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The Media Arts and Media Design Program cordially invites students and interested participants to attend a special lecture titled “Lovelace Limit: What AI Can’t Do.”

24 March 2026
Faculty of Fine Arts
The Media Arts and Media Design Program cordially invites students and interested participants to attend a special lecture titled “Lovelace Limit: What AI Can’t Do.”
The lecture will be delivered by Prof. Gunalan Nadarajan from the University of Michigan.
Date: 25 March 2026
Time: 13:00 – 16:00
Venue: Lecture Room 1, Media Arts and Media Design Building, 2nd Floor, Chiang Mai University Art and Culture Center.

About Prof. Gunalan Nadarajan
Gunalan Nadarajan, an art theorist and curator working at the intersections of art, science and technology, is Dean Emeritus and Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan. His publications include multiple books and over 100 book chapters, catalogue essays, academic articles and reviews; many translated into 17 languages. He has curated many international exhibitions including in Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand, US, Korea, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, China and as Artistic Co-Director of Ogaki Media Arts Biennale and Artistic Director of ISEA2008 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Singapore.

Lovelace Limit: What AI Can’t Do

There is an overwhelming flood of information bombarding us daily about AI that it is not surprising that the public is often either uncritically swept up in a techno-utopian dream or terrified into reactionary retreat from these technologies fearing for their jobs and safety. As one trudges through this confusing haze, it is useful to critically reckon with tensions and disjunctions between AI’s actual and purported capabilities. In 1843, in her notes related to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (widely considered a forerunner of the computer) Ada Lovelace who developed the first programs for this machine alerts us to the fundamental limitations of technologies that seek to perform intelligence. “The Analytical Engine”, she says, “has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform...Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.” It is proposed that being limited by the intent, sophistication and clarity of our instructions and imagination is the ‘Lovelace Limit’ that will haunt all machine intelligence. This talk will seek to present a counternarrative to the current rhetoric about AI that highlights its capabilities rather than its limitations. It will be argued that the technological and structural limits of AI open space for exploring the critical possibilities afforded by creative work grounded in a more holistic understanding of intelligence and human capacities. The talk will present artworks that critically reevaluate and reveal the fundamental limits of AI while also positing opportunities for reimagining and engaging these technologies.
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