Who We Are
Un-Common AI is a nonprofit research institute dedicated to reimagining artificial intelligence as a cultural, political, and world-making force. Founded in 2025 by Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Luciana Parisi, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, the institute advances interdisciplinary research, public engagement, and technological design grounded in relational ethics, epistemic justice and collective well-being.
Central to Un-Common AI is a theoretical and political extension of the undercommons—as articulated by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013)—into the domain of AI. In this framing, rather than seeing the undercommons only as a hidden or oppositional social space, we can understand it as a lens for reimagining the cultures and politics of computation—how technologies are designed, used, and governed, and how they might support more collective, equitable, and creative ways of living. Un-Common AI explores how forms of collective study, subversion, and insurgent intellectual life might inhabit, reroute, or refuse dominant AI infrastructures—opening space for what might be called fugitive computation or undercommon AI.
This orientation asks: What if AI wasn't built to extract, monitor, and optimize from our data — but rather equity, relational ethics, and collective well-being? How might what is developed be radically different as well as what AI is developed for in practice? And what can we learn from people and communities who already reject and resist these systems and seek to develop other-wise?
At a moment when AI is rapidly reshaping governance, labor, education, and everyday life, dominant paradigms remain driven by extraction, optimization, efficiency, and control. Un-Common AI intervenes in this landscape by positioning AI as a site of social transformation, cultural production, and planetary responsibility. Through research and development, creative practice, and public communication, the institute explores how AI might support relational, plural ways of knowing and more equitable technological futures.
