AI is not neutral. It reflects the knowledge it has been trained on — the assumptions, the values, the spatial intelligence embedded in the data it has absorbed.
Artificial intelligence is changing how spaces are imagined, drawn, described, and built. This is already happening — in design offices, in planning departments, in the tools that architects and students use every day. The question is not whether this shift is real. The question is who shapes it, and toward what ends. Instead of adapting to the new mode of knowledge production and following its technological acceleration, we have to ask what it amplifies, what it misses, what it cannot see at all. These are not technical accidents. They are cultural choices. And they can be made differently.
POLYCOSMOS investigates AI as something to be actively informed rather than passively adopted. How can artistic practice shape the way AI understands space? How can embodied knowledge, cultural specificity, and cosmological thinking be brought into the development of these tools — rather than flattened by them?
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COSMOTECHNICS
How can we train AI with the kinds of intelligence that matter most: the intelligence of place, of atmosphere, of the human body in a specific environment?
These questions connect to the work of philosopher Yuk Hui, whose concept of cosmotechnics proposes that technology is never universal — it always carries the worldview of its making. A spatial AI informed by diverse cultural traditions, by somatic practice, by the knowledge systems of communities outside the Western mainstream, would be a fundamentally different instrument than what currently exists. Building toward that is part of what POLYCOSMOS does.
At the same time, engaging seriously with AI makes certain other questions more visible: what does it mean to be present in a space? What forms of knowledge require a living body to exist? Where should human attention go as machines take on more of what we once called thinking? These are the questions that run through the entire POLYCOSMOS program — and this is where they begin.
TALKS & LEARNING PROGRAM
How AI is changing the role of the knowledge producer and designer — how we can shape artificial intelligence — and how we can apply it in meaningful ways will be discussed in talks and deepened in our learning program.
Design Beyond AI
Following the concept of cosmotechnics, we dive into the possibilities of the new tools while also opening an experimental space for practices that explore the intelligence of space, body, and consciousness.
Deep Knowledge and Spatial Practice
What does it mean to do research for spatial practice in the age of AI? How do we move from analytical investigation to the deeper and hidden layers of reality?
Expanded Field of Consciousness
Experimental practice and fieldwork serve as an exploration of how we can open space for new possibilities. How can we plant seeds in our minds that will inevitably grow and create new realities?
