Lars Pinkwart will present at the symposium «Dysphoria Mundi. Making and Breaking World Models», taking place from the 28–29. September 2026 at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The symposium is organized by the ERC project AIMODELS in cooperation with Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Machine Visual Culture group at Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History Rome.

The symposium seeks to engage with the promissory ambitions of world models, and the estrangement they produce. Models built to understand, know, and inhabit the world often do not fit the beings that should be living through them. Following Paul B. Preciado, this misfit presents itself as a dysphoria. Rather than interpreting such dysphoria as mere errors to be corrected, or a condition to either accept or resist, Dysphoria Mundi asks what this very misfitting reveals about the structural exclusions operated by these models, the dimensions they shallow out, and the possibilities for praxis their opacity, paradoxically, opens up. Dysphoria Mundi seeks to explore such limits and possibilities by thinking through four intersecting strands of inquiry concerned with world models, and world modelling more broadly.