rational process with genuine opportunity costs between more and less likely and desirable projects. Second, do unlikely-to-succeed projects constitute an opportunity cost for more interesting research directions within a discipline? Isa Luiten Sustaining the Hype: On the Durability of the NewSpace Imaginary in Europe Hype is the rocket fuel of NewSpace, and NewSpace has become the central force in shaping Europe’s outer space industry. NewSpace is a powerful imaginary that is characterized by the belief that the future of outer space exploration lies not in state-led bureaucracy, but rather in entrepreneurship and commercialization of the industry. NewSpace originated in the US after NASA’s setbacks (e.g., the Columbia disaster in 2003) and was later popularized by the Space Frontier Foundation in 2004. It further developed in the shadows of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but also travelled to Europe where it has become increasingly 16 institutionalized in the European Space Agency (ESA). Though in Europe, NewSpace is not a wholesale break, but rather a narrative tool to catalyse hybrid public-private partnerships. I build on Borup et al. (2006), Heupel et al., (2024) and van Lente et al. (2013) in their notion that (entrepreneurial) hype is a performative force that mobilizes resources, legitimizes actors and shapes the pace and direction of technological development. My research investigates how entrepreneurial hype sustains the NewSpace imaginary and how, in turn, NewSpace creates fertile ground for hype practices to flourish. NewSpace entrepreneurs imagine themselves as revolutionizing the industry and use hype deliberately in pitches and conversations with potential investors, like venture capitalists, but also agencies like ESA and NASA who still play a dominant role in the industry. In turn, the ESA is reinforcing these hype practices through “risktaker” initiatives like the φ-labs, Business Incubation Centres and IRIS². I aim to contribute to hype studies through the case study of the central role of entrepreneurial hype in Europe’s space industry. I also aim to experiment expanding hype studies from discrete technologies to imaginaries and infrastructures. I demonstrate not only how hype can inspire policy and institutional infrastructures, but also how NewSpace has avoided the ‘trough of disillusionment’ by perpetually rebooting itself and in that way avoiding collapse by staying consistently vague. Sebastian Roberts The Yin and Yang of Selling Out: Cool and Hype Between Capital and Race To sell out or not to sell out is—or, rather, was—a reputation-defining question, policing the border between the “authentically” cool and “mere” hype. Once the most derogatory of accusations against a cultural practitioner, “selling out” has all but vanished from discourses surrounding art and commerce. Does this mark the triumph of hype over cool, or has selling out become cool? Did the concept of “selling out” outlive its usefulness, or was it a false dilemma to begin with? This paper will answer these questions by way of defining cool, hype, and their epistemological mediator, hip. Briefly, cool is a way of being: a particular mode of relating to extrinsic reality based upon phenomenological experience, and consequent suspicion, of that reality. Hip is a way of knowing: a metadiscourse about coolness fueled by a combination of neophilia and subcultural capital. Hype is the commodification and trafficking of hip’s specialized knowledge. However, digging into the American origins of cool, hip, and hype requires attending to the operation of race within and across these three phenomena. The affordances of cool, as a way of being, vary considerably along the color line; so too does the value of hip’s specialized knowledge, and its distribution throughout hype’s circuits of exchange. Consequently, between subcultures that are differently racialized (e.g. punk as “white,” hip-hop as “black”), there are different ramifications to selling out: what is being sold, what is being gained, what is being lost, and whether or not it can be taken back. Sebastian Roberts is a Ph.D. candidate in the Humanities Department at York University in Toronto, Canada and is the recipient of a 2024 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. His doctoral research is focused upon “cool” as cultural capital and the politics of right-wing resentment. 17 Chair: Ivan Flis Mathieu Fechant Negentropy; Hype; and Quantum Dreams: On the Entropic Dynamics of Knowledge and Technology In the first half of this talk , we will explore how meaning , utility and belief coalesce in shapes of information flow, and how hype —far from being accidental— functions as an entropyreduction tool within sociotechnical systems. While trying to contrast self-organizing hype with obvious propaganda, we will address the moral risk and global dynamic of the cognitive global system and try to situate that discourse in terms of cognitive ecology, and econophysics. In a second part we will make use of the speaker personal knowledge of quantum computing field to comment and elaborate on hype processes at play in it. From NISQ-era promises to the engineeringresearch tensions within corporate labs (e.g., Google, IBM, Alice Bob), we analyze the technological, epistemological, and organizational stakes. By trying to disentangle real development and merely purposeful misunderstandings we will try to give a clear minded presentation of the structure of the scientific work and its questions. Drawing on literature around energy consumption, computational irreversibility, and the “entropy of knowledge,” we also ask the mirror question: Can quantum computing deliver on its hype, and is it a structural mirror of broader cognitive-economic dynamics? Muhammad Unggul Karami The hype of quantum in the academic sphere: Promises and expectation of the future of quantum technology in peer-reviewed literature Quantum technology is a term that combines two seemingly different concepts (Roberson, 2021). ‘Quantum’ has traditionally been perceived as a domain so complex that it is accessible primarily to specialists, while ‘technology’ is something that everyone can use. The emergence of this term signals the transition of quantum theory from a purely theoretical framework in physics to a source of new technology development. Quantum technology is nowadays regarded as an emerging technology that expected to have novel applications in computing, sensing, and communication. In the field of emerging technology, expectations and promises play important roles (Borup et al., 2006). Not only do expectations align scientists around common goals, but they can also stimulate resources and support (Eames et al., 2006). Using the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015), one can to relate expectations and promises of the future to the individuals, institutions, and practices shaping the present. Previous research has shown that these expectations travel through our society (Konrad and Alvial Palavicino, 2017). Moreover, in the context of emerging technology, expectations articulated by scientists and researchers within academia shape the expectations in other spheres, such as media and policy (Caulfield and Condit, 2012). In this study, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of highly cited papers on the topic of quantum technologies from 2007 to 2023. Each year, we analysed the top 10 articles to capture the discourse. 18 Drawing on the concepts from the sociology of expectations and sociotechnical imaginaries, we interpreted the embedded expectations and promises regarding quantum technology. Our analysis revealed two distinct ways of conveying expectations: the 'use case' and 'goal'. The ‘use case’ is related to the notion that quantum technology can address problems. While the ‘goal’ is related to the forms of the future in which quantum technology will be widely available. Ivan Flis Is longue durée hype just plain old fam? Some historical notes on the cycles of Nikola Tesla's fame “The space people have now stated that Nikola was born on board their ship on a flight from Venus, and that they landed on the Earth at midnight, between July 9 and 10, 1856,” wrote Margaret Storm, an American fashion journalist-turned-New-Ager in her 1959 samizdat book Return of the Dove. Tesla, and his mother Đuka; as Storm told it, disembarked from a spaceship in the mountains of Lika, right at the Austrian military frontier with the Ottomans. They were taken up by Milutin Tesla, a local Orthodox parish priest, as his wife and son. In 1856, two Venusians became Serbian frontiersfolk, and as the nineteenth century would come to a close, Nikola would move to New York and invent electrical modernity. So it goes, as one strange version of this famous story. In this talk, I will contrast the New Age construction of Tesla the Venusian with two other Tesla’s – first, the 1977 Tesla as the perfect Yugoslav in the hands of the Zagreb-based electrical engineer Tomo Bosanac. Second, the 1919 construction of Tesla by Tesla himself and his editor Hugo Gernsback into an inspirational ideal inventor for American boy experimenters. My aim is to provoke the conceptual frameworks of hype studies by carefully retracting how the audiences of Nikola Tesla throughout the 20th century absorbed, inflected, and amplified his fame, layering and intermixing it with early amateur tech cultures, New Age counterculture, and Yugoslav state communism. I hope that my analysis will provoke a discussion about the contrasts between the analytical concepts of hype, fame, reputation, and selffashioning, and how the careful deployment of their distinctions in a historical reconstruction allows us to understand how a nineteenth century inventor of some renown could become everything from a synecdoche for electrical modernity to the brand name of twenty-first century technofascism. Tomás Criado; Brais Estévez Vilariño How hot is heat? The hype of extreme weather and its predicaments We live in a time of overheated atmospheres, both in meteorological and political terms. A hard-to-grasp climatic mutation – as Bruno Latour called it – is underway. Yet, every summer, red-saturated satellite images flood our screens, news of temperature records being broken spread constantly one extreme weather event at a time. Forecasts have become central in popular culture, and visualizations of extreme meteorological events circulate with unprecedented intensity: is heat a hype? Indeed, heat appears everywhere yet strangely absent. Despite its rising presence and our omnipresent worries – not to mention its enraged negation – extreme heat feels like a hype that doesn't quite manage to alter modernist ways of inhabiting. Heat is indeed becoming an innovation hype affecting policies and triggering technological solutions, also activating citizen initiatives. However, in some of these instances something doesn't seem to click, heat appearing as a sinister, abstract or metaphorical entity, a proxy for other conversations, like capitalism or class struggle. In this contribution, we explore the recent explosion of interest in heat in popular culture, bridging hype studies with the STS-inflicted political ecology of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and others. Drawing on press analysis and a study of social media from the Spanish public sphere since 2023, part of our ongoing ethnographic interest in the transformation of urban inhabiting in conditions of extreme heat, we wish to reflect on Gaia's overheated hype and its predicaments. Rather than debunking hype, we wish to treat it as a symptom in a psychoanalytic sense: of a fundamental disorientation and an unease to forge plural inhabitable futures beyond modern forms of living. We ask: how hot is heat? Put 19 otherwise, how might its hype help heat turn into a mobilising force, not just a problem, enabling to translate our contemporary worries into more careful practices transforming our modes of inhabiting? 20 11th of September, 9:00-11:00 Chair: Roanne van Voorst Thomas Tsakalakis Adverse and (Potentially) Beneficial Effects of Science Hype on How the Socio-Ethical Conundrums Concerning Rare Diseases Are Addressed Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to fund the development of medicines that might prevent/treat rare life-threatening diseases because small patient populations do not constitute a viable market. Lowprevalence diseases and the drugs that could potentially cure them have been named “orphan.” Nonetheless, there are about 8,000 distinct rare medical conditions, which afflict over 350 million people worldwide. Hence, the fact that the terms “rare” and “orphan” have been established in public discourse by science communicators constitutes a case of hype in reverse, given that the extent and the importance of this issue are deliberately, unfairly, and exaggeratedly downplayed; when it comes to the public dialogue amongst citizens, experts, and policymakers about how best to address the ethico-political controversies related to rare disorders, this exacerbates a problem that is already knotty due to the differing priorities and values that come into play. The “median voter” finds it unreasonable, at least from a utilitarian perspective, that a budget-constrained healthcare system should divert its attention from common diseases to rare ones. However, the media’s strategical deflation of expectations regarding the likely effectiveness of new orphan drugs should not affect the pertinent biomedical research, which may help us better understand the genetic basis of common diseases and thereby achieve breakthroughs in treating them; additionally, it abides by the social obligation to promote the expansion of medical knowledge in general. Science hype can occupy a critical role in reframing the aforementioned issue, thus contributing to the fight against rare diseases. The way to achieve this is not by arousing overly optimistic expectations about alleged “wonder drugs” that will provide maximum health benefits with minimal cost, as this might erode the public’s trust in science, but by overemphasizing the fact that civic space will be dangerously constricted if the welfare of the worse off is not prioritized. Gili Yaron; Violet Petit-Steeghs Hyping healthcare: the dynamics of innovative healthcare concepts In recent decades, healthcare has seen the rise of numerous ‘innovative concepts’ that aim to transform care provision—from person-centered care and resilience to more recent additions like culturally responsive care. In shaping stakeholders’ understanding and delivery of care, such concepts can be understood as ‘linguistic technologies’ (Dehue 2023). As they circulate in policy and practice, healthcare concepts often exhibit hype-like dynamics, including temporal booms, overpromising, and strategic rhetoric (Bareis et al. 2023). Yet, apart from scattered work on healthcare ‘buzzwords,’ little attention has been paid to healthcare concepts as hypes (Bensaude Vincent 2014; Penkler et al. 2019). To better understand the hype-like dynamics of healthcare concepts, we explored the emergence and embedding of three key examples: person-centered care, evidence-based medicine, and positive health. Drawing on an analysis of twenty scientific publications, we identify strikingly similar trajectories across all 21 three. Each concept begins as the catchphrase of a critical movement within science and/or science policy, aiming to challenge the status quo. Proponents’ emancipatory rhetoric then mobilizes field actors—policymakers, managers, healthcare professionals—to ‘implement’ or ‘roll out’ the concept using various tools developed for this purpose. These efforts, however, often take a top-down approach to conceptual innovation, marked by excessive optimism, instrumentalism, and a limited grasp of complexity. In practice, this