It's Not About AI. It's About Us.

DSPT Sunset — "It's Not About AI. It's About Us." — An Intimate Cartography of Coexisting with Intelligent Systems

Join us for an evening Sunset at Critical TechWorks: a thought-provoking performance and talk followed by relaxed networking over drinks and bites. Open to everyone, students, hobbyists, professionals, and executives alike.

This is our last event before the summer break, we'll be back in September with more! 🌞

📅 When: July 16, 2026, 18h00–20h30
📍 Where: Critical TechWorks, R. Dr. António Luís Gomes 10, Porto

Agenda:

• 18h00–18h10 — Get together
• 18h10–18h20 — Welcome by DSPT
• 18h20–19h15 — Performance/Talk + Discussion
• 19h15–20h00 — Networking and Bites

The Talk: "It's Not About AI. It's About Us." — An Intimate Cartography of Coexisting with Intelligent Systems

Maybe AI isn't the real question of our time. Maybe we are: the way we project desire, fear, authority, creativity, and intimacy onto systems that don't live, don't die, and don't respond from a body.

This performative talk starts from a simple provocation: what if AI isn't here to replace the human, but to expose it? What if, faced with the machine, our dependencies, fantasies, fragilities, and ways of relating become more visible?

The audience is invited to help build a collective map of the emotions, contradictions, and fictions that surface when we begin to think, create, and decide alongside non-human entities. This isn't about understanding algorithms, or about celebrating or condemning technology. It's about observing what AI reorganizes in us: authorship, presence, trust, the desire for control, loneliness, imagination, and the very notion of intelligence.

By the end, the question may not be whether AI thinks. It may be something more uncomfortable: what kind of humans are we willing to become when we agree to think alongside "it"?

The Speakers

António Baía Reis — Artist, researcher, and university professor working across immersive media, performance, sound, image, and experimental art. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor at the University of Salamanca, with a PhD in Digital Media from the University of Porto developed in collaboration with Stanford. His work has been presented at Somerset House, Venice Immersive, and the Cannes XR Immersive Competition. More at antoniobaiareis.com

Emília Moreira — Psychologist and associate researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) and RISE-Health, with a PhD in Geriatrics and Gerontology. Her research spans cardiocerebrovascular disease, mental health, and digital health. She combines her academic career with clinical practice at Hospital Lusíadas Porto and Clínica FMUP.

As always with DSPT, this event is free and open to everyone curious about data, AI, and the questions they raise about us. See you there, and see you again in September! 👋