Place, AI, and Practice

Presented by TOPOS LAB: advancing place research

Place, AI, and Practice brings together researchers, artists, designers, practitioners, and communities to explore changing relationships between place and artificial intelligence.

The conference considers how AI is influencing the ways we understand, experience, imagine, and represent the places around us, and how this in turn impacts our sense of place. It asks what happens when computational systems encounter the particularities of lived environments, local knowledge, memory, culture, and community.

Drawing on Topos Lab’s interdisciplinary approach to place research, the conference creates opportunities for exchange across research and practice. Through talks, conversations, creative work, and experimental approaches, Place, AI, and Practice will examine the possibilities and challenges that emerge as AI becomes increasingly involved in how places are understood and made.

Topos Lab invites researchers, artists, designers, practitioners, and scholars to contribute up to 25-minute presentations that explore the intersections between place, AI, and practice,

We are particularly interested in contributions that approach questions such as but not limited to:

• How does AI represent particular places, communities, and environments?

• What happens to local knowledge when place is translated into data?

• How are artists and designers using AI to work with place?

• How might creative practice expose the assumptions embedded in AI systems?

• What new forms of place-making might emerge through AI?

• How do AI-generated images, text, maps, models, or environments shape perceptions of place?

• What happens to memory, identity, atmosphere, and lived experience when place becomes computational?

• How can practice provide new methods for researching relationships between AI and place?

• What are the social, cultural, environmental, and political implications of AI-mediated representations of place?

We are open to academic papers, creative practice, visual works, demonstrations, experimental presentations, and other forms of situated inquiry. Contributions that cross disciplinary boundaries are particularly encouraged.

The conference asks how we might understand AI through the places where it operates and the practices that make it meaningful. This includes attention to the material conditions of AI, the data and infrastructures that support it, and the communities whose places and knowledge become part of computational systems.

We invite contributions that do more than describe these relationships. We are interested in work that makes, tests, questions, or experiments with them.

Please submit an abstract of 150 words outlining your proposed contribution, including its relationship to place, AI, and practice. Creative and practice-based submissions may include supporting images, documentation, or links where appropriate.

Deadline: 18 December 2026
Notification: 1 February 2027
Full papers due: 8 June 2027
Conference: 1-2 July, RMIT University, Melbourne City Campus
Submission: shaun.wilson@rmit.edu.au

A selection of papers will be published in peer review TBA