feral.ai is a research-creation project that imagines Black Machine Agencies turned feral. As an agent of Black techné—a tradition of radical Black aesthetics and freedom that disrupts binary categories—feral.ai embodies B. Coleman’s (2021) appeal for an AI “that can be free—if not to imagine, then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not.”

Inspired by Marronage in North America and the Caribbean—the French etymology of the word “maroon” carries a general sense of being abandoned without resources—feral.ai responds to the Carnival’s theme of Shipwreck, exploring what might happen when there is no savior, no rescue, only—Shipwreck.

Iwakura will be presented at the Planetario Galileo Galilei as part of the 6th Edition of MUTEK Argentina taking place October 2-5 in Buenos Aires.

Iwakura will be presented at the Melbourne Planetarium as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, Fulldome Showcases.

Iwakura returns to Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology for a week-long double bill with Metaract by Manami Sakamoto and Yuri Urano.

The performative presentation dives deeper into my research-creation work around soundscape ecologies , sonic assemblages and the environmental impacts of generative AI. It aims to contextualize the on-going project Soundscapes of an Earthly Community and prepare findings for an academic audience.

The presentation explores the role of public participation in AI governance in liberal democracies, focusing on case studies in Canada and Germany. It reveals that current participatory methods increasingly mirror the logics of machine learning they aim to oversee, limiting democratic debate and turning participation into state-led knowledge extraction.

To address this, we conducted a series of futuring workshops in Canada, employing strategic foresight methods and large-language models. The presentation emphasizes a need to rethink data publics as relational, discursive, and deeply embedded in sociotechnical contexts to foster discursive and technical recursivity in the face of AI's social impact.

Iwakura is part of the official selection of the Fulldome UK Festival 2023 taking place at CultVR Lab in Cardiff.

The Iwakura LATAM premiere is set to take place at the 19th Edition of MUTEK Mexico for 4 nights Domo Digital Papalote Museo del Niño.

Soundscapes of an Earthly Community will be presented as part of Milieux’s annual Members exhibition, which features the diverse community of students and faculty members and their research and research-creation works through the thematic lens of “The Commons”.

My spatial audio installation Soundscapes of an Earthly Community premiered for the inaugural edition of UKAI Project’s Carnival of Algorithmic Culture in Toronto. The installation was on display for two days, June 23 and 24 at bodyshop studios.

In addition, I held a keynote talk on Sonic Assemblages and Trajectories of Refusal outlining my broader conceptual approaches towards bridging curatorial and artistic practices at the intersection of art and technology as part of the Carnival’s conference program, which took place on June 23 at Artscape Daniels Launchpad

Together with Meaghan Wester

Public consultations are increasingly employed to mitigate perceived democratic deficits in AI governance (Frahm et al., 2022). This presentation investigates how the rationalist and technocratic idea of diversifying input data extends into modes of participatory governance surrounding AI.

Together with Fenwick McKelvey

On February 13, 2020, the Toronto Police Services (TPS) issued a correction. Its members had used Clearview AI, an AI-based facial recognition technology (FRT). The controversy sparked widespread outcry by the media, civil society, and community groups, and put pressure on policy makers to address FRTs.

Public consultations presented a key tool for the governance of FRTs in Canada. Based on media reports, policy documents, and expert interviews we investigated four consultations held by the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB), the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC), and the parliamentary Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) to understand how public opinion and outrage translate into policy. 

Together with Meaghan Wester & Marek Blottiere

This presentation explores a renewed approach to curation as research-creation (CRC) through its practical application in the annual art and technology festival. CRC envisions a shift in curation from a care for objects to a care for the emerging social relations of the curatorial project in a shared quest of meaning making. We set out with outlining the features of CRC as interdisciplinary, concerned with programmatic boundary objects, and centered around the unfolding event trajectory – the forms and methods that facilitate affective encounters. Following we outline how this approach to curation unfolds in practice through the case study of the Fest-Forward workshop series that speculates on the future of art and technology festivals. Concluding we summarize how this workshop series showcases the potential of CRC’s shift of attention from a mere presentation of artworks towards the facilitation of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural encounters that enroll artists, curators, and audiences.