Workshop delivered at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, as part of the 4th Politics of the Machines conference in April 2024.
This workshop helped participants understand the evolution of their relationship to their own hobbies. Why did they ignore them for long periods of time, only to eventually return to them? What role did their conscious priorities and unconscious instincts play in that evolution? Participants mapped out this deeper relationship to themselves and their hobbies through curves and historical timelines. They were exposed to digestible snippets of the works of George Sand, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Hannah Arendt, three women thinkers who are foundational for style inference.
Participants reported being surprised by the format of the workshop and the attention paid to deeper processes of human experience. They found it refreshing that the worksheets did not ask them questions for which they already knew the answer. They took every minute of the moment given to them to reflect on their own and they liked the fact that no personal selfish fact was embarrassing since everyone came forward with an honest look about their wants and aspirations. One participant in particular reported enjoying recalling parts of their past they haven’t had time to think about.
Who’s Afraid of AI? Arts, Sciences, and the Futures of Intelligence, a global conference at University of Toronto in October 2025
Our founder Rayyan Dabbous teamed up with Pia Kleber, David Rokeby, and Dirk Bernhardt-Walther to co-organize an international conference with talks & conversations between ‘godparents’ of AI Geoffrey Hinton (2025 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics) and Fei-Fei Li (Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI) as well as renowned artists and philosophers including Jeanette Winterson (12 Bytes: How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love), N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman), Matteo Pasquinelli (The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence) and more influential figures from around the world.
The conference’s interdisciplinary dialogue and its emphasis on the role of the humanities in shaping our technological future match our commitment at Style Inference Labs to do the same. Our founder continues to collaborate with and learn from the conference’s host, the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies, and AI, namely as their Media Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Presentation delivered at the conference of the American Psychological Association (Division 24: Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) in May 2026.
The purpose of the conference - Re-enchanting Psychology - fit well with the empowering objectives of style inference. “This conference reopens questions about what psychology is for and whose lives it is answerable to,” the Division’s President told the audience when kicking off the proceedings. We think psychology ought to serve human beings, rather than merely measure and thus limit their capacities.
Building Motivation with Lou Andreas-Salomé took the audience back to the origins of depth psychology, relying on the life and works of the first female psychoanalyst. We explained how Andreas-Salomé helps us track the journey of our own desires. We all know that some things motivate us more than others: but why? How can answering that question help us identify what naturally can motivate us and what simply doesn’t? One audience member particularly enjoyed this exploration of a forgotten figure, noting that Andreas-Salomé’s psychoanalytic theories appear less rigid than Freud’s.