I come from a background in cybernetics and intelligent systems, trained in systems that aim to optimize, automate, and predict. But I think there was always a part of me that didn’t fully subscribe to those ideas. Even back then, something in me resisted the logic of efficiency and control. During my years of university, I often felt slightly off. I didn’t quite fit the mold. There was a quiet unease in me, a persistent sense that I was performing something I didn’t fully believe in. Over time, that unruly seed grew louder, and I found myself drawn more and more toward the mess, the gaps, and especially the things machines can’t hold.

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A Bigger Splash, David Hockney, 1967, Tate

Eventually, I quit my first PhD in AI after two years, without any clear idea what to do next. I still tried to pursue a job in tech, thinking it was the logical path forward, but during the Covid years I made a sharp turn and ended up working in communications for an art gallery. I spent nearly three years there, immersed in a public institution that exposed me to the full spectrum of what art could be: expressive, critical, challenging, liberatory. But at some point I realized I didn’t want to just amplify culture; I was increasingly drawn toward more intellectual work, research, and creation: I wanted to make a bigger splash!

I craved deeper engagement, not just amplification. Although that period gave me space to absorb, to observe, and eventually to recognize that I wanted to be in a position to shape ideas, not just promote them. It comes as no surprise that eventually I landed in an arts PhD focused on critical AI and design, where I could finally begin to ask the questions that the tech world had trained me to ignore.

I’ve never believed conventional education works the way it claims to. I also did not really enjoy being inside those systems, not just school systems but the broader structures that reward productivity, individualism, and staying in line. For a long time, I didn’t question that. I just thought: this is how things are. But then I encountered people and places that helped me imagine otherwise, and eventually, to create otherwise. And even now, while I’m pursuing a PhD through a fairly traditional structure, I recognize that it's only within the relative freedom of an arts-based research space that I've been able to explore these questions. It's kind of funny — para-academia born in academia. But that's what makes it possible. The Institute of Machine Unlearning, in many ways, is born from that space of possibility, the kind you may or may not be lucky enough to find within a PhD.

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One of the hardest things to unlearn for me was the myth of the individual hero. I grew up thinking I had to do everything alone, never rely on anyone. Coming from Eastern European background, where traditional values and quiet endurance are often prized, I internalized a sense of self-reliance that was both cultural and personal. Individualism, while not named as such, was deeply embedded, the expectation to manage, persist, and achieve and to suffer through it all, because Slovak people love suffering, or at least we’re really good at performing it and even being praised for it. It took time, and being in spaces that offered other models of relation, to realize that this wasn't the only way to exist.

Over the years, that shell slowly cracked open. I started learning the joy and depth of building a web, or rather a network of friends, collaborators, and co-conspirators. Not for status or strategy. Rather to share stories, exchange skills, and practice other ways of being together. For the past two years, I’ve also been the communications lead for AIxDESIGN, which taught me so much about navigating community building, the kind that isn't transactional, but based on mutual recognition, curiosity, and playfulness. I have got to see the backstage of an young self-funded org that live by its values, does participatory research and gatekeeps nothing! Honestly, it was so much fun. Never have I ever imagined that I could be working otherwise and in a way, already unlearning a lot that I know about the dominant narratives that we world by.

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In a way, the Institute of Machine Unlearning is an offspring of all those entanglements. I wouldn’t be forming it without those years of experiencing, in a very practical way, what it means to work in the open and do participatory research. I loved working on AI literacy through social media, but what stayed with me most was the participatory part: hosting workshops, connecting with people, and doing research with others, not in isolation. Acknowledging our differences, as Audre Lorde insists we must, and staying with the troubles, as Donna Haraway proposes. These practices became less about methods and more about a way of being in relation. That’s why I’m trying to package these years of learning, gathering, and curiosity, my long period of recalibration, into something collective. I’m founding this not to center myself, but to invite others in. When I think about it, I don’t wish to be the hero. I want to play in the sand, together.

The Institute of Machine Unlearning is my way of doing that. It's a mask, a performance, if you will, echoing Susan Sontag's ideas of a new sensibility or a refusal to keep treating scientific ways of knowing as inherently more valid than artistic or sensory ways of exploring the world. It's a form that plays the game just enough to be let in, only to rewire things from the inside. A way to sneak weird things into the system. It’s how I practice serious play. It’s how I take refusal seriously. It gives shape to something soft, experimental, and collective. Practicing the weird third thing, between AI doomerism and hype where lies the messy middle space of participatory inquiry, playful subversion, and machine unlearning. So… Let’s unlearn together, shall we?

xx Dominika

But what does it all mean?