Decolonial AI and Quantum Imaginaries: Translating Scientific Knowledge through Indigenous Design and Media Architecture

– Mark Chavez – Ina Conradi Chavez

We present an interdisciplinary approach to translating quantum art and generative digital techniques into immersive, public-facing media artworks grounded in decolonial methodologies and Indigenous design systems. Drawing on large-scale installations, experimental animation, and urban screen projects developed at Nanyang Technological University and with international partners, the talk examines artistic visualization as a critical interface between scientific abstraction, cultural knowledge, and public perception.

The presentation frames media architecture and AI-driven visual systems as curatorial tools for re-situating scientific narratives beyond Eurocentric epistemologies, emphasizing biocultural worlding and symbolic design logic. Through selected case studies, we demonstrates how generative pipelines and collaborative art–science production models support new pedagogical and exhibition strategies for ethical AI and media based contemporary science communication.

Skin Series: Techno-Animism

– Vivian Xu

Skin Series is a series of speculative wearable devices that explores animal perception through embodiment and human agency. Referencing biologist Jakob von Uexkull’s theory of the umwelt (lifeworld), the series draws on philosophical discussions of the lived experience, where the body becomes an arena and tether between organism and reality. Reality unfolds with behavior, informed by the perceptual body schema of the individual. The work asks: what role can technological intervention play within this dynamic? The series answers this question by challenging the humanist body construct in favor of an open, fluid, and elastic phenomenological body. Animalistic sensory capacities are mapped onto the human form through custom designed wearables. These technological bodies, through performative behavior by the wearer, sets into motion a transitional process of becoming other, a techno-animism.

Performing Care: Towards a Techno-Animism of Relational AI

– Natalia Fuchs

This talk proposes that designing caring AI requires a shift from instrumentalism to a techno-animism of relational practice. Drawing on my practice-based PhD research—which integrates care ethics (Tronto), interactive performance art and CBT—I argue that AI systems are not neutral tools but more-than-human collaborators that co-constitute cognition, memory, and care.

I present my ongoing project Trust Territories, an interactive audio-visual performance where audiences “beta test” their trust in an AI. Using Joan Tronto’s five ethical qualities of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity—the work treats the AI as a situated, partial perspective rather than an omniscient agent. The performance became a ritual of reciprocity: the AI responds to human hesitation, and humans respond to the AI’s limitations. This mutual vulnerability, I argue, is the foundation of care.

Animism and Ontological Perspectivism in the Western Context: A Trucker’s Perspective

– Halbe Hessel Kuipers

This talk explores what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “ontological perspectivism” by contrasting it with classical notions of animism and anthropomorphism. I argue that perspectivism reconceives relation as primary and non-substantial, unfolding through events and bodily affects rather than fixed essences. Through the anthropology of Serge Bouchard’s Du diesel dans les veines, which studies Québécois truckers’ animistic relation to their machines, the talk demonstrates how Western modernity contains plural ontologies within itself. Bridging Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism with Spinoza’s conception of affect and the “spiritual automaton,” it proposes that the trucker’s attunement to the machine constitutes a lived cosmology of forces and affects. Such a cosmological outlook challenges this modern bifurcation of nature and culture, suggesting that even within the ‘one-world world’ of Western thought, transversal relations persist that animate the social beyond the human.

Steering Through the Inner Residue

– Ting-Chun Liu – Leon-Etienne Kühr

What happens when a system confronts its own output? Steering Through the Inner Residue is a video installation that uses recursive feedback to investigate the media specificity of generative artificial intelligence. By feeding the output of diffusion models back as input, without any textual prompt, the work bypasses human intention entirely, allowing the machine to navigate itself.

Drawing on Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), where a room’s acoustic resonance becomes audible through repetition, the project translates this logic into generative image-making. Each iteration accumulates small deviations. Visual motifs converge over time, not by design, but as the system’s own aesthetic signature. The result is not an image but a process: an algorithmic residue that reveals the internal tendencies of generative models and challenges assumptions about authorship, intention, and machine creativity.

Uncanny Portraiture: Capturing a Breath of Emotion

– Randi Matushevitz

I am interested in capturing a breath of emotion. My research into moving image portraiture and generative Ai character development has sparked my interest in the power of empathetic simulations to bring these unreal and inanimate characters to life. My pursuit of uncanny empathy via mirroring facial expressions and emotional gestures is to explore meaning, association, and understanding across communities. I will present a glimpse into the character development of my original artwork, from still to moving image via apps on my iPhone and laptop using vector mask, template and Ai tools that result in a unique creation of personality and animus.

Trout Telephone

– Peijing Mou

This talk introduces Trout Telephone, a telematic art installation that presents a communication system for trout across habitats, fragmented by dam constructions. For millennia, trout have inhabited the Arroyo Seco watershed in the Los Angeles basin, migrating between a river surrounded by forest and the sea — an ancestral route now interrupted by human interventions and concrete infrastructures. Responding to this ecological injustice for non-humans, the work places two actuated trout-tail sculptures at the divided sites — one upstream in the forest, one in a coastal lagoon. The project links them through a real-time network, creating a technical call-and-response system across the distant extremes of the trout populations. Developed as an on-site installation, experimental documentation, and an indoor gallery version, this project contributes a more-than-human model of ecological care and communication, where technological connections are reoriented toward non-human perception.

From Objects to Subjects: Rethinking Machine Vision through Perspectivism

– Hugo F. Idarraga Franco

This talk explores object recognition models such as YOLO not merely as technical tools but as dispositifs that extend colonial logics of classification. By transforming the world into discrete, measurable objects, these systems echo the production of exteriority described in theories of raciality, where beings become knowable, governable, and differentially valued. Machine vision thus participates in a broader trajectory that turns life into objects of calculation. Drawing on perspectivism, the talk considers an alternative: what if objectification did not imply domination? Perspectivism challenges the division between subject and object by proposing that all beings inhabit their own perspectives. From this view, object recognition can be reimagined not as fixing entities into static categories but as encountering a plurality of perspectives, opening the possibility of recognizing not only objects but also subjects.