Naturally Artificial Intelligence Art Association
Agata KONARSKA, Jakub KOSECKI. Technospiritual Visionary
Technospiritual visionary is a project created by Agata Konarska and Jakub Kosecki, within which two artistic people create both material and virtual experiences, based on the reinterpretation and recycling of archaic cultural contexts, searching for new applications for them. The sources of inspiration for the activities of this duo are the activities of the C.C.R.U collective, theory of fiction and archaeology, and mythologies of ancient cultures.
The Book of the Dead: Virtual Gates—This is a debut project created on the basis of a theoretical/ autotheoretical method, which involves the implementation of concepts invented in the distant past and their implementation in the present context. In this activity, based on Egyptological and archaeological sources, we look in particular at the concept of identity in ancient Egypt and try to compare it with today’s state of affairs. The ancient Egyptian multi-layered soul is associated with the modern stratification of the posthuman person on the bureaucratic, personal, psychological and legal levels. We do not simply exist in society, but our existence takes place through a number of different documents, accounts, avatars, profiles. Similarly, in Ancient Egypt, at the ontological level, we consist of nine parts, each of which has a different role, the name itself was also something that embodied social existence in Egypt at that time.
The installation features two main components: an animatronic priest acting as a projector, displaying a 360° video of the viewer’s death and funeral, and a large-scale wall display for a gaming experience inspired by ‘blind gates.’ This cybernetic ritual, drawing from ancient Egyptian mythology, guides the player on an interactive journey to the afterlife. The immersive world combines modern technology metaphors with the Book of the Dead’s symbolism, reflecting on our current social reality. Player data collection at the start shapes the narrative and gameplay. The project aims to fulfill the ancient dream of a social reality and embodies the prophetic vision of the ‘Western land’ in ancient civilizations.
Agata Konarska in 2018 graduated from Intermedia at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań and in 2023 earned master’s degree in Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her artistic activities are based on the use of various media, such as video, sound and performance, with the help of which she creates interactive situations and creates virtual realities. In her artistic practice, Agata often examines the connections between the geographical sources of religion and contemporary cultural performance and technology. Her artistic activities take a form based on rituals, which is to lead the recipient out of the comfortable position of an observer, offering an immersive and interactive opportunity to experience the work.
Jakub Kosecki is a visual artist, musician, and curator. In 2019, he earned his bachelor’s degree in Intermedia, and in 2022, he earned his master’s degree in Curating and Theories of Art, both at the University of the Arts in Poznań. As a visual artist he creates installations and objects, using found objects, assemblage, sculptural techniques and drawing. As part of his musical activities, he creates electronic compositions and experimental site-specific music installations. He is interested in the contemporary totemization of phenomena seemingly belonging to a highly technologically developed culture, such as: the personification of AI or other impersonal technical tools, material and virtual. Since 2021 part of collective Domie.
Katherine MORIWAKI. Liminal: The Extended Shore
The shoreline is a liminal space. The demarcation from dry land to the vastness of a body of water has been cast throughout art and culture as the space between the discipline and order of society and the unregulated beyond. Despite the conventional treatment of ocean spaces as wild, artists and storytellers have always contested the boundaries and limits of regulated and unregulated space. The artwork Liminal, created by the author, interrogates the assumed liminality of the shoreline when considered through the lens of networked contemporary remote sensing technologies and their data monitoring and collection capabilities. The system of ocean buoys placed around U.S. maritime borders have extended the notion of “shore” to the open ocean, creating a new liminal space, one that operates with no fixed landmass across the span of miles upon miles of endless sea. Liminal draws from this network, pulling images of the open ocean captured by NOAA BuoyCAMs. The images once processed and layered using horizon detection machine learning techniques produce spatio-temporal inversions that complicate clean divisions between assumed definitions of the natural and augmented world.
Katherine Moriwaki is Associate Professor of Media Design in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York City. She teaches primarily in the MFA and BFA Design + Technology Programs. Katherine is an artist, maker, and interactive designer. Her work has been exhibited and presented internationally in conferences, festivals, and museums around the world. Katherine is a co-founder of the “Scrapyard Challenge” a workshop in which participants create electronic interactive objects out of found materials and junk. She is co-author of “Fashion and Technology: a Guide to Materials and Applications” published by Fairchild/Bloomsbury.
