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- Convenor:
-
Maria Engberg
(Malmö University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
How do creative professionals embody AI-transformed work? Beyond adoption/resistance binaries, this panel examines friction, irritation, joy, and ambivalence in GenAI use, revealing how resilient professional futures are constructed, not just imagined, through affectively charged, embodied practice.
Description
How does it feel to work and create with generative AI-tools? What is changing in individuals’ perception of professional identities, skills, and their day-to-day work experiences? Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots and GenAI-infused digital tools, already deeply embedded into digital work processes, impact creative practices across design, writing, drawing, programming, artistic practices, and beyond. Inspired by Minna Ruckenstein’s The Feel of Algorithms (2023) and the call to “capture the joys, concerns, and troubles that are personally felt” (p.15) in algorithmic cultures, this panel seeks contributions that explore how individuals navigate and feel about having to or choosing to work with GenAI. We focus on three tensions that professionals embody and navigate: 1. the friction between situated craft knowledge and algorithmic generation; 2. what happens in hands and eyes and heads when GenAI extends, shifts and challenges their expertise; and 3. the reconfiguration of professional boundaries—the machine-human co-creation, the sensory and affective shift from making to prompting and curating, or the work that is partially steered by algorithmic collaborators that demand time-consuming contextualised judgment and evaluation.
We seek papers that will contribute to theoretical and empirical engagements with questions such as: how does attending to felt experience—the sensory shifts and the distributed agency—reveal conditions for more humane sociotechnical configurations? And, what futures are creative professionals already constructing through their embodied engagement with GenAI? By centering our panel on feelings, affect, and embodiment, we build on STS scholarship on the transformations of professional expertise in automated and algorithmic infrastructures and open conceptual space for understanding how resilient futures are not imagined abstractly but built through the textured, embodied work of living and working with GenAI in the present.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper traces how work futures are enacted and felt in asymmetrical encounters between those who promote GenAI and creative workers in communications who navigate its promises, frictions, and embodied demands. It explores the relational dynamics between these future-makers and future-takers.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the relationship between everyday digital work futures and the professional imaginaries surrounding generative AI in the communication industry. It examines how AI-driven work futures are enacted, circulated, and contested between two groups: creative workers expected to use generative AI in their practice and professionals who develop, market, or educate others about its use. To theorise this relational dynamic, the paper adapts Barbara Adam's concepts of future-making and future-taking. Where Adam traces how present actions create futures that successor generations must live with, I apply the concepts to a contemporary, horizontal asymmetry: between those who shape AI narratives and those who receive them. For future-makers, AI arrives as seamless enhancement; for future-takers, it often registers as friction, ambivalence, and quiet recalibration. Yet these positions are not fixed: each group makes futures that the other must navigate, and tension emerges precisely in this exchange. The paper draws on a larger ethnographic study comprising fifty interviews with creative and digital workers in Sweden, focusing here on ten selected to explore this dynamic: five with creatives in communications and five with actors promoting AI in the sector. Using a futures-oriented approach informed by symbolic interactionism, the analysis attends to the embodied and affective dimensions of AI adoption: the sensory shift from making to prompting, the joys and troubles felt when craft meets algorithm, and how these textured experiences shape what futures become liveable.
Paper short abstract
How does working with Generative AI feel in the very organic bodies of Swedish software engineers? This study suggests that engineers are thrown into a GenAI existence knowing their inherent unreliability. This gives rise to both feelings of awe and frustration, sadness, and well-being.
Paper long abstract
GenAI is not just another technological tool. Its inherent feedback loop, its aim to be responsive, and its conversational character push users towards making relationships with their GenAIs. Its chat interface affords it to be open constantly. This implies more social and emotional experiences with GenAIs compared to other technological tools used in working life. So, how are relations then formed with GenAIs at work? And what types of emotions are experienced working with GenAI? This study zooms in on Swedish software developers’ stories about their experiences and feelings working with GenAIs. Theoretically, the paper is inspired by Ingold's dwelling perspective, operationalized through folk theories and feelings. Preliminary findings from individual and group interviews (the last ones conducted February 2026) suggest GenAIs are approached as inevitable but also unreliable. Swedish software engineers are thrown between feelings of awe and frustration in their everyday work with GenAIs. Preliminary findings also suggest that feelings are becoming less pronounced over time. At the time of the conference the full analysis of the results will have been finalized and ready for presentation.
Paper short abstract
The study explores how AI and machine learning reshape architects’ daily experience of work, showing that AI not only adds new tools but transforms their sense of professional agency by reorganizing practices, material arrangements, and understandings of expert design.
