Prof. Dr. Sarah Ciston

Critical AI | Critical-Creative Coding | Artistic Research

Sarah Ciston (they/any) is an artist-researcher building tools to bring intersectional, critical-creative approaches to machine learning. Winner of the 2025 Ars Electronica STARTS Grand Prize, Ciston is the author of "A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets" and co-author of Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press, 2026). They hold a PhD in Media Arts + Practice from University of Southern California and an MFA in Experimental Writing from University of California San Diego.

Ciston has been awarded fellowships at Akademie der Künste, Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Processing Foundation, Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and was named 2023 AI Newcomer by Gesellschaft für Informatik. They have exhibited works or presented research at the European Commission, Mozilla Festival, Ars Electronica, Cambridge University, Goethe Institut, Disruption Network Lab, Berlin Science Week, Dutch Design Week, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Scottish AI Alliance, Chaos Communication Camp, MUTEK, Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Culture Yard, Royal College of Art, and elsewhere. They have published or been featured in MIT Technology Review, AI & Society, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Tagesspiegel, Hyperallergic, Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, etc. 

Ciston joined KHM in 2026, where they will launch a new chapter of Code Collective, the inviting, interdisciplinary community for co-learning programming they started in 2019.

Recent publications: ORCHID

Current focus

Ciston's artistic research examines how emerging technologies transmit and amplify power, ideology, and difference by manipulating language. Currently, three research questions guide this work:

• Intersectional AI: How do the internal mechanisms of AI systems (models, training data, and techniques) reveal their limitations through language, particularly for anyone who does not fit normative baselines?
• Critical AI Using Creative Coding: How can intersectional, critical-creative coding methodologies be used to investigate seemingly opaque large AI systems, using practical, material approaches?
• AI Warfare: How can artistic research help address the urgent personal and global stakes of emerging technologies, by making them tangible, explainable, accessible, and able to be reimagined otherwise?