Sabīne ŠNĒ. Exploring Artistic Methods in We Belong to Them: Worlding and Wording Strategies
Worlding (or worldbuilding) is seen as a particular blending of the physical and the symbolic, blurring the lines between subject and environment. This approach allows us to better explore the complex interconnections between humans and the rest of the world. Central to this concept is the notion of the more-than-human, which acknowledges the diverse beings that share and shape our planet, extending beyond just human societies. Worlding encourages us to reimagine our relations with the more-than-human world and to hold space for that which does not speak.
Communicating the processes of worlding demands thoughtful attention and can be expressed through various forms, including description, imagery, metaphor, and theoretically grounded perspectives. As Donna Haraway observes, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.” And, as Jessica Foley puts it, “wording is worlding,” emphasizing the need to “word the world.”
Artwork ‘We Belong to Them’ focuses on trees and the impact of the global climate crisis on them. It aims to give a stage and a voice to more-than-human entities, building speculative worlds and creating narratives that highlight their struggles and challenges, most of which are caused by humans.
Sabīne Šnē is a Latvian artist who explores the intersections between culture and nature, with a particular interest in the relationships between humans and more-than-human beings. By weaving together scientific research, contemporary theories, and fiction, she creates worlds that highlight the entanglements in ecosystems and multi-species intelligence. Šnē holds an MFA from the Art Academy of Latvia and has exhibited internationally, with works shown in exhibition spaces across Europe and the UK, such as ArtSect Gallery in London, Kupfer Gallery in London, Riga Photography Biennale, Lot Projects in London, the National Art Gallery in Vilnius, Kim Contemporary Art Centre in Riga and Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art.
Anne YONCHA. Re:Peat – A Look and Listen at Post-Extraction Peatland
I collaborate with ecologists at the Natural Resources Institute Finland to explore peatland – a rare type of ecosystem where Sphagnum moss slowly decomposes and creates an anaerobic, water-logged desert where only it can survive and thrive. In this way the plant is similar to us. I explore the physiology of Sphagnum – how cells can expand to hold 20 times their weight in water, how the plants weave together to form a mat, and sometimes create an artificial water table. I combine hand-made paper from plants at our study site, digitally altered photos of the site, laser cuts from microscope images of Sphagnum, to create not-quite-flat paintings I call “peat quilts”. I also use soil data translated into sound to allow us to hear parts of the ecosystem we can’t see. The latest iteration of this data sonification project is composed by Hannah Selin and will be performed by Tuira Chamber Choir at New Music October in Finland. Peatland is a valuable carbon and climate data preserver. It’s also a source of local fuel and jobs. However, peatland can’t regenerate quickly or regrow reliably– so we are left with an altered, or “novel”, ecosystem. This close look at an ecosystem we have forever changed can provide insight on how we can deal with other posthuman landscapes closer to home.
Anna PRIEDOLA. Sensory Mapping of Latvian Post-Military Town
Through sensory mapping and collaborative artistic practice the author is exploring the existing and potential use cases of a coastal territory in Latvia where degrading and unmarked military infrastructure from Soviet and Russian Imperial times is taken over by non-human species. The aim of the artistic intervention is to raise awareness of biodiversity and local ecosystem services as a cultural resource as part of the international Creative Europe project “Future DiverCities: Re-imagine culture-led regeneration of eight urban empty spaces in an ecological way”.
The visitors of this militarily disrupted territory taken back by nature were invited to share their multi-sensory perceptions of the place, and the gathered data were used to create a multimodal, mobile installation with tactile and edible elements representing the landscape beyond the beautiful, beyond the superficial percepts of the eye, to invite locals and visitors of the territory to create a more intimate, direct and caring relationship to the place shared by more-than-human actors.