Paper long abstract
Architects are a knowledge-based occupation combining higher education, creativity, and a strong craft tradition. The recent integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is associated with profound changes, challenging how creativity and craft are enacted in architectural work. This study argues that AI does not merely introduce new tools but reconfigures how architects sense and perform their occupational practice. From a practice theory perspective, architectural work appears as a nexus of doings and a feel for professionalism, organized around shared understandings of creativity, expertise, and professional autonomy. AI tools—such as parametric design systems and analytical platforms for site, environmental, and regulatory data—reshape the material arrangements through which these practices unfold. Rather than simply automating tasks, AI alters the conditions under which design experimentation becomes possible, transforming architects’ practical intelligibility: what feels and counts as appropriate action, creative contribution, or professional judgment. Architects’ “juggling” of AI tools shows that technologies do not seamlessly integrate into practice but require continuous coordination, interpretation, and alignment. In practice-theoretical terms, architects actively reproduce and stabilize their occupation by negotiating new sociomaterial configurations, engaging with data, and creating coherence across organizational boundaries. AI thus becomes embedded in the everyday accomplishment of architectural practice, reshaping workflows as well as the lived experience of agency, creativity, and professional identity.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on interviews with developers and artists, this paper explores how creative professionals feel the friction between embodied craft knowledge and algorithmic generation, tracing affective ambivalence as they understand changing skill, authorship and professional identity.
Paper long abstract
What is lost and gained when the hand gives way to the prompt? This paper draws on qualitative interviews with developers and artists from the Digital Work Futures project to examine how creative professionals experience generative AI as an embodied, affective encounter rather than a straightforward tool adoption. Building on Ruckenstein's structures of feeling (2023), the analysis traces how practitioners navigate a felt tension between situated craft knowledge, what one respondent calls “muscle memory for code,” and the convenience and disorientation of algorithmic generation.
The interviews reveal a spectrum of affective ambivalence. A junior data scientist describes feeling more efficient yet less competent, noting a subtle shame around AI use among colleagues. A conceptual artist distinguishes between text as an intelligence easily artificialized and embodied, sensory knowledge that resists automation — deliberately refusing voice interaction with AI to avoid normalizing what feels uncanny. Both articulate a shift from maker to curator, yet locate authorship differently: in the idea or in the realization, in the hand or in the prompt.
These accounts illuminate how professional identities are not merely disrupted but actively renegotiated through affectively charged micro-practices, choosing when to delegate, where to draw boundaries, what to refuse. The paper argues that attending to these felt negotiations reveals how ideas about possible resilient professional futures are constructed from within algorithmic relations, not imagined from outside them.
Paper short abstract
The article examines how generative AI reshapes creative work by shifting professional boundaries from execution to interpretation and evaluation. Drawing on interviews with creative professionals, it analyzes the affective dynamics of AI collaboration across art worlds and creative industries.
Paper long abstract
This article examines how generative AI reshapes creative practice by shifting professional boundaries from execution toward more interpretative, evaluative, and contextual forms of work. It argues that this transformation is not merely procedural but embodied and affective. The shift from making to prompting, steering, and assessing introduces new affective dynamics, including exhaustion from endless iterative refinement, mistrust toward generated outputs, moments of surprise that reignite curiosity, and the ambivalence of sharing responsibility with an algorithmic collaborator. Emotions are therefore treated not as secondary reactions but as analytical entry points into how expertise and professional identity are recalibrated under AI-driven conditions.
To explore these questions, the article draws on qualitative interviews with creative professionals. It situates these developments within the distinction between artworld contexts and the creative industries (Celis Bueno and Pereira, 2026) and asks how shifts in professional boundary work acquire different meanings and affective resonances across institutional settings structured by divergent logics. In relatively autonomous art worlds, where experimentation often takes precedence over execution and economic accountability, working with generative AI may shape professional identity differently than in the creative industries. Generative AI’s distributed agency may also resonate with long-standing critiques of singular authorship in the art world and evoke curiosity or fascination toward algorithmic co-creation. In creative industries, however, where craftsmanship is closely linked to professional identity and authorship functions as a legal and economic mechanism for securing property rights and profitability, similar changes may instead intensify emotions such as anxiety about professional value and recognition.
Paper short abstract
How do embodied multisensory co-creative processes expand and transform ways of performing, making, and experiencing across sensory modalities and artistic disciplines? This paper discusses empirical engagement with AI and real-time generativity in artistic practice across sound and sculpture.
Paper long abstract
Embodied multisensory engagements with AI challenge the relationship between human and machine agency and provide forms of knowing based on felt experiences. In this paper, we explore co-creative processes in artistic practice across sound and sculpture. We discuss how AI-based tools and real-time generativity expand and transform ways of performing, making, and experiencing through the combination of sensory modalities, artistic disciplines, and technology. We present empirical outcomes of our ongoing project Schima-morphe-ichos (SMI), which brings together sonic, visual, and physical dimensions to investigate new ways of performing and synthesising sound. SMI involves sculptural objects made from steel and textiles digitally augmented by a sensing system that captures orientation data as the objects are being handled by performing artists and participants. Sounds recorded whilst manipulating physical materials for making the objects are at the core of the interactive system and constitute an AI training corpus. Handling the objects enables the transformation and the combination of sounds, and the direct exploration of the latent space of the AI model. We reflect on the experience of the artists and participants with the resulting highly dynamic environment, in which human-machine co-creation depends directly on the embodied interaction with the objects and their material properties. In sharing insight into the shifting boundaries between machine and human agency at the intersection of artistic and computational processes, we address how these shape artistic and creative practices.
