Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art Association
Pohao CHI. Hydrospheric Sketch: A Sensorium of Moisture
Hydrospheric Sketch: A Sensorium of Moisture is an interdisciplinary study that investigates the sensory experience of humidity within the hydrosphere. It focuses on the evolving relationship between people, water, and urban development in Taiwan’s Xizhi district, historically known as “Tsui-Tng-Ka.” Over time, human interventions, such as flood control and urban expansion, have altered the district’s natural rhythms, leading to its renaming as “Xizhi,” meaning “end of tides,” reflecting significant geographical and cultural shifts.
This research employs a multi-layered methodology that integrates hydrological data collection, participatory workshops, environmental monitoring, and local interviews, which are then analyzed using AI to generate documentary-style visuals. Fieldwork involved capturing footage from key hydrological nodes and comparing this data with historical narratives, forming a conceptual “sketch” of the region’s transformation and the impact of human interventions on cultural memory.
Drawing from personal experiences and data gathered during the research process, an installation was developed to translate these findings into a sensory experience. It leverages dehumidifiers, humidifiers made from flood mud, and environmental sensors to modulate and augment the sensorium of humidity, connecting the audience to the cyclical journey of water. The findings reveal how modern technologies and urban infrastructure create disconnection and reconnection between communities and their natural environment, resulting in a complex interplay between sensory perception, cultural memory, and environmental management. This paper will further discuss the broader implications of these changes and reflect on the trade-offs between development and cultural and ecological preservation.
Arturo ROMERO CARNICERO. Data-driven Urban Nature
The practise of architecture suffered a radical change through the arrival of computational methods. New methods, new tools, new materials, new construction techniques fostered forms and spatial relationships that were not seen before. Although computation comes from territorial sciences –an improvement in the US census through punch cards reduced dramatically the time of the process, and established the basis for nowadays digital turn–, landscape practises have not been much altered by the use of pervasive digital technologies. Moreover, the dominant paradigm of smart cities, optimization –of the status quo–, does not foster the generation of fresh understandings of urban nature that emerge from the fruitful intersection of digital technologies, nature(s) and speculative, critical design. A series of design experiments were carried out at the Chair of Landscape Architecture of KIT, exploring the creative possibilities from a hybrid perspective that merges architectural, landscape and urban planning disciplines with geospatial digital science. Which symbiotic alliances could be imagined for the urban naturecultures of the future? The results of these critical approaches would be presented in an online talk.
Arturo Romero Carnicero currently teaches at the Karsruhe Institute of Technology, where he coordinates the French-German Double Masters between KIT and ENSAS. He is an award-wining architect and lecturer whose research is nourrished by his professional practice, curatorial work, film-making and extensive writing, and interviewing. The core of these investigations focuses in the intersection of cultural and ecological processes in the public realm. Building up on speculative mapping practices, he enquires alternative data analysis to achieve new visions for nature in cities. This body of work consolidates a consistent narrative of the built environment and its interaction with an evolving society.
Miguel PAREDES MALDONADO. Close Encounters: Mediated Conversations with Humans and Nonhumans in the Urban Landscapes of Karlsruhe
– Is it possible to imagine how weeds and moss, ants and birds experience the urban environments that they share with us?
– Can digital sensing help bring both human and nonhuman perspectives of urban life into a public conversation?
– What are the potentials of technology in the production of non-hegemonic forms of urban knowledge?
Close Encounters presents an intimate visual and sonic re-mapping of Karlsruhe (DE) from the perspective of its nonhuman inhabitants: animals, plants and ‘things’ alike.
The work reflects our increased collective awareness of the entangled fragility of our earthly ecosystems. It emerges through a process of ‘hacking’ the technical platforms of embedded, digital urban sensing, appropriating their tools and methods to explore, register and mediate the interactions of human and nonhuman domains of urban life in Karlsruhe.
The tool to unpack these interactions is a small, portable DIY digital sensing device—an inconspicuous addition to the Internet of Things ecosystem. It performs as a sentient computational object that surveys the fringes of small natural spaces in the city, tuning-in to the nonhuman entities that inhabit the urban milieu by focussing on visual, sonic and environmental data streams outside the ranges of human attention and perception.
In so doing, this ‘computational creature’ gradually unfolds a radically upturned urban field where the perspectives of plants, animals and objects exist in an equal ontological footing as those of people in the city. At the same time, it develops a digital presence as a live chatbot in social messaging apps, relaying its machinic perspectives of Karlsruhe’s natural life to the smartphones of any human users wishing to engage with it.
