Eryk Salvaggio
Eryk Salvaggio is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training: a practice designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level. He is a researcher on AI, art and education at the metaLab (at) Harvard University, the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment, and a top contributor to Tech Policy Press. He holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University.
As an independent consultant, he is available to work with cultural and academic organizations to make sense of emerging technology and to shape responsive strategies.
Research, Tech & Society
Eryk is the Emerging Technology Research Advisor for the Siegel Family Endowment, a philanthropic organization focused on responsible technology, and a researcher with AI Pedagogy Project with the metaLAB at Harvard University. He served as a Flickr Foundation Research Fellow in 2024. He began working with policy and emerging technologies while serving as a researcher at the Swiss Federal Government’s Swissnex hub in San Francisco, where he worked with cultural institutions, human rights organizations, tech companies, startups, artists and activists to think critically and proactively about tech policy. He has spoken at events including RightsCon and the Women in AI conference, and has published numerous pieces in Tech Policy Press, including one of the most widely circulated stories of 2023. As a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017, he created the Wikipedia article on Algorithmic Bias, sourced with nearly 100 references to top quality scholarly research, which has been read more than 300,000 times.
He has worked with partners including AIxDesign’s Story & Code program, the AI Village at DEFCON 31, Space10, the Australian National University, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, and the National Gallery of Australia. His artwork has been presented at SXSW, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the White House-backed AI Village at the hacker convention DEFCON 31, the New Museum, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the DAHJ Gallery. He has been highlighted in pieces with Wired, the BBC4, The New York Times, ArtForum, NBC News, Neural, Dirty, Mute Magazine, and Outland.
Art, Design & Technology
Eryk’s work examines the relationships between systems, power, and technology, particularly in generative AI. Art is a means of finding unique insights into techno-social assemblages, and his writing on art and tech has appeared in academic journals such as Leonardo, Communications of the ACM, IMAGE, and Patterns. Since 2001, his award-winning work has been shown at the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Bunjil Place (Australia), the CVPR Art Gallery, Michigan State University Science Museum, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Eyebeam, CalArts, Brown University, Turbulence, The Internet Archive, and at various film festivals. His work is referenced in numerous publications, including Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais’ At the Edge of Art, Alex Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Martha Langford’s Image & Imagination.
He has presented talks, keynotes or works at events such as SXSW and DEFCON 31, and at academic conferences, including the Design Research Society Conference (2024, MIT Media Lab), ACM FAccT 2024, the Systems Research & Design Conference (RSD10, 11, & 12), the Advances in Systems Sciences and Systems Practice Conference (2022), Melbourne Design Week (2021), MIT Press (2021), the University of St. Gallen (2018), California College of the Arts (2018, 2019, 2020), the University of Maine, RightsCon (2020), and Gensler San Francisco (2017).
Teaching & Public Speaking
Eryk’s course on AI images was endorsed by the Harvard MetaLab’s AI Pedagogy Project in 2023. He has taught at the Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Malaga, and Bradley University, and he has given talks or lectures at the MIT Media Lab, Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, ANU, NYU, Aarhus, the University of Copenhagen, UC Fresno, and Northeastern University. He earned two concurrent undergraduate degrees, in New Media and Journalism, from the University of Maine, where he was listed as visiting faculty as an undergraduate based on his early interactive, online net.art work.
Eryk is available for public speaking on events that seek a critical but realistic assessment of the state of technology. Reach out if you’d like to connect!