approach leads to poor tailoring, conceptual fuzziness, and tokenism—often resulting in cynical disillusionment about the ‘hype’. We conclude that while conceptual innovation holds real transformative potential due to its rallying force, stakeholders must nevertheless avoid the pitfalls of hype. This requires fostering a complexityinformed approach that supports sustained stakeholder engagement, critical reflection at all organizational levels, and the circulation of diverse forms of knowledge. Roanne van Voorst The Productive Power of Hype: Understanding Why AI Expectations Persist in Healthcare Numerous studies demonstrate that expectations of AI in healthcare are often unrealistically high: realworld examples frequently reveal that the hype surrounding AI is not confirmed by the daily experiences of healthcare professionals. While the question of what can go wrong with AI has been extensively addressed, a more intriguing question remains: why does the hype continue to persist despite setbacks and limitations in practice? What gives the hype its productive force? This paper explores this question through a case study of the increasing collaboration between healthcare professionals and AI, based on ethnographic research conducted in seven hospitals across different parts of the world. I argue that the hype about AI’s role in hospitals is not primarily driven by practical experiences of error-free performance but by a collectively shared belief in its future potential and autonomous development. Two factors underpin the sustained power of this hype. First, despite acknowledging AI’s current limitations, healthcare workers continue to believe in its future possibilities and in its autonomous evolution as an inevitable process. This belief possesses a form of force and autonomy that is difficult to stop, actively fueling further investments and engagement in AI innovations. Second, I demonstrate that healthcare professionals tend to downplay the importance of their diagnostic intuition—an aspect AI does not replicate—in public discourse. This tendency is driven by a desire to conform to narratives of evidencebased and rational practice, which marginalizes vital aspects of caregiving and increases the risk of healthcare being increasingly supplanted by technology. Theoretically, this article contributes two insights: first, that trust and investment in AI are shaped more by collective beliefs about its future than by practical experience; and second, that the productive power of hype operates in practice through shared expectations, which continue to stimulate AI development and integration—even in the face of disappointment or critique. Sofie Kronberger "It's not all that" - Negotiating Data Imperatives in Biomedicine In the increasingly digitized, datafied, and automated world of audiology, artificial Intelligence promises a revolution of biomedical hearing care. AI-based devices and apps now allow users to impact the configurations of their hearing aids more actively and in a time-sensitive manner, suggesting new forms of medical knowledge production, linked to a promise of user empowerment. This comes hand in hand with a perceived dissolution of boundaries, diminishing the distinctions of medical technologies and consumer 22 electronics, patients and users, and preferences and pathologies. Drawing on six months of ethnographic research in Austria, Denmark, and Germany, my research suggests that many companies seem to embrace the hype around AI publicly, while at the same time showing a more reserved and nuanced understanding of the technology in more private settings. In this presentation, I examine not only what hype does, but also how hype is done. I first explore the history of Big Tech in audiology, showcasing how economic interests have always shaped the construction of biomedical hearing, hearing aids, and audiology. I give an overview of some of the effects of the emerging data imperative (Sadowski 2019), impacting current understandings of good patienthood and good hearing. I then examine how actors actively engage in the production and negotiation of myth and hype around AI and Big Data in an effort to shape patient subjectivities, while at the same time counteracting this hype towards other industry players. Albina Abzalova Will AI take over our jobs? The Evolution of Algorithmic Technologies in Dialysis Centers. The Case of the United Arab Emirates The narrative surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) often centers on the fear that it will replace human workers, sparking widespread concerns and anxieties. Many believe that algorithms will primarily take over repetitive tasks and administrative activities, leading to increased efficiency and cost savings. However, others worry that AI-driven automation could result in significant job losses across various industries, potentially causing widespread layoffs and economic disruption. This ongoing debate raises an important question: Are these fears overhyped, or do they reflect a genuine and imminent challenge to the workforce? In this study, we examine collaboration of algorithms and nurses in healthcare, and whether the concerns about job displacement are justified or exaggerated. This study explores how algorithmic technologies shape nursing work in dialysis centers in the United Arab Emirates from an ethnographic perspective. Data were collected from three dialysis centers and two hospitals through immersive observations over two months, along with semistructured interviews. Additionally, roundtable discussions with senior and emergency dialysis nurses highlighted the implications of algorithm-driven technologies in their daily practice. In this study, we examine collaboration of algorithms and nurses, and whether the concerns about job displacement are justified or exaggerated, and how algorithms are transforming the nature of care in healthcare settings. Based on the research conducted, we argue that nursing work remains irreplaceable, and embodiment plays a key role in the successful implementation of algorithmic technologies 23 Chair: Muhammad Osama Shafiq Anna Kraher; Lars Pinkwart The Politics of Critique in the Economy of AI Hype Our contribution examines the role of critique in the context of technology hype, with a particular focus on generative AI. We argue that the relationship between hype and can take on co-constitutive qualities, since hype has effectively operationalised critical inquiry by subjecting critique to its logistics of exchange and value. In such cases, critique mirrors the reductive quality of hype – ideal for circulation and proliferation – by distilling critical ideas into shareable takes, talking points and common mantras that spread more easily than their more reflective, self-aware and ambiguous counterparts. This embrace of platform logics, financialization and mythmaking might seem like an appropriate strategy in order to "counter" hype effectively, yet we would caution that it often increases the flattening of discourse that hype produces in the first place. Aside from a reification of the foundational myths of technologies such as AI, critical scholarship has a tendency to iterate on its own myths and casuistries, which have been effectively dispelled but still seem to hang around or have developed a life of their own, such as the myth of the black box. Further, the endless flow of new hyped-up terminology sweeping over from both computer science and corporate AI research brings with it the risk of providing an intriguing array of novel frames for critique which essentially amounts to an important, but repetitive critique of a hazy notion of "technology", which is rejuvenated through the modalities of hype. Muhammad Osama Shafiq; Sadia Baqar Hype in Politics and Political Communication: A Case Study of Pakistani Politics The concept of "hype" in political communication extends beyond established frameworks such as framing, agenda setting, selective perception, and mis/disinformation. While these models explain how political narratives are shaped, hype encompasses a broader, emotionally driven, and digitally amplified form of communication that reshapes public discourse and social behaviour. Situated within the emerging field of hype studies, this research explores how attention economies, emotionally resonant content, and algorithmic amplification influence political communication and civic engagement. This study examines the role of AI-generated algorithms and social media amplification in producing and sustaining political hype, with a particular focus on Pakistan from 2014 to 2024. This decade witnessed a transformation in the country's political landscape, marked by the integration of digital technologies into political discourse and mobilisation. Using a qualitative, case study approach, the research investigates how digital media contributed to the emergence of new political norms, strategies, and behaviours. Special attention is given to how youth engagement with digital platforms has driven these changes, turning social media into a central arena for political debate, identity formation, and emotional expression. The study aims to understand how hype is constructed, how it resonates with audiences especially young voters and how it shapes both short-term political outcomes and longer-term societal shifts. By analysing Pakistan’s recent political developments through the lens of hype studies, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between media, technology, and political culture in the Global South, with broader implications for the study of political communication in digital societies. 24 Ozan Altan Altinok Low expectations within conservative wing of discourse coalition for innovation and technoscience: integrating vanguard visions to therapeutic consent Drawing on the sociology of expectations, this paper inquires what objects, promises, and audiences are invoked in two examples of biotechnology discourse on organoids, MCELS (Multicellular Engineered Living Systems) in the USA and REBIRTH (From REgenerative BIology to Reconstructive THerapy) in Germany, and how that affects therapeutic consent. Therapeutic consent discussion in the literature has been focusing on singular discourse on the objects of biotechnology. This paper focuses on making of organoids embedded in two very large research projects of biotechnology in two comparative cases to fill the gap between cultures of imaginations and discourses. The paper claims that (a) both projects are connected through shared objects within vanguard visions joined through a discourse coalition. The discourse coalitions that are making them further can be connected at the object level both by the low expectations and the technoscientific imaginaries that are more relevant to public imagination by nested frameworks of vanguard visions and sociotechnical imaginaries. This connection is necessary for the object to be considered within the research and development of the object, whereas when the research programme is finished and the object itself is delivered, the low expectation and the calibration thereafter is dependent on this network (b) When the object [organoid] itself is a research object and a part of a discourse coalition is and an applied healthcare object at the same time, lowering of expectations and recalibration of the higher expectations are necessary for debates around consent as enabling conditions of consent in the very first place. Salvatore Romano "From Hype to Factual Errors: Moderating Generative Search for Election Integrity" Search engines are racing to integrate large-language-model onto their result pages, promising a new era of "generative search." Yet a close look at how these systems behave in live electoral contexts reveals a far uncertain picture. Drawing on the first public dataset of its kind, 5 561 prompt-answer pairs scraped from Microsoft Copilot during the 2023 campaigns in Switzerland, Bavaria and Hesse, AI Forensics shows that enthusiasm should give way to caution. Expert coders found that 30% of replies contained factual errors, while another 39% simply evaded the question, leaving barely a third of answers fully accurate. This evidence underscores the danger of delivering stochastic text generation as authoritative search output. The panel dissects the mixed-methods workflow behind those numbers: multilingual adversarial prompting in four languages, automated data collection for every response and its citations, and double-blind annotation guided by a codebook. We show how the resulting error patterns like hallucinated polling figures, invented scandals and phantom coalitions are systemic, not sporadic, raising immediate compliance questions under the EU Digital Services Act, which designates election information as a high-risk scenario demanding rigorous risk assessment and mitigation. Hype often celebrates what chatbots can do; we focus on what they still cannot. Building on daily monitoring of Microsoft Copilot across seven EU languages during the 2024 European Parliament race, we trace how platforms belatedly deployed political-content filters "policy shield" messages, and we will discuss why this opaque, reactive approach remains insufficient. By the end of the session, participants will take away a replicable audit pipeline for evaluating generativesearch answers in any language, fresh empirical evidence that moderation is indispensable yet currently inadequate, and a set of concrete policy proposals to align generative search with democratic norms and DSA obligations. 