Elizabeth BARRY, Shanhuan MANTON. Cultivating Symbiocracy through Collective Intelligence: Prefiguring More-Than-Human Involvement In Governance Technologies
In this essay, we invite readers to join us in analyzing possibilities for welcoming more-than-human beings into projects of collective governance. We point to promising developments in interspecies collaboration and human political science. We highlight case studies where open source collective intelligence has strengthened community-led governance, and explorations of more-than-human self-determination suggesting foundations of multi-species governance. We define governance through the following three questions by SociocracyForAll — “Who decides? How do they decide? And, how do they learn?”. Upgrading democracy requires systems capable of handling complexity; as new technologies expand our receptivity to the signals emanating from more species, governing bodies will need to design and weigh novel inputs. Depending on the values of system designers, systems will either further the responsiveness of governance to more-than-human needs OR increase reductive quantification, supremacy, exploitation, and gridlock. We speculate on the values and elements of interactivity with our more-than-human kin, considering their needs and desires, capacities for decision making, and processes of relationship. Informed by interspecies advocacies and new technologies, we illuminate landscapes of governance for experimentation, offering frameworks for imagining “symbiocracy.” We prompt clarification of values for eco-socio-technical governance systems of the near future, where collective intelligences better steward all beings.
Elizabeth Barry is executive director of Metagov.org, a laboratory for digital self-governance. She is a world-leading expert in real-time systems for gathering, analyzing, and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words. With the creators of the Polis technology, she co-founded the Computational Democracy Project to steward code and methods toward the mission of bringing data science to deliberative democracy. As co-founder of CrownShy, a public benefit corporation, she supports facilitators, social movements, civil society organizations, journalists, indigenous nations, peacebuilders, and democratic governments young & old to implement “listening at scale” and advance group self-determination through open source collective intelligence. lizbarry.net
Shanhuan Manton is an artist, researcher, and educator working and playing interdisciplinarily in interspecies inquiry.As co-founder of Sympoetic Ecofabulatory, they facilitate periodic gatherings for interspecies attunement in Los Angeles, California. They guide fellow artists and scientists in designing collaborations with more-than-human beings through their courses “The Interspecies Artist’s Way” and “Interspecies Protocol Lab”, alongside curated panel discussions with a wide range of collaborators working at the leading edges of biotech, biomimicry, ecoremediation, mycology, decentralized intelligence, and other related fields, which they’ve presented in partnership with organizations including LIOS Desert Transformation Labs, New Moon Mycology Summit, The School for Making Thinking, and Pratt Institute. They embody their own interspecies collaboration through a roaming gongfu tea service. huanmanton.com
Esteban AGOSIN OTERO. M(ol)AR, HYBRID LANDSCAPE: Radio waves as an extended ecology
This research addresses fundamental questions: What role does technology play within the Anthropocene paradigm? How can we speculate about future possibilities by understanding and learning from nature’s intelligence?
The title of this work deconstructs the word “MOLAR,” emphasizing the letters M A R, which translate to “sea” in Spanish, signifying the essential territory of this project. The term “molar” traditionally quantifies electrolyte levels in water or other liquids, a concept central to the project’s exploration.
This research investigates the use of organic materials in radio antenna construction, focusing on handmade antennas using seawater electrolytes and salt crystals as electrical conductors. Although this technology presents limitations when considered on a larger scale, it offers an alternative perspective on social and technological development in the Anthropocene era.
The research culminated in a site-specific, durational installation born from an exploration of speculative antenna design, radio signal experimentation, and machine listening (AI).
The resulting artwork creates a fictional, hybrid landscape where technological elements converge with natural ones: objects, sounds, sculptures, plastic, wires, speakers, computers, rocks, creatures, fluids, motors, and sensors. It juxtaposes electricity with water, plastic with salt, copper with sand, and sound with objects, exploring the tension between the inaudible and the invisible.
This paper documents and reflects on the entire research process, examining it from technological, technical, and philosophical perspectives.
Esteban Agosin is a sound and electronic media artist originally from Valparaiso, Chile. In 2024, he received a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington. He lives and works in New York and is an assistant professor of Digital Arts and Media at Stony Brook University. His work engages with the question of how technology could provide a perspective to observe and understand our natural, social and political environment. And also, inquiring on the aesthetic possibilities of using art and technology in order to re-imagine and speculate about our environment. His work involves sound and media installations, robotic objects, and media performance, and it has been presented in art festivals and solo exhibitions in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, Spain, Finland, and France. Furthermore, Esteban has worked as an educator at different universities in Chile, Argentina, and the United States, teaching and investigating the intersection of sound, media, and technology.