Where does thought begin?
Is AI a mirror of our own making?
Imaginative Intelligences with G5A: The Origin of Thought opens an artist-led dialogue that explores the intersection of AI, technology, and the future of storytelling at the G5A warehouse, Mumbai.
What might narrative and expression look like in a tech-driven world?
How can we shape a future where innovation is grounded in imagination, ethics, empathy, and artistic vision?
G5A, Mozilla Foundation and Berggruen Institute invite technologists and cultural practitioners to engage in the evolving relationship between humans and AI to learn, reflect, and build a space for shared inquiry for the future.
Through taster sessions and a three-day assembly, we will explore, question, and develop outcomes born at the intersection of art, society, and AI. The project is guided by 3 questions:
How we remember, as AI reshapes memory, history, and the stories we preserve
How we think, as human cognition increasingly collaborates with machine intelligence
How we connect, as technology transforms relationships, communities, and belonging
assembly
A three-day gathering of artists, technologists, policymakers, filmmakers, and cultural practitioners exploring how AI is reshaping memory, community, creativity, and human connection.
Emerging from five taster sessions shaped around questions of how we remember, think, and connect in an age of machine intelligence, the Assembly brings together conversations, workshops and an immersive installation, that open space for collective reflection, learning, and shared inquiry into the evolving relationship between humans and AI.
schedule
DAY ONE
Friday, May 29, 2026
12 PM to 7 PM
Immersive Installation
Transresistance: Lost Transmissions
4 PM to 7 PM
Workshop
Archaeology of AI: An Exercise in Time Travel & Aesthetic Forgery
Ram Surendran
7 PM to 8 PM
Keynote Address
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
DAY TWO
Saturday, May 30, 2026
12 to 7 PM
Immersive Installation
Transresistance: Lost Transmissions
2 PM to 3 PM
Conversation
100 Years of AI: Decoding the Stack, the Society, and the Century Ahead
Sanjay Palsamudram
4 to 7 PM
Workshop
The Sentiment Machine: Using machine intelligence to turn opinions into art
Dennis Peter
7 PM to 8 PM
Conversation
Who Gets to Imagine the Future?
Aaron Myles Pereira Ishan Benegal Richa Roy Sanjay Palsamudram Dr Siddharth Warrier
DAY THREE
Sunday, May 31, 2026
12 to 7 PM
Immersive Installation | BB
2 PM to 3 PM
Conversation
Who’s Cooking? Taste, Memory and the Algorithms Between Us
Anusha Murthy Ganesh Bagler Gresham Fernandes Ishan Benegal Lily Kelting
4 to 7 PM
Workshop
Bodies, vision, and new tangibilities
Dhruv Saxena
6 PM to 7 PM
Conversation
Film and AI: Rewriting the Frame
Nikkhil Advani in conversation with Aranya Sahay
8 PM to 9 PM
Circle of Inquiry
What Shall We Become Together?
Anuradha Parikh Dia Mirza Ishan Benegal Kyle Baptista Rajni Bakshi Ranjit Hoskote
FRIDAY-SUNDAY, MAY 29-31
taster sessions
1
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18
Panel Discussion
2
SATURDAY, APRIL 04
The Third Culture: Art After AI
3
SATURDAY, APRIL 18
How Will We Remember?
4
SATURDAY, APRIL 25
Humans in the Slop
5
SATURDAY, MAY 16
Healing in the age of AI
Explore Session 01
February 18, 2026
Artists, policymakers, and technologists came together to explore ideas of memory, community, and home at the intersection of AI, art, and culture. The first session, held at Oddbird Theatre in New Delhi, reflected on questions such as: What is memory? What is community? What is home?
The session opened with an AI demonstration comparing human and chatbot responses using parameters such as choice, novelty, and sentiment. The exercise sparked a wider conversation led by Ishan Benegal (Artistic Director, G5A and Founder + Chef, PORT Kitchen & Bar), alongside Shakun Batra (Filmmaker), Nandana Sengupta (Associate Professor, School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi), and Ritu Kapur (Co-founder and Managing Director, Quint Digital Limited).
Highlights from the conversation
Do Chatbots Hallucinate Community?
We built a tool to understand how narrative might look in a tech-driven world.
To study how our AI counterparts think differently about very human subjects, we asked several AI tools some abstract questions. Help us by sharing your thoughts for the human side, and let’s explore how the two sides compare.
Watch the complete conversation
Explore Session 02
April 04, 2026
The Third Culture: Art after AI
By Dr Neal Parikh
The session began with the history and philosophy of art in its many forms, then traced how the foundational ideas of the information age shape what these systems can and cannot do. That technical grounding opened into a broader inquiry into the political economy of AI and art – who captures value when machines learn from human creative work, how power and institutions influence what gets built or lost, and what all of this means for livelihoods, cultural traditions, and the evolving aesthetic, ethical, and institutional frameworks still taking shape.
Watch the highlight reel
Explore Session 03
April 18, 2026
How Will We Remember?
Memory has always been shaped by the technologies that hold it, from oral traditions and storytelling to photography and digital archives. Each era builds its own systems that determine what is preserved and what fades. Today, Artificial Intelligence marks a new rupture: as machines are trained on our cultural archives – images, languages, and stories, they are not only storing the past but actively reshaping its meaning. This raises urgent questions about authorship, ownership, and the politics of remembering in an age where memory is increasingly mediated by algorithms.
This session brought together artists, thinkers, and practitioners to engage with this shift through a workshop, panel, and performance. Moving from hands-on making to critical discussion to embodied expression, the evening explored what it means when machines begin to hold memory – what we lose, what we retain, and what new forms of remembering might emerge.
Watch the highlight reel
Explore Session 04
April 25, 2026
Humans in the Slop
Humans in the Slop was a participatory workshop and conversation that explored these tensions through collective practice rather than prescription. The session was part of Imaginative Intelligences with G5A: The Origin of Thought, curated by Animela and facilitated by Aayushman Pandey.
Participants co-created an exquisite corpse-style music video for Creative Commons music, in this case, Nine Inch Nails’ “Discipline”. Each participant directed one segment using methods of their choosing—whether heavily AI-assisted, minimally augmented, entirely analogue, or somewhere in between. In doing so, each creative decision becomes a site for considering labour, authorship, consent, environmental cost, aesthetics and value.
The final work emerged as a fragmented, playful and collectively authored portrait of contemporary artistic ambivalence.
Directed by Meghu SN · Riju Mrinal Roy · Ujaala Chaudhuri · Mihir Jajodia · Janhavi Pradhan · Nishant Bhaskar · Cyril-Vincent Michaud · Vedika Aslesha Joshi · Scott Tellis · Reibang Chakma · Yosha Khurana · Davis Curry · Aashith Shetty · Kishan Dev · Siddesh Masurkar · David Pinto · Nilesh Balakrishnan · Archanaa N Trasy · Anne Kerhoas Doshi · Aayushman Pandey
Explore Session 05
May 16, 2026
Healing in the Age of AI
The conversation explored how artificial intelligence is reshaping modern medicine, not just in diagnostics and decision-making, but in the very nature of clinical thinking and patient care.
Moderated by Dr. Sanat Phatak and Dr. Siddharth Warrier, the session examined the ethical tensions emerging as AI systems increasingly participate in deeply human medical interactions. The session highlighted that the future of medicine will not be defined by AI alone, but by how thoughtfully humans choose to integrate it into care, decision-making, and the patient experience.