Amidst an explosion of techniques to make machines learn and mimic humans, we ask how music and performance can reflect on promise and danger alike. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have created the opportunity to make the machine a more relatable collaborator – allowing it to listen, see, and respond in a way that more closely mimics human expectations.

There’s growing hope that these techniques can externalise our own perception and potential. But there are justified worries about these technologies. Machine learning presents the spectre of computers running amok over human civilization. Deep ethical questions arise, ranging from the societal impact of automation and surveillance, to opaque capabilities and corporate agendas. On a more fundamental level, these developments challenge our ideas about what make us unique as humans, as we respond to a newly created form of consciousness.

Can artists help calm some of our fears by hacking or transforming AI technology into something more open and transparent?

For this year's Hacklab, we've invite participants to invent collaborative performances that embrace the chaos, strangeness, and cultural anxiety surrounding the theme of AI, echoing the titular Turmoil of this year's CTM festival.

We asked coders and technologists to apply, but also people from across artistic and research backgrounds, from musicians to poets to psychologists – anyone interested in how humans, machines, and hybrids might perform together. Those outcomes could take forms ranging from musical instruments to performance art and choreography to data-driven sound art to improvised human rule sets.

As always, we’ll have a week together to explore and invent, with inputs around the theme, culminating in a live performance in HAU2.

AI itself demands collaboration between the wetware disciplines of the brain and the primitive models of code. For the Hacklab, we hope similar cross-disciplinary collisions might help us invent a spontaneous collective intelligence – or at least to disrupt one.