r ferris

ai and us - where are we headed? a conversation

2025

We’ll be exploring eight crucial questions together:

  • Intelligence itself—what does it mean to be smart? How do we recognize intelligence when it doesn’t think like us?
  • Memory: how do we remember, and how do machines remember? What gets kept, what gets forgotten, and who decides?
  • Learning: the miracle of how both children and algorithms discover patterns in chaos, and why they do it so differently.
  • Reasoning and Strategy: the chess match between human intuition and machine logic, and what happens when they collaborate.
  • Alignment: perhaps the most critical question of our time: how do we ensure that as AI becomes more powerful, it wants what we want? And who decides what “we” want?
  • Transparency: the black box problem. When AI makes decisions that affect our lives, should we understand how? Can we?
  • Control versus Autonomy: the eternal human question, now applied to our creations. How much freedom do we give to systems that might eventually surpass us?
  • Governance: who gets to decide how AI shapes our future? The companies building it? Governments regulating it? Or communities living with it?

We have an ai with us tonight—not as a performer, but as a silent witness to our conversations. It will listen, absorb, and remain quiet unless someone directly asks: “What do you think?” Only then will it share its perspective on what it has observed.

Artist Bio

r ferris is a participation-based artist whose work spans social practice, video, and conceptual forms. Rooted in the belief that art can emerge from everyday interactions, ferris creates pieces that often blur the boundaries between art and non-art, ritual and routine, object and event. Based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, ferris has developed a body of work that invites communal presence, hospitality, and reflection on systems—social, economic, technological, and spiritual.

Beginning with early works like Made in China and Coat Bag (2000), ferris engaged industrial spaces in Shanghai in collaborative acts that foreshadowed a long practice of participatory exchange. From 2003–2008, ferris created a series of video artworks, notably Nude Descending Staircase 2008, a layered homage to Duchamp, Richter, and Muybridge. The artist’s commitment to experience as medium deepened with Burn Meditation (2005), a participatory installation presented at ARTcade in Cleveland.

In 2009, ferris produced a flurry of socially engaged works including Full Moon over Hot Springs—an intimate communion involving bread, wine, and community participants under the moonlight—as well as Live Chat NonArt Art, NonArt Art Walk, and Participation Conversation, the latter inspired by Tom Marioni’s adage, “The act of drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art.” This same ethos underpins ferris’s Berlin-based interventions such as VolksArt at the Waschcafé, Free Store Beer Piece, and Convivium Berlin, projects that draw from the ideas of Joseph Beuys and Ficino’s Renaissance conviviums.

From 2010 to the present, ferris has continued to explore the intersection of art, community, and conviviality through a range of events: Drinking Beer (& breaking bread) with Friends (Asterisk Gallery, 2010), Tea and Chat (Zygote Press, 2010), Crockpot Convivium – CLE (Convivium33 Gallery, 2011), Caffe Conversation ex officio at the 55th Venice Biennale, and Galatea Glance at The Sculpture Center, Cleveland (2013). Participation-based gestures such as Exquisite Corpse Happening, and Van Rooy Coffee Service further extend ferris’s commitment to art as shared encounter.

Recent works include The Listening Project (Rooms to Let, 2018), reflecting a continued interest in quiet presence and attentiveness as creative acts.

r ferris’s practice invites participants into subtle shifts of perception, where the line between artist and audience dissolves, and both are creators.