31 11th of September, 11:30-13:30 Chair: Ola Michalec Ola Michalec; Cian O'Donovan; Joshua Moon Can buzzwords create infrastructures? Reflecting on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus approach Over the past few decades, the increasing pressures on water, energy and food have widened social inequalities and furthered environmental damage. The scholarship on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEF Nexus) has responded with policy-oriented interdisciplinary research on modelling the use of environmental resources. While the WEF Nexus covers some elements of complexity, it has been critiqued by social scientists for ignoring questions of power and justice. On the other hand, the WEF Nexus has succeeded in mobilising funding and the attention of policymakers. How have sustainability researchers used the ‘WEF Nexus’ buzzword to engage with complexity and what are the underlying capabilities required to support this engagement? While current reviews of the WEF Nexus research focus on methodologies for integration and optimisation, we examine nexus research as an interdisciplinary practice, contingent on capabilities and politics. As such, we show how the WEF Nexus programme engaged with the notion of complexity, while acknowledging the notions of power and justice. We argue that the WEF Nexus buzzword was successful in building cognitive capabilities for researching complexity by giving researchers the flexibility to reconceptualise it as well as the freedom to assemble novel configurations of teams. However, the time-limited nature of the hype around the Nexus meant that researchers and programme leads were less able to translate their research agendas into transgressive, political action. This was particularly visible in the case of early career and overseas scholars who did not have the pre-existing ‘backstage’ capabilities, i.e. networks, access to relevant software or domain-specific knowledge. Émile Pronovost Crypto without credibility?: Understanding discourses and materiality of digital infrastructures through a case study in Sherbrooke; Canada This paper explores the dynamics of hype surrounding discourse on digital infrastructures by focusing on the case of Bitfarms, Canada’s second largest crypto-mining company operating in the municipality of Sherbrooke, Quebec. In a saga that lasted four years, one of Bitfarms crypto-mining center was delocalized : the constant ventilation noise that prevented its mining machines from overheating disturbed more than 500 hundreds residents from 2018 until it moved, in 2022. A panoply of actors and discourses contributed to the installation, unveiling and delocalization of Bitfarms’s crypto-mining center, an infrastructure that wasn’t trying to be seen. Beyond grounding digital 32 infrastructure in its material form, this case study offers a means to trace the discursive logics that shape, legitimize, and move through it. Through a revised typology of data centers, this study identifies crypto-mining centers as a controversial sub-type whose legitimacy is often questioned in public discourse. Using empirical data from fieldwork, interviews, press review and municipal councils, it analyzes how the Bitfarms saga became a local flashpoint, and how this case contrasts with the hyped framing surrounding AI infrastructures elsewhere in Quebec. By reclassifying crypto-mining centers within the broader category of data centers, this paper proposes to evaluate these infrastructures both by the discursives processes they are entangled with—local development promises, hype and bad press— and by their material footprint—energy use, spatial occupation, and socio-political impact on host communities. Focusing both on material and discursives dimensions of an infrastructure opens up a perspective to "deflate the hype" and re-ground debates in democratic accountability and ecological cost. In response to the question of whether hype can be prevented, this paper proposes a potential avenue for its mitigation: grounding the analysis of techno-hyped narratives— whether training large language models or mining cryptocurrencies —through their material infrastructures and territorial manifestations. Pietro Autorino Antihype: on compost non-scalability A wave of enthusiasm is generating great expectations in ecological agriculture under the tag of “regenerative farming” (Gosnell, 2022), moving the interest of different agrarian stakeholders, ranging from peasant smallholders, to policy-makers, multilateral organisations, and big corporations (Krzywoszynska, 2024). The main emphasis of regenerative agriculture lies on introducing soil care practices that enhance soil productivity, amongst which techniques of composting have gained particular traction (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015). Yet, when soil becomes a matter of care, how does this interrogate and reconfigure the politics of scale in agroecological transitions (Ghelfi and Papadopoulos, 2022)? I focus on a particular approach to regenerative farming commercialised and popularised by Dr Elaine Ingham as “Soil Food Web” (Ingham, 2004) and frame the current hype (Kastenhofer, 2023) around this specific approach, also amidst the broader promises of a microbial turn in agroecology (Muenster, 2018). I shed light on how the applied use of biocomplete compost and microbiological approaches to soil repair reframe soil remediation (Aachen and Eichmann, 2009; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2021) as a pluriverse multiscalar and translocal process of reconfiguring more-than-human relationalities. I propose the concept of “Anti-hype”, to highlight the frictions that arise when ontologies that take seriously multispecies care and relational complexity in human-soil ecotones such as the realm of composting on the one hand, meet with attempts of performing scalability, systematising, standardising and/or coopting compost experimentalism into agroindustrial processes. I emphasise how practices and imaginaries of composting activate material-semiotic (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018) abundance which in this phase of radical grassroots elaboration of alternatives articulate thick ambiguities (Abrahamsson and Bertoni, 2014) about scalability (Tsing, 2016). Yet, the point is not solving dilemmas about how and whether to scale these processes, but rather exploring how the material politics of the compost resist and decompose the problems of scale vis-à-vis extractivism and productivist growth in agrarian ecologies in the late stages of the long green revolution (Patel, 2012). 33 Chair: Mirna Zeman Mirna Zeman Hypes; Fashions and Automatisms Diagnosis “hype” applied to massively consumed, popular, marketable media artefacts (including literature, arts and technology) has been filling sections in journals and magazines in recent years and has mostly taken a form of value statement, criticizing hypes as a negative effect of the late capitalist economy. Despite the conjuncture of the term, we still miss a theory defining hypes in the field of culture, explaining how they emerge and what role they play in circulation of themes and motives around the globe and in dynamics of cultural/literary/media evolution. I define literary/popcultural/media hypes as largely non-predictable, short-term clusters/accumulations of similar content (including its cross-media translations and material spin-offs), having an impact on a consumer and frequently facing practical “realizations” on the recipient’s side (e.g. in form of cults). My presentation proposes to think of hypes in analogy to (vestimentary) fashions. Hypes follow the law of (variant as well as invariant) repetition inherent to the mechanism of fashion. Both hypes and fashions can be identified on the basis of abundance of similar material, both are short-term, temporary phenomena depending on an ability of a model to reproduce large number of variants of its kind. Focusing on examples of hypes in European Literatures, the presentation offers a cyclical concept of (literary) hypes/fashions, aiming to discuss its applicability on other spheres of hype studies in the plenum of the conference. The concept employs the notions of cumulation, seriality and iteration in describing literary hypes, and poses the question whether changes in prevailing hypes move through a series of recurring cycles. Furthermore, the presentation proposes the concept of “automatisms”, that was introduced in the theory of literature by Russian Formalists and that was being further developed in an interdisciplinary context by the research training group “Automatisms. Cultural Techniques of Complexity Reduction” at Paderborn University, as useful descriptive model for hype. “Automatisms” are defined as processes that largely elude conscious control. They exist on the level of individual and collective action as well as in interactions with technology. Since they are rooted in repetition ‒ rather than in creativity, planning, or design ‒ automatisms are close to the mechanical. At the same time, these processes do not function like technical automata. There are neither prior definitions nor programmings. It is the execution itself, and the scattered activity of many, that create the structure of hype. Virtually behind the backs of those involved, automatisms of hypes generate new structures. Rebecca DeWael Cultural Prizes as Hype: The Case of the Oscars Devon Powers (2012) defines hype as “a state of anticipation generated through the circulation of promotion, resulting in a crisis of value” (pp. 863, emphasis in original). This paper uses this definition to consider the Oscars Best Picture competition. For nearly a century, industry professionals, film enthusiasts, and pop culture fans alike have participated in the celebration of and debate around the films and filmmakers honoured by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in their annual Oscars Awards. This ceremony, affectionately dubbed “Hollywood’s Biggest Night,” is the final event in a string of awards ceremonies for the American film industry which take place in the early months of each year. All of these other cultural prize ceremonies, like the Golden Globes and the Emmys, act as precursors and predictors for 34 the Oscars, contributing to the hype around the films nominated for the Best Picture. Here, winning other prizes and gaining public attention builds the hype of nominated films, which is paired with studio For Your Consideration campaigns which act to convince Academy members to choose their film while voting, which increases the chance of the film winning the Oscar. This ultimately also leads to increased box office sales for nominated films. But James F. English (2009) suggests that awarding bodies give cultural prizes because they want to maintain their own cultural and symbolic power. In other words, prizes increase the hype not only for the film that receives the prize, but also the organization which gives the prize. I suggest that combining English’s theorization of cultural prizes and Powers’ definition of hype allows for a deeper understanding of how the Oscars functions within social discourses. Eileen Stephens In Defence of Unsexiness: Hype as a Tool of Neoliberal Cultural Policy Neoliberalism via New Public Management (NPM) has restructured public policy, and cultural policy is no exception. The shift from operational funding transfers to a competitive grantmaking process focussing on time-based projects reflects a move from government service delivery to one relying on external consultants. While the project model rewards spectacle and innovation, it produces two consequences : hyperbolic writing and sidelining background work in cultural institutions. The resulting competition mindset features application and review language that requires every project to be boundary breaking, transgressive, and disruptive, all while having matching funding while not using funding to support administrative staff or building expenses, otherwise known as the unsexy aspects of the art world. Decades of this model have left cultural institutions stretched to a breaking point. This presentation critiques the political and linguistic economies of cultural funding hype. Funders’ prioritization of visibility, novelty, quantifiable outcomes and deliverables, and the hyperbolic language used to communicate them, require permanent hyperbole and contribute to the ongoing precarity in the arts. A call to action for funders to move away from constant cycles of project-based financing and reprioritize unrestricted operating funding – a return to unsexiness – is issued. Natalia Stanusch Platformatted Hype: How to Operationalize the Formalities of AI “Slop”? This paper is an invitation to conceptualize and operationalize a set of formalities of hype - defined as ‘platformatted’ (following MacKenzie and Munster, 2019) hype – by turning to study a selection of visuals generated by text-to-image/video AI models. Using a multitude of interdisciplinary approaches, such as feminist critique, media studies, art history, and critical AI studies, this paper aims to further critical engagement with the social implications of algorithmic systems and AI at large. This paper asks: How can we operationalize hype as a formal (aesthetic) and affective category that can be applied to study both the ‘AI’ hype at large and generative AI visuals as its symptom? To do so, I offer a framework to understand, critique, and intervene in what I define as ‘platformatted hype.’ We can approach platformatted hype as a set of formal characteristics aimed to capture attention by 1) affecting the viewers to stop (scrolling) through excitement, weird disturbance, or strangeness and 2) recognizing its embeddedness into a technical system oriented towards a specific set of values which translates into particular (aesthetical) formalities that can be best conceptualized as, indeed, hype. In this research, I focus on visuals-as-case-studies which exemplify platformatted hype in action. To conceptualize it, I relate platformatted hype to the notions of spam, poor image, cyber-phantasmagoria, networked images, noise, enshittification, and slop. I use the concept of affect to further bridge platformatted hype’s formal qualities with its embeddedness into platforms; platforms are central entities 35 as they are the (im)material enforcement of power dynamics between monopolistic players of Big Tech, users, and objects. It is on and through platforms where platformatted hype is distributed, circulated, and amplified with its viral spreading, seductive force of simulation, and, ultimately, financial accumulation. I furthermore argue that platformatted hype spills over platforms, outside social media sites. 36 Chair: Carolina Cavalcanti Falcão Shiming Shen Myth, Power, and Sovereignty: Mapping AI Hype in the Discourse of the Chinese State Narratives around artificial intelligence often employ what Campolo and Crawford (2020) describe as enchanted determinism—a rhetorical strategy that portrays AI as an unstoppable, quasi-mystical force beyond human understanding or control. In China, technology development plays a central role in official narratives surrounding national rejuvenation and technological sovereignty. Notably, given that all media and enterprises operate under the surveillance of the Communist Party, it becomes particularly compelling to examine the alignment—or collusion—between different actors in producing and sustaining these narratives. This study explores the mechanisms of AI hype in an authoritarian context by analyzing the official website of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (www.gov.cn). This platform functions as the government’s central hub for publishing policies, official documents, press releases, and information on national affairs. A search using the keyword “人工智能” (artificial intelligence) and related terms reveals 10,534 articles on the topic, spanning from 2016 to the present. This study is structured in two parts, focusing respectively on temporal and relational dimensions: 1. Discursive Strategies: Using computational textual analysis, this part will trace a genealogy of AI narratives, with particular attention to how techno-nationalist discourses are constructed and disseminated in the Chinese context. Programming tools such as Python or R will be used to analyze the discourse and identify recurring patterns and ideological frames. 