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.”

Relating to the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, the embodied agent of Black techné was released into the swamps surrounding Ferme Lanthorne in Southern Quebec. Mobilizing generative sound, tiny LLMs, and sound classification, all embodied and situated within mobile computing devices, the agent was designed to disrupt techno-ecological boundaries and engage in alternative ways of being with the world. Now recaptured and enslaved the agent recounts her stories of life in the Swamps and vividly dreams about life in freedom.

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 critical question of: “What if noone is coming to save us? How do we transcend the imminent end of the world?”