TechnoMirage is a collaborative event series by Underground Art and Design (UAAD) and Liminal, a design futures agency, created to examine artificial intelligence through artistic inquiry, speculative practice, and collective worldbuilding. Across programs in New York and abroad, the series explores how AI shapes cultural narratives, creative labor, and future imaginaries. It invites artists and communities to question the systems behind machine intelligence and to reclaim agency in shaping its possibilities.

The name TechnoMirage describes the illusion of progress that AI often projects. Beneath polished interfaces lie extractive data practices, optimization logics, ghosted authorship, stolen identities, and machinic fantasies of neutrality. These systems present themselves as clean and inevitable while operating through infrastructures built on surveillance, classification, and unequal distribution of technological power.

In response, TechnoMirage gathers artists who challenge these narratives from within. The series includes an in-person panel on reclaiming AI from extractive systems, a speculative workshop that asks participants to imagine life and creative practice in 2050, and a live performance set that experiments with noise, failure, feedback, and improvisation as strategies for disrupting machine logic. Global programs expand the inquiry through the virtual exhibition Ghost in the Feedback Loop, a virtual panel with Parsons School of Design, and this publication, which brings together interviews, field notes, and shared methods as a living archive.

TechnoMirage positions AI not as a neutral tool but as a site of negotiation. It asks what futures emerge when artists confront the ghosts, illusions, and structures embedded in their tools and invites readers to consider how creativity, ethics, and agency might be reimagined in the shadow of machine intelligence.