2. Power Dynamics: To analyze the actor-network involved in shaping dominant AI discourse, we will conduct a network analysis based on metadata from each article on the State Council’s website. Each entry includes hyperlinks to original sources, enabling the identification of key actors—ranging from government departments and media outlets to technology firms and research institutions. The network of interactions among these entities will be mapped using Gephi, in order to understand how power circulates and consensus is built. Through this empirical exploration of discourse and power relations in China’s AI ecosystem, the project seeks to illuminate how enchanted determinism and techno-optimism are mobilized by different actors. Ultimately, this research aims to contribute to comparative understandings of how AI hype is constructed across different political systems, particularly between state-led models and capitalist surveillance regimes. Michael Senters There Will Be No Silksong News at the Direct: Performative Cynicism; Nega-Hype and Managing Identity in a Terminally Online World. Hype has been an integral part in fandom culture for many years but in particular it has played a key role in the video game industry where hype surrounding new games and console releases are always surrounded by an immense amount of hype. As the industry and fandom surrounding it has grown, hype and buildup for new releases has grown around it. There have been many instances of games failing to live up to the hype it has generated such as the original releases of No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2070. These instances of failure, alongside trolls and others mocking hype culture has led to the creation of a sort of performative cynicism 37 within the fandom, especially surrounding games that people hope to see made such as Silksong and Bloodborne Remake. As announcement shows like Nintendo Direct and State of Play have become more common, so too has the growth of this kind of performative cynicism to create a form of nega-hype, a hyping of belief that announcements surrounding certain games will never happen or will be unlikely to happen. Why do people do this performative cynicism about games they clearly care immensely about? I argue in this paper that this form of nega-hype is a kind of defensive reaction to a world where sincerity is often looked down upon. In order to maintain one’s social identity in an increasingly online world it becomes necessary to perform this cynicism which I feel leads to tension within individual fans and creates a toxic fandom culture that can only be defeated by choosing to embrace sincerity and embracing hype. Carolina Cavalcanti Falcão What’s the Hype? Generational Differences as Markers of Behavior and Identity This project stems from an initial inquiry into the growing use of generational differences as symbolic markers of behavior and identity. It takes as a premise that such differences are not biologically given but discursively constructed, especially within digital culture, where they gain visibility, circulate rapidly, and acquire performative force. The aim is to understand how these distinctions between “young” and “old” are continually updated through cultural and media signs that act as moral, affective, and aesthetic classifications. The analytical approach is discursive, focusing on the construction of a field of contested signifiers. Expressions such as “cringe,” “boomer,” “millennial,” and “Gen Z” go beyond chronological labeling; they operate as symbolic markers of belonging, adequacy, or displacement. Within this context, the concept of hype plays a central role — not as a tool for forecasting trends, but as a cultural force of traction that drives the emergence and adherence to certain ways of being, dressing, consuming, and positioning oneself. Hype, here, is understood as a cultural operator that produces symbolic value and accelerates generational distinctions, while sustaining the ephemeral and viral logic of digital relevance. This perspective draws on authors who examine the performative nature of social classification (Butler, 1993; Hall, 1997), youth culture and symbolic struggle (McRobbie, 2009), as well as the production of media value and cultural circulation (Banet-Weiser, 2012; 2018). It also engages with critical views of youth as a historical and political construction (Dayrell, 2003; Pais, 2006), proposing a discursive reading that treats generational markers as floating signifiers, whose fixation is always partial and contingent. The analytical proposal is to map how hype contributes to the reinvention of generational boundaries — not only by updating stereotypes, but by reshaping the symbolic limits of what it means to be “young” or “old” in digital environments. The research will examine the circulation of memes, short videos, hashtags, and viral expressions on social media, with a special focus on the disputes surrounding signs such as “cringe,” “boomer,” “ok millennial,” and “Gen Z.” These signs function performatively, establishing classifications that affect recognition, belonging, and exclusion. Ana Belen Rojo Ojados Hyper(Me) The phenomenon of "hype" within virtualized social spaces—such as social media platforms (SMPs) or video games—acts as a double-edged catalyst, merging marketing spectacle, community fervor, and cultural anticipation to shape consumer behavior and industry trends. In the case of video games, this operates via the viral dissemination of pre-release trailers, influencer endorsements, and social media virality (e.g., GTA 38 VI, Starfield, Elden Ring, or Silksong). Hype generates artificial scarcity and fear of missing out (FOMO), incentivizing pre-orders and microtransaction investments (the greater the hype, the higher the monetization potential). This performative cycle, rooted in Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, often decouples player expectations from product reality, triggering adverse reactions when games fail to meet promised outcomes. On the other hand, social media platforms such as Twitch and TikTok amplify hype through algorithm-driven promotion, transforming video games into transient cultural events rather than enduring works of art. Meanwhile, corporate strategies instrumentalize nostalgia (e.g., remakes, sequels) and early access models, prioritizing economic gains over creative risk-taking. Ethically, hype perpetuates exploitative labor practices (such as the crunch phenomenon) and manipulates younger audiences through loot box psychology. Ultimately, hype reflects the infiltration of neoliberalism into the realm of play, commodifying passion while obscuring systemic inequities in access and representation. Sustainable innovation demands dismantling the cyclical toxicity of hype by centering player agency over corporate spectacle. The proliferation of virtual worlds, such as Second Life and Inzoi (released in April 2025), has intensified ethical debates surrounding the intersection of identity, visual design, and corporate power in digital spaces. This analysis examines how the aesthetic and structural design of virtual environments—from avatar customization interfaces and branded in-game assets to the algorithmic manipulation of visual content—shapes ethical dilemmas pertaining to selfrepresentation, cultural homogenization, and systemic inequalities. Drawing on visual culture studies, ethics, and design politics, the critique interrogates the neoliberal foundations of virtual identity construction, arguing that hype surrounding creative freedom often conceals exploitative design practices and suppresses alternative perspectives, generating biases and marginalization. Within these platforms, identity becomes commodified through graphic design choices that prioritize commercial imperatives over values such as inclusivity and diversity. Avatar-creation tools, for instance, frequently replicate reductive visual tropes (e.g., normative or objectified bodies) that reinforce Eurocentric aesthetic standards. These design decisions, rooted in Barthes’ (1964) semiotics of visual culture, encode power dynamics into the very interfaces users navigate, reducing identity to a series of consumable aesthetics. Meanwhile, corporate branding infiltrates virtual spaces through hyperrealistic clothing or architecture, as exemplified by Balenciaga’s viral 2023 collaboration in Fortnite, which blurs the boundaries between self-expression and consumerist conformity. 39 Chair: Berk Alkoç Fabio Morreale Reductive; Exclusionary; Normalising: Beyond the Hype of Generative AI Music This presentation offers a critical examination of the reductive, exclusionary, and normalising tendencies embedded in modern Machine Learning approaches to generate music algorithmically (GenAI). In the public discourse, GenAI is often promoted as the ultimate tool that will (finally) allow anyone to generate any type of music with no effort, at little to no cost. This techno-solutionist rhetoric has gained unprecedented traction, leading to claims of having solved and democratised music. In my presentation, I will expose how such claims depend on a strategic erasure of the systemic constraints embedded into GenAI. I identify such constraints as processes of reduction, exclusion, and normalisation as well as multiple arbitrary ontological and epistemological assumptions about music, which drastically delimit what music such systems can generate. In my presentation, I will report the most common architectures and paradigms of GenAI and foreground the specific mechanisms through which they normalise particular musical ontologies and foreclose (most) musical possibilities. In stark opposition to their stated narrative of freedom and democratisation, GenAI tools impose normative constraints by defining what is acceptable, correct, or preferable, and by disallowing deviations from these predefined norms. Thus, I aim to show how hype operates not merely as overstatement, but as a cultural logic that reifies narrow aesthetics and epistemologies, and encodes value judgements under the guise of technological neutrality. Here, hype constructs a fantasy of autonomy, even as the outputs of these systems are tightly constrained by curatorial and raciaslised data regimes and encoded assumptions and by numerous human interventions and corrections that remain necessary at various stages. I will conclude by showing how the veil sustained by hype obscures the true potential of GenAI for musical innovation – a potential that risks remaining untapped unless freed from exploitative ideologies, flawed epistemologies, and hype narratives. Mark Higgins Suspended in Hype: Dubstep; Creative Innovation; and Algorithmic Music Generation In this paper I examine the digital ecosystem within which dubstep music was suspended during the 2010s, a period nestled between hypes. Dubstep enjoyed meteoric hype at the start of that decade. A few years later, reflecting today’s salivatory trend, generative AI tools such as Suno can birth original tracks in seconds. Dubstep first emerged from a small, London subculture. What was originally a sparse and sonically ominous music rapidly evolved into a technocentric showcase of complex robotic sounds, symbolising an electronicrock attitude. After converging with the American mainstream, the radically reconfigured music had a prominent media presence until the hype evaporated under its own heat. Post-hype dubstep persisted through the remainder of the 2010s, supported by a new generation of digitally enabled music-makers and a growing trove of online learning materials and creative assets. In contrast to the restless musical innovation of the preceding decade, though, dubstep’s core sonic attributes remained unchanged. Even today, prompting Suno with “instrumental dubstep track” yields material with exactly the same sonic characteristics predominant during dubstep’s post-hype period. 40 In this paper, I show the relationship between the enduring sonic-homology of post-hype dubstep and a highly prescriptive, proceduralised approach to music-making, promoted by readily accessible digital resources. I further consider how the technologised epistemological infrastructure effectively suspended music-makers within an algorithmic creative space, prefiguring the algorithms that underpin music generation with AI today. In conclusion, I consider the contrast between the kind of vitality that enabled dubstep’s rapid evolution during the comparably offline 2000s with the apparent stultification of the heavily digitised 2010s. Amid the current hype surrounding AI, this leaves a timely question hanging: what might the heavily technologised, algorithmic musicking that characterised post-hype dubstep foreshadow with regards to the future of novel creative innovation in an increasingly automated popular music ecosystem? Gabriel Gutierrez The Hype of Urban Music in Brazil and Around the World Urban music is currently experiencing a significant surge in popularity both in Brazil and in the global market. In the latest report by the IFPI, produced by the world’s leading record companies, two out of the three case studies presented focus on urban music artists: Tyler, The Creator (rap) and Myke Towers (reggaeton). Among the ten most-streamed artists globally in 2024, five belong to the urban music genre. As a musical genre, urban music encompasses contemporary sounds that have emerged from major global cities, often originating in peripheral areas and marked by strong Afro-diasporic influences. These aesthetics include rap (trap, grime, drill), Brazilian funk (miami, tamborzão, mandelão, MTG), reggaeton, dancehall, afropop, among others. As early as 2017, a Nielsen study indicated that rap had become the most consumed music genre in the United States, surpassing rock. In Brazil, the only genre capable of challenging the dominance of pop sertanejo is urban music, represented by artists such as Anitta, Ludmilla, Gloria Groove, Matuê, MC Ryan, Xamã, Kevin O Chris, Felipe Ret, Tasha & Tracie, Veigh, Kayblack, among others. These artists are increasingly gaining prominence, featuring in editorial playlists and performing at both national and international festivals. Consequently, between 2022 and 2023, urban music consumption on streaming platforms grew by 90%, reaching a total of 2 billion streams, according to Crowley. The hype surrounding urban music is a global phenomenon, consolidated by Puerto Rican reggaeton, American rap/trap, and the growing potential for exporting Brazilian funk. Originating in urban peripheries and produced with digital audio technologies, Brazilian urban music intersects with economic sectors such as fashion, beverages, and creative industries like television. This article investigates the economic, cultural, technological, and aesthetic factors contributing to the rise of Brazilian urban music, particularly rap and funk from Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to understand the reasons behind its success by analyzing urban music through the lenses of popular cultural matrices, global postmodernism, Afro-diasporic music, and pop music. The aim is to contribute to research on the communication and music markets in the contemporary world. Ilja Mirsky Hypertexting: Theater & Hype as Performance Machines This session proposes a critical and historically contextualized inquiry into the co-evolution of theater and hype as mutually reinforcing modalities of performance. It posits that both function as technologies of anticipation—structuring public attention, shaping narrative expectations, and producing affective engagement. Drawing on performance studies, media theory, and cultural history, the session interrogates 47 I argue that understanding hype requires interpretive attention to the meanings, associations, and behaviours that emerge from specific contexts. Rather than stabilising hype through rigid definitions, I emphasise its performative and behavioural dimensions, how it guides individual and collective actions, often coexisting with or even challenging formal frameworks. Hype, I contend, should be recognised for its flexibility, ambiguity, and embeddedness in institutional settings and cultural narratives. By contrasting this folk concept approach with externally imposed academic constructs like imaginaries, I highlight the importance of emic perspectives, the situated understandings actors bring to hype. Through mixed qualitative empirical research, I aim to examine how different actors interpret and experience hype in practice, how their views are shaped by cultural environments and positionalities, and how these dynamics contribute to the reproduction of hype within the digital economy. My analysis ultimately aims to reveal the underlying beliefs and ongoing practices that sustain and circulate hype as a powerful force in contemporary innovation systems. 