OPENINGS
Held at PalaCinema Locarno, October 9, 2026
Intelligence in Time begins from a simple uncertainty: perhaps intelligence is not only what generates, but what happens before and after generation. Before the answer, there is attention, hesitation, memory, intuition, relation. After the answer, there is interpretation, consequence, responsibility and response. In a technological culture increasingly organized around immediacy, automation and acceleration, intelligence may instead be found in the capacity to inhabit an interval, to remain with what is not yet resolved.
David Peat’s idea of Gentle Action offers a way of thinking through this interval. It questions the familiar sequence by which we isolate a problem, analyse it, impose a solution and measure the result. Such a logic presumes that the observer can stand outside the system being changed. But in complex systems, ecological, social, cultural, technological, every intervention alters the field from within. Peat proposes instead a form of creative suspension: delaying the impulse to solve, staying within a situation long enough for hidden relations to become perceptible, and acting only when an intervention can move with the system rather than against it. Gentle Action thus becomes not passivity, but another form of intelligence: intelligence as timing, sensitivity and proportion.
Seen through this lens, artificial intelligence confronts us not only with a new form of computation, but with a crisis of temporality. Automation privileges sequence, prediction and speed; human experience moves through other rhythms. Synchronicity suggests a time of relation rather than succession: a meaningful convergence that cannot be reduced to efficiency. Kairos opens a new dimension of time, it names the moment that must be recognized rather than scheduled. Eons stretch beyond human duration; the Yugas imagine time as cyclical transformation rather than linear progress. These temporalities remind us that intelligence has never belonged to a single clock. It emerges differently across bodies, cultures, histories and scales.
Intelligence in Time is therefore the first movement in a broader inquiry into our relationship with artificial intelligence through time and process. It asks whether the central question is not how quickly machines can generate, but whether we can preserve the conditions in which judgment, relation and meaning can still arise around generation. Perhaps the task is not to slow technology for its own sake, nor to accelerate alongside it, but to recover a more plural sense of time: the time to perceive, the time to respond, the time to act, and the time to refrain from acting. In this sense, Gentle Action becomes an approach to intelligence itself, not intelligence as mastery, but intelligence as the capacity to enter into subtle relation with what is unfolding.
