Our Speakers
Stephanie Catani
University of Würzburg
Stephanie Catani is Professor of Modern German Literary Studies and Media at the University of Würzburg. Her research centers on creative artificial intelligence and its implications for literature, authorship, and the arts. Her publications in this field include the edited handbook "Künstliche Intelligenz und die Künste" (De Gruyter, 2024), the co-edited volume "Generative Literatur. Produktion und Rezeption im Zeichen des Codes" (Textpraxis, 2024), and numerous articles on generative literature, computational creativity, and AI-based authorship. Further research interests — reflected in (co-)edited volumes such as "Literatur und Podcast" (Metzler, 2025), "Popliteratur 3.0. Soziale Medien und Gegenwartsliteratur" (De Gruyter, 2023), "Künstliche Welten zwischen Multisensorik und Multimedialität" (De Gruyter, 2021), and "Non-Person. Grenzen des Humanen in Literatur, Kultur und Medien" (Fink, 2020) — encompass literature's relationship to (digital) contemporary media as well as interdisciplinary and media-comparative questions. She is principal investigator of the DFG-funded project "Photo-Poems in Illustrated Magazines between 1895 and 1945" (2024–2027) and member of the DFG-funded scientific network "The Knowledge of Digital Literature."
David Jhave Johnston
Centre for Digital Narrative, Bergen. glia.ca
David Jhave Johnston is a digital-poet writing in emergent domains: A.I., 3D, VR, and code. Author-programmer of the multimedia human + A.I. writing art-project ReRites (Anteism Books, 2019), the theoretical-history Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications (MIT Press, 2016), and many online multimedia literary explorations at www.glia.ca. He is currently employed as an Ai-narrative researcher at the UiB Centre for Digital Narrative from August 2023-26 on a team investigating Extending Digital Narrative.
Vadim Keylin
Independent Researcher
Vadim Keylin is a poet and sound studies scholar. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Culture from Aarhus University and in 2021–2025 was a postdoc in the ERC project “Poetry in the Digital Age” at the University of Hamburg, leading the subproject “Music(alization) and the Lyric: Recent Medial Correlations”. He is the author of two monographs: Participatory Sound Art: Technologies, Aesthetics, Politics (2023) and Digital Oral Poetry: Voice and Subjectivity in Algorithmic Culture (2026) and has published extensively on sound studies and sound art, audioliterature and digital culture.
Matej Novotný
Vysoká škola výtvarných umení, Bratislava
Matej Novotný co-leads the Digital Arts studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. He specializes in digital technologies, visualization, creative programming, and virtual environments. He studied mathematics and computer graphics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Comenius University in Bratislava. He has published research in the areas of interactive information visualization, virtual and augmented reality. He is a co-founder of VIS GRAVIS, a company working in the field of visual computing and interaction.
Rudolf Rosa
Univerzita Karlova
Rudolf Rosa je počítačovým lingvistou na Ústavu formální a aplikované lingvistiky MFF UK. V posledních letech se zaměřuje na generování textu pomocí jazykových modelů. V rámci projektu THEaiTRE se podílel na vzniku první české divadelní hry se scénářem vygenerovaným umělou inteligencí. Vede projekt EduPo, v němž se jazykové modely učí generovat básně v češtině, s cílem vytvořit komplexní vzdělávací aplikaci věnovanou české poezii.
Ondřej Vojtíšek
Univerzita Karlova
Ondřej Vojtíšek učí český jazyk a literaturu na pedagogickém lyceu Jedna radost a připravuje budoucí češtináře a češtinářky na Filozofické fakultě Univerzity Karlovy. Jeho oborem je didaktika literatury a zaměřuje se především na možností vyučovat a ověřovat dovednost interpretace textů, zajímá ho ale i sféra příruček k výuce literatury či otázka literárního kánonu ve školním kontextu. V rámci projektu EduPo o AI generování básnických textů připravoval jeho didaktické uplatnění.
Barbora Trnková
Masarykova univerzita / ScreenSaverGallery / Vašulka Kitchen Brno
Barbora Trnková je umělkyně, výzkumnice, fotografka a kurátorka, tematizující AI jako detektor výstupů imaginace zakořeněné v dominantní subjektivitě. Ke svým různorodým projektům přistupuje jako k tvorbě foto-proti-aparátů, optických událostí a nástrojů poznání, jimiž lze přeostřovat vidění a tím zprostředkovat co nemůžeme, nebo nechceme vidět. Inspirována posthumanismem a nefilozofií se věnuje intimitě, tabu a mocenským strukturám v naší digitálně medializované realitě. Je spoluzakladatelkou screensaver.gallery unikátní experimentální výstavní platformy pro digitální umění a spoluautorkou softwarových děl na platformě metazoa.org. V současnosti působí kurátorsky v Domě umění města Brna a nově také ve Vašulka Kitchen Brno, pedagogicky na TIM FF MU tamtéž a je autorkou publikace The Look of the Internalized Machine Gaze.
Ondřej Trhoň
No fun kolektiv
Ondřej Trhoň je kulturní kritik, teoretik a umělec. Absolvoval studia novych médií na FF UK, doktorské studium na Akademii výtvarných umění. Je členem herně-uměleckého No fun kolektivu a zajímá se o politické a společenské kontexty videoher s interaktivního umění.
Our PhD Students
Tomáš Marušiak
Masarykova univerzita/King’s College London
Tomáš Marušiak is a visual artist, researcher, and educator in the field of AI Art. He graduated from the AFAD in Bratislava, co-founded the Studio of New Media at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University of Košice, where he also taught until 2012. His research at the Masaryk University focuses on the aesthetics of AI Art and artificial consciousness. In 2025, he served as a visiting professor at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he taught the course AI Art Strategies. He also initiates and coordinates major events in the field, including as director of the Speaking AIArt conference in Brno.
Michael Franěk
Masarykova univerzita
Michael Franěk is a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno. His research focuses on artificial intelligence in digital games, machine learning, and player–AI interaction. His doctoral project combines theoretical research with the development of an experimental game environment. Alongside academia, he works with IT, audiovisual technologies, automation, electronics, and technical systems, with broader interests extending to automotive and mechanical technologies.
Igor Rjabinin
Vysoká škola výtvarných umení, Bratislava
Igor Rjabinin is a developer, researcher and open source enthusiast working at the intersection of mathematics, art and programming. He completed his PhD on digital storytelling and nonlinear narratives in June 2026 at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where he teaches Creative Coding. Formerly a developer at the Slovak National Gallery, he is a founding member of Metafori, creating digital tools for cultural heritage.
Man Lai Tin
Masarykova univerzita/Univerzita J. E. Purkyně
Assistant Professor, interdisciplinary academic, and media artist specializing in machine creativity, computational aesthetics, the philosophy of technology, and the phenomenological dimensions of AI in art. Man Tin’s work integrates critical theory, digital media, immersive technologies, and artistic practice to examine the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent systems.
Organisers
Karel Piorecký
Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, Praha