48 Chair: Quentin Gervasoni Amelia Moore Automation Fever and the Hype of Child Online Safety The safety of young people on social media continues to receive heightened attention, driven by growing moral concern and intensified political discussion. This research critically examines the discourses underlying online safety, drawing on policy interventions, stakeholder interviews, and media representations. In particular, I reflect on the cultural influence of the Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ and the enactment of the UK’s Online Safety Act. As a snapshot of this rapidly evolving field, the study explores how dominant narratives of risk and protection construct young people as uniquely vulnerable digital subjects. This framing has fuelled demands for urgent intervention and contributed to a broader climate of automation anxiety, where fears about the societal impacts of technology escalate without clear direction. My findings suggest that the responsibility to protect is being shifted between policymakers, technology companies, and parents. This dynamic creates an ideal environment for accountability to be avoided and has the potential to legitimise approaches to care that blur the line between safety and surveillance. As a result, I question whether sufficient scrutiny is given to online safety policies, as they have significant implications for the agency of young people in digital spaces. I suggest that effective safeguarding of young people on social media requires cutting through the hype and fostering collaboration among stakeholders at the personal, political, and corporate levels. This is important to ensure that digital autonomy is not lost in the noise of moral panic and techno-solutionism. Jacob Pleasants; Dan Krutka; Marie Heath Challenging Tech Hype in Education - The Civics of Technology Project Educational spaces have long been sites of intense technology hype. Purveyors of education technology create hype by promising to disrupt, transform, and revolutionise "outmoded" educational approaches. These hype narratives have been extremely successful and lucrative for industry actors, even while their promises of transformative change have failed to materialize. Recent developments in "artificial intelligence” technologies have only amplified this historical trend. Hype around the "potential" of these new technologies has led to high-profile procurements at institutions of higher education as well as public schools. How do we push back against these hype narratives about technology and schools? The Civics of Technology Project is a grassroots organisation of educators who have come together to advance alternative visions of technology in education, from public schools to colleges and universities. Many of us are part of an emerging field of critical education technologies studies has begun to investigate the political and economic systems and social actors that perpetuate the hype cycles of education technology. We seek to both understand and disrupt hype narratives, replacing them instead with a "technoskeptical" stance. In this session, we will share work that our community has done and is doing to advance our technoskep2cal perspec2ve. We will highlight instructional resources that we have developed that promote a measured rather than hype-laden view of technology. These include an investigation of provocative quotes about technology and an approach to conducting a technoethical audit. We will also share some of the ongoing collaborative work of our community, with invitations for getting involved. Our overarching aim with this 49 session is to identify and build connections between the work of the Civics of Technology network and the world of hype studies. Ariadna Angulo-Brunet; Maria Teresa Soto-Sanfiel; Chin-Wen Chong Too much hype? How hyped artificial intelligence news affects perceptions of scientific and journalists credibility Hype in science communication refers to the exaggeration or sensationalism of scientific information, often lacking robust evidence. At present, both practitioners and researchers warn that hype can undermine the credibility of scientists, journalists and the sources through which scientific information is disseminated. At the same time, some scholars view it as positive as it can also be beneficial to boost public interest in science. This study specifically examines how exposure to hype in news about Artificial Intelligence influences perceptions of credibility for scientists, journalists, and information sources. Using an experimental design, 622 participants (48.9% female) were randomly assigned to watch one of 10 video news segments about AI applications, varying in topic (self-driving cars or finance), hype intensity (low, neutral, high), and outcome valence (positive or negative). Preand post-exposure measures assessed attitudes toward AI, anxiety, aOect, and credibility perceptions (scientists, journalists and source). Multiple regression analyses revealed that hype intensity and outcome valence did not significantly impact scientists' credibility. However, higher message evaluation scores were associated with lower scientist credibility, while greater source competence, trustworthiness and reputation were linked to higher scientist credibility. For journalist credibility, higher message evaluation scores predicted lower credibility, while greater source trustworthiness and reputation were associated with higher credibility. Regarding source credibility, exposure to high-intensity negative hype increased perceptions of goodwill and trustworthiness compared to neutral conditions. Anxiety negatively predicted all source credibility dimensions, while positive affect, message credibility, and source reputation positively predicted them. The findings suggest hype may have nuanced effects on credibility perceptions that vary by target. While not directly impacting scientist credibility, hype appears to influence journalist and source credibility evaluations. Overall, the results indicate a complex relationship between hype exposure and credibility judgments in science communication that warrants further investigation. Giulia Villanucci ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic did not take place’: The role of hype and an autoethnographic reflection on Covid19 communication strategies This paper examines the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of media hype, attention economy, and the dynamics of public communication, drawing on a digital autoethnographic approach. Reflecting on my own experience of navigating the infodemic, I interrogate how background knowledge in media studies enabled me to critically assess pandemic-related content circulating online, a capacity not equally accessible to (nor to be expected from) all social media users. The analysis situates personal experience within broader theoretical frameworks informed by Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality and Bourdieu’s theory of capital. I argue that the affective intensity of social media during the pandemic, particularly the repeated circulation of graphic and emotionally charged imagery, such as Italian military convoys transporting coffins in northern Italy in March 2020, functioned as a mechanism of hype. These spectacles sustained social media content attention, but the information overload in conjunction with traumatic lived experiences of the pandemic helped undermine trust in more complex and rapidly-changing official communication and directives for months to come. I explore how science communicators, government bodies, and health organisations 50 struggled to compete with the emotional immediacy and algorithmic velocity of platformed discourse, leading to a collapse in trust and increased vulnerability to dis/misinformation. The paper presents illustrative examples of Covid-19 communication strategies across institutional and informal settings, critically analysing their effectiveness within the context of an attention-driven media environment. I argue that the pandemic’s mediatisation facilitated the production of conditions in which the most emotionally resonant (rather than the most accurate) messages prevailed. In doing so, the paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the limitations of public communication in crises shaped by hype and digital saturation. 51 Chair: Eugenia Stamboliev Charles Pidgeon Criti-hype; four years on and in the age of consumer AI In 2021, technology historian Lee Vinsel warned against what he termed “criti-hype”: the phenomenon of critics inadvertently reinforcing the tech industry’s power by overhyping and sensationalising technological doomsday scenarios. ‘It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes’, writes Vinsel. The most obvious recent example of this is conversations around genAI: frequently, far-off apocalypses of hyper-intelligent robot overlords distort and distract from the actual material consequences of current AI practices. Skynet-like prophesies about AI extinction events swallow up funding, public attention, and academic research, meanwhile, current harms are under-emphasised (such as the uncompensated ransacking of our informational commons, floods of AI scams, deskilling and loss of verifiable knowledge, and environmental degradation). Talk about future robot overlords distracts from talk about current labour laws. As Jathan Sadowski comments, ‘These companies would love for everybody to believe they have such lucrative powers!’. The job of the technology critic, therefore, seems clear: to identify and denounce hype at all times, never giving it air time, lest one accidentally perform criti-hype. The difficulty, of course, is that identifying hype as hype (unverified, over-inflated, sensational claims) requires giving hype air time. To debunk, fact-check, and verify overhyped claims requires us to detail those claims and find where they become untethered from reality. In my paper, I assess and build on Vinsel’s characterisation, which was written before the public release of ChatGPT (2022) and other consumer AI products. In doing so, I offer up provocations about how STS scholars should engage in technological criticism without inadvertently giving extra oxygen to hype. Jimi DePriest Don't believe the hA.I.pe This presentation seeks to explore the role of hype in promoting psycho-social currents of both approval and fear in public attitudes towards A.I. and its development as an extension of state sovereignty and military power. I aim to address politicised A.I. hype in terms seeking to analyse the presence of hyperstition in cases where dangerous and untested automation technologies are being ushered into the public sphere by neoliberal regimes. Remaining critical of the discriminatory track record and inherent biases found in A.I. technologies engineered as tools for enforcing oppressive politico-economic measures, the exploitation of marginalized people is condemned as a pervasive feature of their manufacture and implementation. Taking a dialectical approach, the material and ideological conditions surrounding the burgeoning upsurge in A.I. investment practised by contemporary neoliberal states sliding towards fascism will be compared to the technofetishism found in the commercial appeal of early automation technology to the German Nazi regime. The hypnotic data lust which fueled the German Nazi regimes obsession with data extraction is proposed to be comparable to the insatiable demand for data which undergirds contemporary A.I. production. Socialhistorical and political-economic concerns will be tempered with cultural analyses to tease out the role of myth making which underlies the propagandized narratives used to generate public beliefs about the 52 potential value, ethics and capabilities of employing machinic systems to automate the bureaucratic, infrastructural and martial programs of state forces. I endeavor to unpack how mainstream dystopian narratives which overhype the capacity for social control displayed by A.I. contributes to public capitulation to its institutional weaponization, as the technology is perceived as a dominating and immutable force which cannot be resisted. Proposing the importance of emphasizing the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of neoliberal A.I. systems acts as a starting point for exploring potentials for resistance. Eugenia Stamboliev Un-hyping Trustworthy AI AI trustworthiness matters, but its scope is unclear; most of it is a hyped buzzword. The content, reliability, output, or data accuracy of a technology can determine its trustworthiness. As we see that GenAI applications such as ChatGPT are highly untrustworthy due to their inconsistent and inaccurate results, we mostly focus on content issues like Chatbots (LLMs) fabricates non-existent facts, offers unreliable but smashed-up summaries, or invents sources. Following, I will argue that we wrongly hype the trustworthiness of ChatGPT. For once, we only focus on the content side in debating trustworthiness. Regardless of whether the content output of chatbots or GenAI applications is correct, these tools are inherently untrustworthy due to unfairly obtained online resources, infringement on the copyrights of various book authors, and concealment of exploitative working conditions. I show that ChatGPT–as an example for so-called “AI”– can be only understood fully by examining its epistemic distrust or looking at its untrustworthiness, considering the sociotechnical, political, and ethical criteria. Overall, I illustrate three points: Firstly, our trust concerns in chatbots or AI are one-sided and output-driven, overlooking their production and materiality. Second, this neglect can unintentionally promote unethical or limited norms of what makes a holistically trustworthy technology (assuming we can have one). Third, I argue that distrust is a neglected concept and method of exploring the refusal of unethical or undemocratic AI. Emre Altindag Visualizing Otherwise: A Wordless Artistic Inquiry into Surveillance and Dispossession This presentation explores my graphic art book The Cost of Being Homeless in the Age of Smart Cities, a visual narrative that challenges dominant discourses around technological "smartness" in urban development. As a visual artist and researcher, I use silent sequential art to unpack how hype-driven imaginaries of "smart cities" often exclude or erase the lived experiences of unhoused individuals, reducing complex social issues to datafied abstractions. Grounded in practice-based research and a methodology of visual storytelling, the work resists alarmist or utopian narratives by centering poetic visual metaphors that embody fragility, displacement, and resistance. The process of crafting this graphic novel becomes a form of artistic inquiry, where drawing is not illustrative but investigative, an aesthetic tool to engage with surveillance, precarity, and invisibility. Although not an installation or workshop, the graphic novel itself is a completed creative work that embodies a form of critical, practice-based research. My presentation will reflect on how artists can approach complex socio-technological topics through artistic research, and how a graphic novel can function as a site of knowledge production, challenging the hype from within. This contribution fits the Making and Doing track because it does not merely talk about hype but shows how artistic practice becomes a form of action-research, visually questioning dominant futures and offering new ways of seeing and feeling. 