Final Report - "The Algorithmic Mirror" Workshop
| Title | Final Report - "The Algorithmic Mirror" Workshop |
|---|---|
| Author | Luca Pasquali |
| Date | 2026-07-24 |
| Project | 2023-1-IT03-ESC51-VTJ-000139142 |
Final Report & Personal Reflection: "The Algorithmic Mirror" Workshop
Author: Luca Pasquali
Workshop Date: July 23, 2026
Venue: Alte University, Tbilisi (Georgia)
Framework: ESC Volunteering Project supported by the European Solidarity Corps and Istituto Cultura Italiana
On July 23, 2026, I led the workshop "The Algorithmic Mirror: Architecture, Technological Apparatus & Social Effects of AI" at Alte University in Tbilisi, and looking back on it now, the experience carries a weight that goes well beyond the hour and a half I spent speaking. When I first proposed running this session, management was openly hesitant about having me take it on as speaker and facilitator. My background is unconventional, and I do not hold a completed formal academic degree in the field, which understandably raised doubts about whether I was the right person to lead a discussion of this kind in front of a university audience. I chose not to let that hesitation be the final word. I pushed back, made my case, and eventually earned the approval to design and deliver the session on my own terms. Standing in front of that room and carrying it through independently is something I am genuinely proud of, not just because the talk went well, but because it represents a small but real victory over the assumption that formal credentials are the only valid entry point into a conversation about technology and society. The organizational delivery held together, the room stayed engaged from start to finish, and the response from the audience confirmed that the risk had been worth taking.
I built the workshop around a multidisciplinary reading of Artificial Intelligence, deliberately working to dismantle techno-solutionist narratives rather than reinforce them. The session moved from historical and mythological roots, tracing a line from Hephaestus' autonomous tripods in the Iliad to the I Ching as an early binary precursor of modern algorithms, into the mechanics and statistical illusions at the heart of the technology itself, from Claude Shannon's 1951 "Copernican Trauma" through to Large Language Models and the psychological pull of the ELIZA Effect. From there I opened up the geopolitics of AI, setting American commercial and private models against European regulatory and sovereign frameworks and Chinese state-backed open-source ecosystems, before turning to the environmental impact and sustainability of data processing and computing infrastructure, and closing with creative labor and media philosophy through Latour's Actor-Network Theory and Vaccari's notion of the "technological unconscious." Of everything I presented, it was the environmental cost of AI that by far generated the most engagement and debate. That thread pulled us naturally into a genuinely political discussion about the future of open-source AI, and I found myself moderating a debate I had not fully anticipated but was glad to see unfold.
The room was made up mostly of students from the Engineering department and other technical faculties, and in hindsight that shaped what worked and what I would change. Given how technically literate this audience was, I think a future version of the workshop would benefit from going deeper into the actual mechanics of model architecture, things like weight dynamics, attention mechanisms, or the mathematical specifics of diffusion processes. The humanistic and philosophical framing was well received and clearly gave people a new lens to think through, but I could feel that a slightly heavier technical dose would have matched even more closely what this particular crowd was hoping to get out of it.
This workshop proved to me, in a very concrete way, the value of approaching technology through a critical, cross-disciplinary lens rather than accepting the narratives it usually comes packaged in. But beyond the content itself, delivering this seminar and overcoming the initial administrative doubts about my academic credentials feels like a real milestone in my own professional development. It is a marker I will keep coming back to, and it reinforces for me just how much impact this ESC volunteering project in Tbilisi is having, not only on the people who attend, but on how I see my own path forward.