Karel Piorecký (* 1978). Literary scholar and researcher in the field of new media and artificial intelligence. He works in the Department of 20th‑Century and Contemporary Literature at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His expertise lies in the history of modern Czech poetry and the interplay between literature and new media. He has published the monographs Czech Poetry in the Postmodern Situation (2011) and Czech Literature and New Media (2016). In collaboration with Zuzana Husárová, he co‑authored the monograph *The Culture of Neural Networks: Synthetic Literature and Art in (Not Only) the Czech and Slovak Context* (2024).
Zuzana Husárová
Vysoká škola výtvarných umení, Bratislava

Zuzana Husárová is a Slovak poet, researcher, and scholar specializing in electronic literature, digital media, and intermedia performance. She is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and an editor for the gender-focused magazine Glosolália. She has published four poetry books—liminal, lucent, amoeba, and Hypomnemata—as well as Výsledky vzniku (laureate of a national poetry prize), a book generated by the neural network Liza Gennart and co-created with Ľubomír Panák, and a bilingual Slovak-German collection Hyper (translated by Martina Lisa). She has co-edited two collective monographs on electronic literature research. Her theoretical book The Culture of Neural Networks, co-authored with Karel Piorecký, received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism in Electronic Literature.
Jana Horáková
Organiser of PhD section, Masarykova univerzita, Brno

Jana Horáková is an associate professor of new media art at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, Czech Republic, where she oversees the study programs Theory of Interactive Media (MA) and Digital Culture and Creative Industries (PhD). She specializes in local new media art history, robotic art, and innovative methodologies of new media art research and mediation. She has presented her research in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Finland, the USA, and Japan. She is the author of several papers, book chapters, and books on the cultural history of robotics, robotic art, software art, and new media art preservation strategies. For a number of years, she has been experimenting with cutting-edge applications of new media as research tools within research on the history and aesthetics of digital art, co-curated exhibitions, and led the interdisciplinary research project Media Art Live Archive.
Conference about Art, Literature, and Playfulness in the Context of Generative AI
29. - 30. 9. 2026
Praha, Kampus Hybernská - Didaktikon