Breathing Algorithms

In the wake of the 2025 AI Action Summit hosted in France, the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence in shaping our societies, cultures, and creative futures has taken centre stage. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in our daily lives, from predictive algorithms to creative collaboration, its implications for justice, equity, and sustainability demand critical artistic inquiry. In parallel, the world is grappling with the escalating climate crisis-particularly in countries like Pakistan, where urban centres are suffocating under the weight of environmental neglect. 1 As the world marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement this November, conversations around climate justice, ethical technologies, and cross-cultural collaboration are more urgent than ever. In Lahore, a city choked by recurring smog and environmental degradation, global themes have intensely local resonances. The city’s worsening air quality is a public health crisis and a mirror reflecting structural inequalities, ecological apathy, and gendered vulnerabilities. It is also a call to action: to imagine new futures where technology, art, and ethics converge for sustainable and inclusive change. The convergence of technology, AI, and climate change presents profound implications for cultural heritage, particularly in vulnerable cities like Lahore. 

As artificial intelligence reshapes how societies produce, preserve, and interpret culture, it also raises urgent questions about equity, justice, and sustainability. Simultaneously, the climate crisis threatens both tangible and intangible heritage—pollution, displacement, and ecological degradation erode not only physical spaces but also communal memory and traditional knowledge. In this context, cultural heritage becomes both a casualty and a site of resistance, where artists, technologists, and communities can harness AI not only to document loss but also to reimagine futures rooted in care, inclusion, and environmental justice. 

The Lahore Digital Arts Festival (LDF), in collaboration with Novembre Numérique, the Institut Français, the French Embassy in Pakistan, and the Alliance Française de Lahore, proposes a timely program that brings together French and Pakistani artists, thinkers, and technologists to explore the intersection of Gendered AI, environmental justice, and digital art. Through a curated exhibition, residency exchange, and public programs, the initiative seeks to raise critical questions such as: 

1. How can artists use AI as a tool and a medium to critique environmental collapse and imagine ecological futures? 
2. What new visual languages emerge when gender, climate, and AI intersect in digital storytelling?
3. Can AI be programmed to care? What would feminist, climate-conscious algorithms look like?
4. How are women and marginalised communities in cities like Lahore differently affected by climate change and technological transformation?
5. What is the role of cross-cultural collaboration in building ethical and locally resonant digital futures?
6. How might speculative art help us confront smog, displacement, and planetary precarity- not with despair, but with imagination?
7. In what ways can digital art function as a form of climate resistance and technological activism?
8. What does climate-resilient cultural preservation look like in the age of algorithmic decision-making? 

These questions will serve as the program’s thematic backbone, guiding the creation of new works and opening space for public reflection. By engaging with the promises and perils of AI in a rapidly warming world, Breathing Algorithms offers more than commentary; it aims to prototype poetic, political, and planetary alternatives.