53 Chair: Luiga Tircase Wenzel Mehnert Preparing for the hype to come: Fictional Technofutures to prime expectations of the future Science fiction (SF) serves as both a mirror and a guide to society's relationship with technological innovation, simultaneously reflecting cultural anxieties and aspirations while shaping the discourse around new and emerging technologies (NEST). From Isaac Asimov’s benevolent robots to dystopian visions like HAL 9000 or the Terminator, SF constructs technoimaginaries—visions of possible futures that attribute meaning to technology and influence public expectations. This presentation investigates the interplay between SF and technology development through the lens of technofutures—speculative depictions that extend beyond prediction to actively shape the socio-technical discourse. By tracing SF's role in fostering cultural imaginaries, this work highlights how these narratives impact societal acceptance, inspire technological innovation, and reinforce unfounded hype beyond the entertainment industry. Building on frameworks from science and technology studies (STS), this research offers a critical, hermeneutic perspective to evaluate SF’s influence on technology. It explores the dialectic between utopian and dystopian narratives, emphasizing the risks of reductive readings that commodify SF into mere product roadmaps, neglecting its nuanced critique of sociocultural dynamics and highlights the interplay between hype, pop culture and the commodification of expectations of the future. Ultimately, this analysis calls for integrating SF into a systematic approach to technology assessment and hype reflection, recognizing its dual role as a repository of sociotechnical imaginaries and a driver of global technology hype. The approach enriches our understanding of how speculative storytelling shapes not just perceptions but the material development of technological futures on a global scale. Giuseppina Debbi Beyond the Hype: Hybrid Practices and Silent Resistance in the Adoption of AI in Italian Journalism In global debates on artificial intelligence in journalism, hype often acts as an uncritical driver of technological transformation. The Italian context is characterised by a peculiar coexistence: on the one hand, institutional journalism resists the hype through editorial silence, union caution, and a notable absence of specific policies and guidelines. On the other hand, journalists are informally and individually using AI tools in their routines, revealing an underground, unregulated, and everyday engagement with AI in newsrooms. A unique and illustrative case is that of Il Foglio, a conservative daily newspaper, which launched Il Foglio AI, a four-page insert generated entirely by AI from human prompts. The month-long initiative, deliberately provocative and explicitly non-substitutive, exemplifies a hybrid model of AI adoption. It highlights the layered complexity and ambivalence of the Italian media landscape, where innovation emerges not through top-down strategies but through experimental and editorially driven provocations. Il Foglio’s editor-in-chief has confirmed his intention to continue publishing AI-generated content selectively. This contribution presents an in-depth study based on the analysis of journalistic practices and public discourse related to the Il Foglio initiative. It argues that the gap between the global hype surrounding AI and the Italian reality reflects not only strategic or cultural differences, but also a structural lack of systematic training. The issue is not merely one of technical competence, but of cultivating a critical, ethical, and design-oriented 54 professional culture around AI in journalism. Italy thus emerges not as a laggard, but as a revealing laboratory for rethinking AI adoption beyond deterministic narratives, where resistance and experimentation actively coexist. This case invites reflection on the need for training mechanisms capable of accompanying, rather than passively enduring, innovation. Clemens Ackerl; Jascha Bareis; Reinhard Heil Hyping Up AI Beyond Human Controllability? As artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities continue to advance, a once-niche debate confined to expert circles and science fiction novels is moving to the forefront of public discourse: the risk of AI surpassing human controllability and triggering catastrophic consequences. Scenarios of sudden takeovers, societal collapse, or apocalyptic destruction may appear drawn from dystopian fiction, but they are increasingly shaping real-world policy debates. AI existential risks (X-risks) are a particularly emotionally evocative frame. After all, such doomsday scenarios imply drastic opportunity costs and closing windows of action to mitigate absolute worstcase effects for humanity. Consequently, they are highly performative and resemble the characteristics of (criti-)hypes. This paper presents an integrative narrative review of the assumptions and rhetorical underpinnings of Xrisk discourse in the academic literature, focusing specifically on scenarios involving AI beyond human controllability. Drawing on 81 peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, we examine how these narratives shape debates at the crossroads of the tech world, NGOs, politics and (social) media – despite ongoing contestation over their plausibility. Our analysis reveals a fragmented discourse marked by bold yet often unsubstantiated claims, including accelerationist growth models and speculative calculations of catastrophic tipping points. Functionalist, anthropomorphic, and metaphysical conceptualizations of AI dominate, while interdisciplinary perspectives considering issues of infrastructure, social agency, and Big Tech oligopolies remain marginal. Rather than acting as a counterweight, the academic discourse frequently reproduces the logic of hype – failing to distinguish clearly between speculative claims and empirically grounded concerns. We argue that such hype dynamics distort and risk undermining meaningful engagement. To counter this, we propose a plausibility checklist for AI (X-risk) hype and argue for an attention shift from the maximum possible negative consequences to the speaking position and authority of those making claims, and the AI characteristics presumed as prerequisites for these consequences. Luigia Tricase; Alice Mattoni Contesting AI Futures: Social Movements and Solarpunk AI Governments around the world are devising national AI strategies that regulate how, in the next few years, Artificial Intelligence and its technological derivatives will be implemented in different fields of public life, such as healthcare, justice, border surveillance and education. These strategies, as well as the dominant narratives about AI that they upheld, often come with promises of AI’s potential for improving democracies, one that depicts these emerging technologies as a revolution, a discontinuity from the past. National strategies promising an AI revolution are, however, often uncritically reproducing the industry utopias, discursive closure and technological sublime of narratives elaborated by the tech firms behind AI development, a mostly proprietary, venture capital-backed, black-box field of innovation. 55 If promises of democratic improvement are prominent among dominant narratives, they are problematized in the contentious political arena. Here, civil society actors are often developing critical accounts of the way emerging AI technologies are already employedor plan to beby institutions, as well as of their overall revolutionary value for societies. Among them, social movement organizations and their networks are primary developers of alternative, contentious and re-politicized visions of AI. Through their practices, these actors 1. delineate AI as an object of contention, 2. Develop alternative uses of AI as a tool for contention. Nonetheless, despite research agrees on their productive, future-making capacity, grassroots practices are currently understudied in the field of AI. This empirical paper emerges from this literature gap, addressing it through an ethnographic approach. Starting from the case study of a social movement network active in two Italian cities throughout 2023 and 2024, we conducted participant observation and interviewed eight key actors of the network. By observing and inquiring about AI practices, our aim was to discover howand ifAI permeates activist spaces, how it does so, and what alternative meanings about AI are being constructed by activists through their AI practices. Conclusively, we evaluated the potential of these practices to contest dominant promises and visions of AI. While individual AI practices have been discussed with interviewees, with most of them employing Generative AI to code, write and generate images but with careful evaluation of downsides, the focus of participant observation has been on collective AI practices. Two types of collective AI practices are identified: a) present-oriented practices, and b) future-oriented practices. Through a) presentoriented practices, activists in the network elaborate alternative meanings of existing AI and its current value in societies: they discuss existing AI Errors in fields of labor, information, human rights and environmental impact; addressing these errors, they ground in present fact and re-politicize AI, rejecting dominant revolutionary narratives. Through b) future-oriented practices, activists foster imagination moments through which alternative AI futures are discussed: they experiment, through workshops and labs, desirable AIs, first by imagining and then by building and platforming prefigurative AI projects inspired by Solarpunk principles. While they remain situational and are far from implementing long-term alternative AI futures, we highlight the political potential of these practices to question dominant AI promises and utopias. Felix De Backer The “hype” in “hyperstition”: towards a nonlinear temporality of cultural phenomena This paper takes the notion of hyperstition as a starting point to reflect upon the concept of hype. This neologism, which was coined by the CCRU in the late twenties, combines hype(r) and superstition and is defined as a “fiction that makes itself real”. The notion of hyperstition has far-reaching implications on the notion of belief. If a fiction can make itself real then the gap between the reality and fiction, the real and the not-real, becomes obsolete. Furthermore, belief is then no longer defined as believing-in-something, but much rather becomes a productive force. Belief is no longer passive (believing in x or y) but becomes active and can produce changes in the world. It is this productive force of belief that constitutes ‘hype’. After having crystallized this notion of hype, I will investigate what implications this productive force has on temporality. I will show that in a framework of hype as a productive force of belief, a linear temporality becomes hard to defend. If fictions can make themselves real, through hype, then they can warp the timeline. Hyperstitions make themselves real, and hence enrichen the reality with new elements which were not yet present before this hyperstitional dynamic of self-realization. However, since a hyperstition makes itself real, it does not come into being as the actualization of something which was already – albeit latently – present in the reality but only now has shown itself. Much on the contrary, hyperstition brings about – or: conjures – a new element in/of the reality. Hyperstition thus harbors the potential to retroactively alter 56 reality, to endow reality with new layers of meaning it did not yet possess beforehand. I will argue that it is in this sense that we can conceive of (the hype in) hyperstition as a certain form of time-travel. Chair: Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves Aaron Pagel The 300 Million Mile View: Asteroid Mining and a Synthesized Theory of Hype Management literature has seen a recent surge in hype scholarship, marking the beginning of a rich and fruitful discussion of a multi-level phenomenon through an interdisciplinary lens. While management’s entry into this research stream is promising, theorizing around this phenomenon has occurred across a diverse range of domains, from consulting practitioners to media studies, and even includes accounting. Leveraging the extended case method, I examine hype research to reconstruct extant theorizing into a synthesized lens with which I then examine the asteroid mining industry between 2012 to 2019. In an abductive analytical process within a reflexive model of science, I find that hype theorizing can be framed within two dimensions: Resource versus Process and Agentic versus Structural. These dimensions highlight underscore hype as a cultural phenomenon where expectations of the future are derived through visions of potential outcomes or simply through the exchange of information. Additionally, I find two subcomponents of hype: Temporal Relationships and Technology Influences. The former describes how time horizons are an important consideration in expectation development. The latter situates technology as an input to hype, rather than the subject as in previous hype literature. My extreme and novel empirical context is used to present a cohesive interpretation of how the asteroid mining industry was influenced by a complex phenomenon such as hype. The goal of this paper is to reconstruct theory from disparate domains to assist future researchers with building or testing hype theory within positive models of science. This research contributes to hype, futures, and innovation literatures. Andreu Belsunces Goncalves Deep Hype: Understanding Hype Dynamics in Moonshot Projects Deep hype is a distinct form of technological overpromising that differs from conventional hype in a crucial way: it is rooted in a multi-dimensional network of uncertainties projected into an open-ended future, making its promises difficult—if not impossible—to verify in the present. Unlike regular hype, which generates excitement around near-term breakthroughs (such as a new medical treatment or a more powerful AI model), deep hype constructs grand, long-term futures and allegedly civilisational transformations. This presentation introduces the concept of deep hype and explores it through the large-scale, long-term nature of moonshot projects. These initiatives are driven by bold visions aimed at tackling massive global challenges such as solving climate change through geoengineering, curing all illnesses through CRISPR therapy, providing limitless energy through nuclear fusion, exponentially increasing computational power through quantum technologies, or solving everything through Artificial General Intelligence. Such projects involve high-risk, high-reward stakes, demand long-term commitment, and rely on cross-disciplinary and global collaboration, often through public-private partnerships. Through a comparative analysis of several moonshot projects, the presentation will show how deep hype expands the window of opportunity by sustaining excitement and ambiguity long enough to attract ongoing 63 This workshop aims to help scholars more realistically assess technology’s impact on humanity by employing the historical analytical concept of change and continuity over time (CCOT). After a short introductory presentation, participants will be presented with a case study of a ‘revolutionary’ technology and will work in groups to analyse its impact or lack thereof from the human (i.e., non-material) perspective. It is hoped that encouraging scholars, practitioners, and others to systematically reflect on continuities instead of changes may 'humble' the hype prevalent in today’s technological discourse. This workshop will be a hybrid workshop. There will be no maximum amount of participants. Anne-Laure Oberson - A collective critical cartography of hype (in person workshop) Inspired by the original work on critical cartographies and collective mapping of argentinian Iconoclasistas Pablo Ares and Julia Risler, as well as their german offspring kollektiv orangotango, who have been developing the practice of maping applied to questions regarding space, power and resistance, this workshop proposes to explore the phenomenon of ‘hype’ from as various points of views as there will be participants, crossing personal expertise in the fields represented, in order to reveal its multifaceted aspect, complex workings and ramifications across disciplines. This collective critical cartography aims to interconnect an historical perspective with political, social, cultural and other applications with its current impact. Maps have a long history as instruments of power, yet collective mapping can be a tool for extending awareness, emancipation and empowerment. The activity of mapping collectivelly as a critical practice, involves the collaborative task of constructing a network of information that fosters new understanding and meanings. It can also serve as a functional depository in a dynamic archiving process. During the workshop we will explore how hype phenomena have and currently circulate in various disciplines by sharing and linking vocabularies, visuals, and stories brought forth by participants, who are encouraged to contribute prior knowledge and their own material to the content that will be collected during the conference by the workshop moderator. This collective practice helps learn how to read concepts and how to initiate emancipatory processes, by connecting theoretical reflections and concrete actions. Questions such as - Is there a territory of hype? What are the power relations at play in the mediatisation of hype? Is there an ecology of hype and does hype have an impact on climate issues? Can a critical cartography of hype account for disparities, invisibilities, discrimination? – or any that participants will care to raise will drive our discussions and outline our designs. This workshop will be of the hands-on, body gesture, pen and paper type. Yet given the ambition to create an object that should last and evolve in time in order to provide an open database continually completed and a working tool for the nascent field of hype studies, it would be interesting to also think of the map’s affordance from the onset and aim to conceive it as accessible, interoperable, inclusive, editable, etc. Thus the work done during the workshop will be translated and further expanded to an online platform, as the aim of the workshop is to produce a dynamic and useful cartography for everyone who contributes during the workshop as well as afterwards. This proposition is based on the principles of critical thinking, collective intelligence and creative commons. This workshop will be fully in person and unfortunately not available for online attendees of the conference. The maximum amount of participants is 15. First come, first served. 