Paper short abstract
AI shifts musical creation by changing how performers and composers engage with instruments. Interviews with nine composers show three ways AI becomes embodied knowledge, moving resistance from physical effort to probabilistic navigation and reshaping affect and understanding.
Paper long abstract
Composing and playing acoustic instruments demands embodied and cognitive investment; creating music with generative AI more often involves prompting, steering, and iterating outputs. Making with GenAI seldom feels like composing at an acoustic piano. Drawing on nine in-depth interviews with artistic composers across classical, experimental, and digital practices, we identify three instrument onto-epistemologies that shape how AI is understood, embodied, and learned. Interviewing both AI users and non-users, we trace how generative systems enter (or are rejected in) situated creative work.
First, a resistance-anchored onto-epistemology treats the acoustic instrument as a partner that “pushes back.” Skill emerges through bodily struggle, repetition, and material constraint; GenAI can feel frictionless, even irritating, because it lacks weight, resistance, and energetic reciprocity. Second, reconfiguration welcomes AI’s rearrangement of musicianship. Instead of motor mastery grounded in tactile feedback, practice becomes probabilistic navigation: parameter tuning, exploratory search, and curatorial selection amid algorithmic abundance. The body does not disappear; it relocates from physical calibration to attentiveness and evaluative listening. Third, integration, most common among our respondents, reorients embodiment from resisting materials to engaging outputs, where aesthetic judgment, pattern recognition, and iterative curation become central sites of skilful participation.
We suggest that GenAI can reorganize what counts as “resistance” in musical work and, with it, the forms of embodied attention and affect that structure playing and composing. These onto-epistemologies generate distinct encounters with AI, such as irritation, playfulness, or ambivalence and broadly frame creativity as embodied negotiation of constraints and possibilities rather than abstract algorithmic procedures.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how independent electronic music creators encounter genAI in the “release pipeline," where tracks become platform-ready through metadata, pitch writing, and promotion. It shows how AI affects invisible data labor, creative craft and qualculation in the platformized music economy.
Paper long abstract
Generative AI is rapidly transforming creative work, yet most research on AI in music focuses on its role in composition or audience consumption. This paper shifts attention to an overlooked stage of creative labor in the platformized music economy: the release pipeline, where tracks are formatted, classified, and rendered platform-legible before reaching audiences. In this stage, independent artists perform forms of often invisible data labor (e.g., metadata entry, genre-mood classification, pitch writing, cover art generation, and compliance documentation) which are increasingly mediated by generative AI tools. Drawing on qualitative interviews and observations with independent electronic music producers, the paper explores how creators embody and experience AI-assisted release work in practice. Rather than casting generative AI within the familiar binary of adoption versus resistance, this paper attends to the felt texture of creative labor, where musicians encounter AI not as an abstract technology but as a situated collaborator within everyday workflows. Preparing a track for platform release becomes an affectively charged practice in which artists move through moments of friction, convenience, hesitation, and subtle irritation as they prompt, edit, and negotiate with algorithmic outputs. These encounters generate a new layer of “qualculation” (Callon 2005), as artists simultaneously evaluate opportunities for platform visibility and monetization while managing risks to their authenticity and artistic credibility. By opening the release pipeline as a site of sociotechnical governance, the paper shows how generative AI reshapes not only creative workflows but also the embodied practices through which musicians, exercising distributed agency, negotiate artistic and commercial interests.
Paper short abstract
This paper will examine computer animators’ changing embodied relationships to their work, technology, and professional identity with GenAI in their industry. Informed by dance, animation, and feminist labour theory, I will attend to their affective experience of movement in the software interface.
Paper long abstract
This paper will examine how computer animators’ embodied relationships to work, technology, and professional identity are changing through GenAI in their industry. Machine learning and generative algorithms are increasingly woven into the processes of computer animation for film and television, sparking both celebratory and doomsday predictions and compounding the real precarity pressing upon workers. This extends a legacy of automation and perceived struggles between embodied human craft and technology in animation, conceived of as a medium existing through the tension between the freedom of the moving image and the regulated movement of labour producing it (Frank).
My dissertation approaches the embodied labour and knowledge of animators from an interdisciplinary perspective, building on a shared history of systems for movement analysis between dance and animation (Gadassik). I will present fieldwork findings exploring animators’ embodied relationships to algorithms in their software interfaces (how they engage tool sets to “think in movement” [Sheets-Johnstone], felt sense of time and space shaped by the interface’s “possibility space” [Wood]). Through long-form interviews and walk-throughs (Light) of their creative process, animators describe experiences of struggle, play, power, or partnership as technology does or does not do what they expected. These experiences inform their shifting professional identities (artist, craftsperson, technician…), which they articulate differently depending on how GenAI is integrated into their roles (e.g. high or low-level). I will bring these findings into conversation with feminist theories of labour and technology (Chun, Nakamura) to consider how embodied findings tell about workers’ varied experiences of marginalization and resistance.