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.
The new mode of knowledge production AI represents comes with its own acceleration. POLYCOSMOS asks what that acceleration amplifies, what it misses, what it cannot see at all — treating these as cultural choices, open to being made differently, rather than settling for them as technical givens.
POLYCOSMOS investigates AI as something to actively inform rather than passively adopt. How can artistic practice shape the way AI understands space? How can embodied knowledge, cultural specificity, and cosmological thinking enter the development of these tools, carrying their full weight rather than being flattened by them?
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COSMOTECHNICS
How can we train AI with the kinds of intelligence that matter most for spatial practice — 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.
Engaging seriously with AI also sharpens a different set of questions: 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 questions run through the entire POLYCOSMOS program, and this is where they begin.
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, moving along three connected strands:
Design Beyond AI
Following the concept of cosmotechnics, this strand explores the possibilities of new tools while holding open an experimental space for practices that engage the intelligence of space, body, and consciousness directly.
Deep Knowledge and Spatial Practice
What does research for spatial practice mean in the age of AI? This strand works the movement from analytical investigation toward the deeper, less visible layers of reality.
Expanded Field of Consciousness
Experimental practice and fieldwork explore how new possibilities can open in space. Here, attention itself becomes a design material — seeds planted in the mind that grow into new realities.