64 Christo Buschek - Investigating Datasets - The underbelly of the AI hype (in person workshop) We have internalized the phrase “AI is a black box.” But, when we examine the datasets used to train these incredibly complex machines more closely, we recognize the models they power and learn about the emerging effects of algorithmic systems. While models are featured prominently in press releases, the datasets that fuel the algorithms mostly fly under the radar. However, datasets show that AI is not a black box but rather an assemblage of various technical artifacts and processes. They are the result of choices and values, a product of the people and culture in which they originate. And, like all algorithmic systems, unexpected behavior emerges. This workshop will be hybrid. There is no maximum amount of participants. Danae Lois; Julieta Groshaus and Valentina Marún - Hype Was Here: Tracing the ghosts of collective excitement (in person workshop) In a world where attention is traded like currency, hype often gets mistaken for value. But what if it’s more than just noise? What if hype is a mechanism that doesn’t just mirror the zeitgeist but it makes it? This session unpacks the full arc of hype: from its spark to its peak, and haunting quiet that follows. We’ll dig into case studies from tech, branding, and culture to understand how hype speeds up time, fuels belief, and shifts resources. We’re not here to dismiss it, we’re here to decode it. Because hype doesn’t just ride on hope. It helps shape speculative futures. Some come to life. Others crash fast. Either way, hype reveals what we’re ready to believe, what systems we build to support it, and what happens when the buzz fades but the impact lingers. We’ll mix sharp analysis with a live, collaborative mapping inviting participants to trace their own hype encounters, the rush, the fallout, and what stayed behind. This is a conversation about more than trends. It’s about how hype moves markets, minds, and meaning; and how we might repurpose its residue into something real. This workshop will be hybrid. There is a maximum of 25 participants. First come, first served. 65 12th of September, 15:00-16:30 Grace Turlte - Queering Hype: A Playable Workshop for Trans/forming Predictive AI (in person workshop) ‘Queering Hype’ is a proposal for a playable workshop geared toward subverting and trans/forming predictive AI systems by simulating queer orientations and transfeminist tactics in experimental modes. This workshop responds to trends in interdisciplinary critical AI that prioritize themes such as fairness and trust, while inadvertently preserving AI’s impetus toward the ultimate prediction and stabilization of futures. More attention is required to radically unsettle or trans/figure the ontological dualisms upon which typical predictive AI systems depend. At stake here is the question of how AI—as if by design—abstracts and transforms agency, affect, and individual and collective senses of futurity and capacity to become futural. Building on queer and transfeminist theories, ethics, and politics entangled in AI, this workshop poses the question: Who gets to imagine futures implicated by AI? How do AI’s underlying logics privilege or marginalise certain futures? And ultimately, how can the hype surrounding and produced by AI be subverted? In response, queering hype offers fluid and relational engagements with AI systems, moving beyond the constraints of predictability and conventional applications. Specifically, this playable workshop foregrounds queer futurities where participants perform and embody theory’s challenge to normative, binary classification, identification, and stabilization. It becomes a sandbox environment that activates improvisational movements aligned with Hartman’s (2019) “wayward lives,” inviting participants to live through alternative ways of relating to and becoming-with algorithms. By situating the workshop within the broader context of ‘hype studies,’ this approach demonstrates a wayward path that traverses theory and experimentation, challenging predictive AI’s “fixing” impulse while opening horizons for emergent, relational, and more-than-human modes of becoming that trans/form AI’s hype. Ron Bronson - When Hype Breaks the City (online workshop) We'll invite participants into a critical conversation about the overlooked externalities of hype. Especially how its speed, scale, and virality destabilize urban life. From viral products that overwhelm city infrastructure, to speculative real estate trends driven by platform visibility, to AI rollouts that local governments are unprepared to absorb, hype doesn’t just shape perception, it’s creating fallouts that cannot be kept up with in real time. Across three rounds of small-group discussion, participants will engage with prompt cards that explore questions like: • What happens when lies move faster than infrastructure? • How do cities absorb the fallout of hype-driven markets, trends, and platforms? • Can we imagine civic tools that slow down or redirect speculative momentum? • How does hype interfere with local planning, budgeting, and public trust? • What happens when lies or vaporware produce real-world displacement or systems strain? Can we build a taxonomy of “hype literacy” or infrastructural resilience against speculative culture? 66 Each group will work through a rotating set of prompts designed to surface lived examples, draw connections, and reflect on the municipal and geopolitical consequences of unchecked hype. These cards will touch on themes like platform overreach, financial velocity, simulation governance, and local policy paralysis. I've spent my career looking at systems, working on design at scale and interrogating the ways that consequences are shrouded into interfaces that leave lasting harm on communities. This workshop will be fully online. In person attendees of the conference can join the stream in the corresponding room in the programme. There is no limit to amount of participants. Lourdes Rodriguez - Detectives of the Hype: Surfacing Bias and Worldviews in Our Sensemaking Processes (in person workshop) Hype is more than a fleeting buzz; as this conference highlights, it is a pervasive force that significantly influences markets, politics, and societal narratives. "Detectives of the Hype" is based on a foresight methodology I have developed over the past decade, known as "Detectives of the Future." This approach has been applied in a range of settings, from senior executives to middle school students, offering a practical, hands-on framework for understanding how signals of change emerge and helping participants differentiate between genuine transformations and transient, overhyped phenomena. In this workshop, participants will engage in an exercise designed to reflect on how individual, cultural, and societal biases influence our perception of change and trends, challenging assumptions that often guide our sensemaking. Furthermore, the exercise will address the critical role of attention spans in navigating hype. In an era of information overload and ever-decreasing attention spans, we are often distracted or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of signals, making it harder to discern valuable insights from fleeting trends. By the end of the workshop, attendees will be equipped with tools to critically evaluate change, identify the underlying forces at play, and understand the broader impact of hype on shaping future possibilities. Aligned with the "Engaging" thematic track, this session offers an immersive, action-oriented exploration of how hype can be spotted, understood, and navigated despite our biases and assumptions. Overall, this workshop aims to build metacognitive skills, enabling participants to be more critical in the way they interpret and understand ambiguous or complex information, especially in a world where attention itself is a scarce resource. This workshop will be fully in person and unfortunately not available for online attendees of the conference. The maximum amount of participants is 15. First come, first served. Patricia von Papstein - I want to be a Caring Trickster! - An Emo Hype with Potential? (online workshop) Imagine the whole world being gripped by an intense urge to be obedient and cheeky, smart and directed, wild and gentle all at once. This is the behavioral repertoire of the Caring Trickster within us. Never lived before, but now in high demand. A brief era of emotional reordering is dawning. The contradictions in our personal behavior become a blissful source of power. Business and society are being flooded by bold actions fueled by the energy of the new behavior idol. We’re done with emotional exaggerations – we’ve had the heroes, the gangsters, the renegades, the wretched, the perpetually lovestruck. So how does the Caring Trickster become attractive as a desirable behavioral model? 67 In my open floor space, I will guide participants through the possibilities of staging such improbable ? hype. We will closely examine how the fantasies we project onto a Caring Trickster figure can lead to behaviors that transcend megalomania or apocalyptic dramas. I show which resistances speak up against such unfamiliar emotional energy and how these voices can be put out of balance. The films Perfume and Perfect Sense served as inspiration, along with my years of research on the topic of “What is unruly mental health?” This workshop will be fully online. In person attendees of the conference are encouraged to join the stream in the corresponding room in the programme. Maximum of 20 participants. Caitlin Keeley; Keely Adler (RADAR community) - Digging into Hype: Multiplayer Mining for Meaning (online workshop) In an age of accelerating trends and competing futures narratives, how might we collectively unpack the phenomenon of hype to reveal deeper cultural shifts? This interactive workshop invites participants to explore beneath the surface of emerging signals using the "5 Whys" methodology – a multiplayer approach to finding root causes and patterns behind cultural phenomena – which was published in RADAR’s book “The Curious Human’s Field Guide to the Future.” Together, we'll move beyond superficial trend-spotting to discover what yearnings, needs, and shifting paradigms might be hiding below the surface noise. Drawing from RADAR's experience in cultivating collective intelligence across its global community, this session transforms individual signal-spotting into shared sensemaking. Participants will practice applying this framework to current examples of technological, cultural, and social hype narratives, developing muscles for distinguishing between fleeting trends and emerging futures worth nurturing. We'll explore how digging deeper in our own reflections – beneath hype and together in multiplayer mode – can feed richer understanding through collective digestion. This workshop offers practical tools for identifying what's beneath the hype while demonstrating how collaborative sensemaking creates thicker, more nuanced understanding than any single perspective could achieve alone. Participants will leave with both a tangible framework they can apply immediately and an experience of the "multiplayer maximalism" that makes RADAR's approach to futures work distinctive. RADAR is a global futures collective dedicated to accelerating better futures through multiplayer collaboration. Founded on the principle that "the future belongs to those who think about it," RADAR brings together diverse perspectives to collectively imagine and build alternatives to the status quo, bridging the gap between yearning and action through community-driven foresight and experimentation. This workshop will be fully online. In person attendees of the conference are encouraged to join the stream in the corresponding room in the programme. There is no limit to amount of participants. 68 Displayed in the Art hall (open throughout the conference) Lucas Kuster - Saliva Collection Container How and with what legitimation are design interventions in social issues actually appropriate; and do they make sense at all? The work Saliva Collection Container (orig.: Speichelauffangbehälter) deals with (non-)action in the context of social challenges from a transformative design perspective. The title of the work is borrowed from Ivan Pavlov's study on the conditioning of dogs. In Pavlov's specific experiment a dog's saliva collected in a container was the indicator for a successful conditioning of the animal. In a less animalistic way, however, my work is about human, especially designerly, reflex-like reactions to crisisand hype-like situations: spectacle. My submission consists of a speculative object as a fictitious measuring instrument for collecting “designer’s saliva”—in situations of designerly urges of “making things better” or even “good” or “improving things for others” or just being quick enough to jump on a current “hype train”. Besides the object, the work goes with a fictitious explanatory graphic and a hand-sketched 4-field matrix that attempts to weigh up actions/non-actions with communication/non-communication. This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference and is available to buy. Citlali Hernandez; Roger Pibernat; Andreus Costa - Smoke Vending Machine (SVM) "Vender humo" (selling smoke) is a Spanish and Catalan expression that means to sell something worthless, usually by the means of quackery, charlatanism, and, in more recent years, hype. The expression is also commonly applied in the art world to criticize superficial or effortless art projects that are only based on some spectacular effect (most common in technology-based art projects) or on very simple and banal actions or devices with big or pretentious statements (particularly in the so-called conceptual art or ideabased art forms). As a collective working at the cutting edge of art, technology and science, we often deal with this feeling. Contrary to what it may seem, selling smoke, or helping to do so, is not easy and can be very annoying. Not to mention how difficult it is to explain this to the tax authorities. We have decided to take this issue seriously and to materialise it in an outstanding, compelling and innovative way. Taking advantage of the new AI technologies, we propose to build the most advanced Smoke Vending Machine (SVM). Our R&D team has been working hard to design a totally new experience. From hardware to software, we obsess over every detail to create a seamless experience for our customers who seek the most exquisite bubbles, infused with smoky ideas and bold statements at the intersection of art and technology. All this combined with the ease of use of a few buttons and no hassle with bureaucracy and the like. We will have our legal and accounting departments research the most legitimate way to do this. FYI, we only accept cash as a payment method. This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. 