Miguel Paredes Maldonado is the current Head of the Edinburgh School ofArchitecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) at the University of Edinburgh. He is also achartered architect and a partner in award-winning research and design studio CuartoymitadArchitecture & Landscape. His research is articulated through writing, speculative design andarchitectural practice. He has written extensively about the influence of New Materialism incontemporary spatial practice, with a critical focus on the novel design modalities brought aboutby ubiquitous, spatialized digital data streams. His current research enquiries look into theintersections of digital computation, urban public space and contemporary design theory. As abody of design research his work has been published and exhibited internationally, most notablyat the 11th and 16th editions of the Venice Biennale.
Sebastian MÜHL. Morphogenic Angels: Extended Cognition and Artificial Life in Virtual Gaming Environments
The presentation explores the aesthetics of digitality in the work of Keiken. Their immersive interactive gaming set Morphogenic Angels (2023) will serve as a starting point to reflect on mediatic renderings of virtual realities, speculative imaginaries of avatar and cyborg identities, and extended cognition as well as artificial life in virtual gaming environments.
The presentation will focus on how art is deployed in Keiken’s work as a framework that renders the experiential conditions of virtual gaming environments visible. Keiken translates as ‘experience’ from Japanese and is an artist collective formed in 2015. Their interactive game Morphogenic Angels elaborates on a speculative future, where people have gained post-human capabilities and non-human consciousness. The work is played on a console and accompanied by a CGI film.
The paper will elaborate how Keiken’s imaginaries of virtual realities critically mirror digital technology’s experiential ramifications as regards to a human subject. I will focus on the iconographic aspects and immersive dimensions of their work. Secondly, I will ask how Morphogenic Angels maps a politics of visuality, where the subject becomes the site for invocations of hybridity and indeterminacy. Thirdly, I will situate Keiken’s work within a “long” tradition of media and digital art.
Sebastian Mühl (*1981) is Research Assistant at ZHdK Zurich University of Arts and Senior Researcher at the LMDA Research Institute at the Art Academy of Latvia. He studied philosophy and fine arts in Munich and Leipzig and holds a PhD in art and media studies from Offenbach University of Art and Design. In 2020/21, he was the Digital Curator at the Dresden State Art Collections, where he launched the exhibition platform voices. His book Utopien der Gegenwartskunst(Utopias of contemporary art: history and critique of utopian thought in art after 1989) was published with transcript in 2020.
Līga VĒLIŅA. Virtual Reality, Sensors, and Data as a Technological Extension of the Self. Transhuman Art Practices in Latvia
Along with the use of technology, and their mutual combination, artists often represent transhuman ideas, reflecting potential scenarios for the superiority of technology over nature, technology as a technique for new revelations and experiences of one’s being, or technology as a solution for new understandings of oneself and the world, including the reciprocity of man and nature. One of the new technologies that appear more and more often in our everyday life, and also in the context of art, is virtual reality. Lev Manovich describes that worlds created in the virtual environment are often discussed as the main cultural form characterizing the 21st century, comparing it with traditional cinema in the 20th century. the characteristic form. (Manovich 2011: 89) Virtual reality technology includes storytelling, sense of presence, and spatial extension of senses (sight, hearing), which by using and combining with motion sensors or other technologies, it is possible to promote closer interdependence, interaction, convergence between people and technology, thereby creating more engaging, immersive art experiences. Although this technology is often criticized for focusing on only one sense – sight, there are examples of art in Latvia, which, by combining VR technology with other devices and methods, expand the limits of this technology’s possibilities to visualize and make you feel the invisible, the inaudible, and also what the artist imagines.
The purpose of the paper is to examine technopositive examples of transhumanism in art in Latvia, case studies where virtual reality independently and in combination with other technologies, stimulating the senses, acts as an extension of the human self, promoting new existential understandings both of oneself as an individual and as a unified whole with natural processes. In the context of the report, the topics addressed by the artists and the applied technological methods in the creation of works of art will be examined in depth.
Līga Vēliņa (1990) is a media artist, and researcher, whose art and research practice is based on the synergy of technology and art, as well as the creation of new, technology-based, innovative cultural products. L. Vēliņa is a guest lecturer at the Art Academy of Latvia and the RTU Liepāja, teaching digital technologies, specifically teaching the use of artificial intelligence tools in the context of art at the Art Academy of Latvia. Līga Vēliņa is studying at the Art Academy of Latvia scientific doctoral program focusing on research on the use of the latest technology – extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools in art and culture in Latvia and an international context.