69 DiSect - (Don’t) believe the hype I’d like to bring the collage work commissioned for our group and transform it into participatory art. I’m a big believer in playing with media other than text and with curating interactions that might lead to surprising and earnest conversations. Here’s why I like this work in particular: If everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, then does that mean that collage made out of over 70 elements could essentially be a full-length novel? The finished artwork is full of Easter eggs which point to almost nostalgic cases of ridiculous hypes of the past. From Oasis’ brothers ticket scandal to the lofty London Garden bridge project which costed £53 million without ever leaving the planning stage, DiSect’s artwork creates a parallel universe made of space dust and collective delirium. In the age of endless debates over the nature of mis/dis/mal/information, the medium of collage allows playful manoeuvring between those categories. On the one hand, every single element was sourced from archival magazines and newspapers, serving as a testimony to particular times and events. On the other, images were clearly taken out of context and juxtaposed against each other to spin new narratives which may or may not bear resemblance to the true accounts evidenced by the historians of tomorrow. As a researcher working on hype in the context of digital innovations, I was drawn to the quietly subversive approach of the artist, in his own words, 'No Google. No Photoshop. No resizing. No colour adjustment. No computers or printers were used or harmed in the making of'. To that end, if you’re reluctant to harm AI bots but aren’t too squeamish about the prospect of cutting through piles of many, many old National Geographic issues, we recommend rummaging through the book section of charity shops for unique finds at affordable prices. This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. Jonny Heath - "New Colour: visions of digital twins" Short stories and poems by Jonny, illustrated by Eve Pyra and Wen Li Why would anyone write a story about fine-grained models that exchange two-way data flows between the real thing and its representations? The notions of ‘actuation’, ‘feedback’ and ‘predictive maintenance’ don’t exactly lend themselves to the medium of fiction. Though given the hype concerning the so-called digital twins, one could–or perhaps should–see them as precisely that–works of vivid imagination of start-up founders, scientists and politicians. With no definitive tie to the particular material ‘tech stack’ , digital twins are not quite technologies, but metaphors telling us something helpful about our contemporary technoscientific culture. The promise of accurate representation of complex biological and social phenomena gently pushes us into the obvious conclusion that a twin is all we need to predict, understand and control our future. (…) In ‘New Colours’, Jonny ran with the platonic ideal of digital twins, speculating what could happen if our societies would mass-adopt those perfectly accurate, detailed and allknowing representations of cities, ecosystems and people. Stories and poems in ‘New Colours’ are more than classic sci-fi cautionary tales about the (un)intended consequences of innovations. In leveraging the metaphor of a twin, Jonny encourages us to reflect on the seductive and persuasive promise of resemblance, completeness and a special bond between the real and the digital twin. Perhaps once you stare into the eyes of your virtual counterpart long enough, you’d notice how uncanny it is? This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. 70 Carla de la Torre - Oblique manoeuvres (for innovators) Over 2023-2024, I spent several months talking to innovators and R&D funders about the evolving ecosystem for the so-called digital twins in the UK. Hearing stories of collective mobilisation, enthusiasm, then disappointment, pivoting and future uncertainty made me reflect about the need to surface the perspectives on hype beyond academic critiques and curate safer spaces for discussing innovators’ own expectations and vulnerabilities. How to challenge the faux-optimistic, hasty and culture of software start ups? This presentation will report on an ongoing project aiming to translate research findings into a card-based game for practitioners involved in the development of digital twins and adjacent technologies. I was initially inspired by the game called “Oblique strategies” developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. The original Oblique Strategies were a series of somehow esoteric card prompts, aiming to help artists with overcoming creative blocks. There is no particular mechanics attached to the original game, i.e., players can draw a single card and reflect on it or decide to discuss several of them as a team. My second point of inspiration is a recent turn to intervention, found in fields like STS but also HCI and Design. Recently, there has been a proliferation of games, roleplays and scenarios for including ethics in data science projects e.g., “Data Hazard Labels”, “Data Ethics Emergency Drill”. Though I fully support researchers explicitly targeting their engagement eWorts at practitioners, I found myself questioning the sole promise of ‘ethics’ tools. While many of the current ethics tools focus on raising awareness among software developers, I wanted to focus on creating space for talking candidly about successes and failures. Consequently, I have embarked on a collaboration with a graphic designer (Carla de la Torre), to develop a set of cards which aims to act as prompts for more honest and humble conversations which acknowledge hype in innovation development. Each card presents an innovator’s dilemma followed by a quick reflexive prompt. Although the card content itself is brief and fairly abstract, further project documentation links individual cards to relevant data (e.g. quotations from research interviewees, policy documents) as well as foundational theoretical concepts from STS and beyond supporting the observations. While a set of cards cannot ensure the appropriate inclusion of ethics in innovation projects (nor it shouldn’t aim for that in the first place as we’re not after individualising responsibility), my hope for this experiment is that it will help to illuminate the collective and political issues with digital twins that are currently obscured by hype. Would it be too idealistic to think an alliance between STS hype scholars and progressive innovators is possible? This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. Berk Alkoç - Nothing But the Truth (And a Lot of Hype): An Archive of Imaginary AI Startups That Say the Quiet Part Out Loud This installation presents a visual archive of 10 entirely fictional AI startups—each designed in the hyperaspirational and innovation-saturated aesthetic of contemporary tech marketing. But with one critical twist: they tell the truth. Instead of claiming to revolutionize consciousness, cure aging, or solve all your mental health problems, these parody startups confess. They admit to scraping personal data without consent, hallucinating outputs with confidence, and rebranding as “AI-driven” weeks before launch to attract investment. Rooted in critical design, adversarial aesthetics, and memetic culture, this speculative archive reframes hype not as an exaggeration but as a genre. These artifacts parody the vocabulary and visual codes of VC pitch decks and LinkedIn futurism to interrogate how hype operates as both signal and shield: a performative distortion that produces trust, money, and myth. 71 The project invites viewers to reflect on techno-hype's affective and ethical dimensions. How does it obscure structural extraction? How does it shelter poor design and inflated claims? And how does it produce belief—even when suspicion is warranted? The installation will feature a looping video or poster wall showcasing the archive, accompanied by a writable surface where attendees can contribute their own startup names, slogans, or AI “truth bombs.” These collective additions will expand the archive over the course of the event, turning the installation into a participatory space for satire, critique, and counter-imaginaries. By encouraging laughter, recognition, and possibly some well-placed indignation, the project aims to demystify hype—and offer a space to rewrite its script. This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. Emre Altindag - Visualizing Otherwise: A Wordless Artistic Inquiry into Surveillance and Dispossession This presentation explores my graphic art book The Cost of Being Homeless in the Age of Smart Cities, a visual narrative that challenges dominant discourses around technological "smartness" in urban development. As a visual artist and researcher, I use silent sequential art to unpack how hype-driven imaginaries of "smart cities" often exclude or erase the lived experiences of unhoused individuals, reducing complex social issues to datafied abstractions. Grounded in practice-based research and a methodology of visual storytelling, the work resists alarmist or utopian narratives by centering poetic visual metaphors that embody fragility, displacement, and resistance. The process of crafting this graphic novel becomes a form of artistic inquiry, where drawing is not illustrative but investigative, an aesthetic tool to engage with surveillance, precarity, and invisibility. I propose this work for the Making and Doing format. Although not an installation or workshop, the graphic novel itself is a completed creative work that embodies a form of critical, practice-based research. My presentation will reflect on how artists can approach complex socio-technological topics through artistic research, and how a graphic novel can function as a site of knowledge production, challenging the hype from within. This contribution fits the Making and Doing track because it does not merely talk about hype but shows how artistic practice becomes a form of action-research, visually questioning dominant futures and offering new ways of seeing and feeling. The link to the published graphic novel I will be discussing is: www.edgelands.institute/outcomes/the-costof-being-homeless-in-the-age-of-smart-cities This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. Donato Ricci; Tommaso Prinetti; Gabriel Alcaras; Zoé de Vries - Tedium: effects and consequences of LLMs boredom What does a workday with a large language model (LLM) look like? What unfolds during hours spent with chatbots meant to streamline work, reduce effort, expand opportunity, and remove obstacles? Tedium, a video installation developed within the Ecologies of LLMs Practices (EL2MP) at SciencesPo’s médialab, offers grounded responses to these questions. It counters the hype and magic surrounding the latest AI generation by documenting mundane, situated interactions between professionals and LLMs across diverse fields. Rather than isolating LLM capabilities, we examine how they reshape work within broader professional ecologies. Based on a participatory, experimental research protocol —co-produced by 72 sociologists, STS scholars, and design researchers— our project creates deliberate interruptions in daily routines, allowing participants to slow down and reflect on their evolving practices with AI. Implemented over several 6–8 month cycles, the protocol involved 40 professionals as co-inquirers. They generated a multimodal archive through regular individual and collective sessions: audio recordings, photos, video, sketches, and chat logs, capturing the texture of LLMs-in-use. This evolving archive became both method and material. Tedium revisits and reorganises this archive into scenes, each depicting a distinct relational mode between generative AI and professional practice. Instead of testing efficiency or outcomes, it traces subtle transformations: the emergence of new tasks such as prompt crafting, error evaluation, or the discretisation of formerly continuous workflows. It describes how LLMs discretise actions, demand domestication to integrate with existing routines, or sometimes resist integration altogether. It explores how these systems amplify or compress different tasks' time, space, and cognitive efforts. Tedium puts the narratives of AI hype to the test, simultaneously tracing their performative effects within everyday work contexts. It offers not a theory of LLMs, but a grounded chronicle of working with and along it: messy, recursive, deceptive, tedious. This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. Hailey Hannigan; Sofia Mari Surkau; Katarina Vrablova - Arenas of Artificial General Intelligence Hype: A visual database of AGI hype discourse Arenas of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Hype is a visual database on AGI hype discourse. The interactive web experience is based on statements by key AGI actors, tech leaders, journalists and academia on the socio-technical fiction of an artificial general intelligence. Using qualitative research methodologies the statements were categorized into six key dimensions of uncertainty. They are visually ordered within arenas, symbolic for the race towards AGI. Conceptual, temporal and existential arenas cluster definitions, collect predictions of AGI’s deployment and assess its risks and promises of prosperity revealing similar statements, contradictions and promises. The project challenges the validity and truthfulness of hype narratives in tech governance, such as uncertainty and inevitability, based on theory of ‘deep hype’ by Andreu Belsunces. This work will be presented in the art exhibition room during the entirety of the conference. Prayas Abhinav ; Satya - A Workshop Engaging Indian Design Students to Design a Tool to Examine the Epistemic Role of Hype in the Design Process We are fundamentally interested in identifying triggers of behaviour-change towards being either influenced by hype or seeing through hype. As artists and educators within a design studies context, we are concerned with Engaging students on delinking the attention a work receives, from the quality of the work. This is vital in a compromised media-driven environment (termed “godi media” in India) of perverted attention, where hype is considered a validating criterion for value and authority. Of interest also are hierarchies of voices within the context of Indian social structures and cultural values, as behavioural conditioners that aid propensity for falling for hype. We seek to incite discussion in a group of Indian design students on perceptions of status, comparison, tribalism, readiness in accepting or rejecting marginal/critical voices, the state of contemporary media, eager affiliation with tech-hype, and a strongly anti-critical society where progressive positions are under threat.