In the Fall of 2022, Artificial Intelligems was invited by Ponton magazine for a contribution to their first issue. 

This page shows our concept text, how to experience the Ornamutations AR filters that we developed for this project, as well as an essay by researcher and writer dr. Laura Tripaldi. 

Find the publication here. 

1. 

1. Artificial Intelligems for Ponton magazine 

What are the roles and impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on craft? Which possibilities, as well as challenges and dangers, might AI offer for artistic practice? How to explore AI’s potential for more-than-human¹ co-creation? Do we, humans, create in collaboration with AI, a designing-with² , or do we use it as a tool, an Extended Intelligence (EI)³, to enhance our creativity and go beyond assumed limits of the human body⁴?

An artistic, philosophical, fundamental research perspective should complement utilitarian approaches and instrumentalised research aimed at practical, industrial, applications. How can we embody technologies such as AI, which, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) being ubiquitous, appear to work in invisible and mysterious ways? Digital technologies and computation processes, in fact, are very material, and it is important to be aware and critical of the potentially exploitative ways and contexts in which these materials are harvested and circulate.⁵

Together with Greg Scheirlinckx, a composer, sound engineer and data scientist, Swillen founded Artificial Intelligems as a research platform to explore AIs as co-creators and mediating technologies between humans and non-humans. Artificial Intelligems explores machine learning as a speculative and participatory imaging tool. In 2021, a call for jewellery makers to share images of their works led to a submission of 969 images. This dataset was used to train a StyleGAN algorithm⁶, which, after hours of ‘learning’ these images, generated continuously transforming Ornamutations that spark new questions and ideas, such as: What if jewellery would grow on and along with the body?

By co-engineering adornment with self-learning algorithms, and by working with images of other artists’ pieces as material for a collective creation, they aim to create new types of ornaments within the phygital realm that challenge perspectives on human-centred design, materiality, value, agency and authorship. To imagine jewellery as a continuously meta-morphing multidimensional being, at once fluid, solid and gaseous, questions interactions with physical bodies, materials and spaces.

For Ponton magazine, Artificial Intelligems created a phygital piece to engage with these Ornamutations, encouraging intra-actions⁷  between bodies, images, matters, surfaces, realities and intelligences. The digital ornaments that emerge when visiting their Insta account⁸ can be worn through augmented reality, creating hybrid bodies. Artificial Intelligems aims to explore novel ways to co-create, present and interact with adornment, while questioning how images and bodies relate and what tactility can mean within digital media. Rather than considering presenting as a way to show final, and fixed, results, they opt for encounters in which making, communicating, and reflecting are intertwined.

Entering a dialogue with various domains is essential. Therefore, Artificial Intelligems invited Laura Tripaldi, materials scientist, writer, and independent researcher, for a textual reflection on themes that play a central role in their related research.⁹ ‘Nanotechnologies,’ as Tripaldi writes, ‘can offer new opportunities to interface biological organisms with artificial objects to build real hybrid organisms in which there is a vanishing distinction between the living body and non-living matter’ (137). 

 1. The phrasing of the more-than-human ‘speaks in one breath of nonhumans and other than humans such as things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical, geological forces, spiritual entities, and humans’ (de la Bellacasa 1).
 2. Professor in design Ron Wakkary wonders ‘How to describe or critically imagine the designer of things when freed of the assumption that a designer is exclusively human?’ To answer this question, he utilizes the term ‘the vitality of things’, ‘a distributed agency, a good starting point for seeing designing-with or the sharing of the foreground with nonhumans that, so to speak, are as equally creative or agentic in the designing of things. The designer of things is the bringing together of agentic capacities across humans and nonhumans in ways that create things’ (173).
 3. See Leach (9 – 10, 93, 142, 170).
 4. Or is AI perhaps strikingly human, because, as architects and curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley argue ‘The human is inseparable from the artifacts that it produces, with the human body having the extended shape of all the artifacts it has made and each artifact being an intimate part of its biology and brain. But also, and more important, the human emerges in the redefinition of capacity provided by the artifacts. In a sense, the artifacts are more human than the human. Artifacts are therefore never simply the representatives of human intentions and abilities. They are also openings, possibilities of something new in the human, even a new human’ (23–24).
 5. Writer, composer and producer Kate Crawford argues that ‘Artificial Intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards. In fact, AI as we know it depends entirely on a much wider set of political and social structures. And due to the capital required to build AI at scale and the ways of seeing that it optimizes, AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. In this sense, AI is a registry of power’ (8).
 6. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were introduced in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow, computer scientist and engineer, and are a fast-growing area in deep neural networks that can be used to generate images, speech, prose and more (Machine Learning Paperspace). StyleGAN2, as used by Artificial Intelligems in their current projects, is a GAN machine-learning framework in use by many AI artists, created by Nvidia researchers and released to the public in February 2019 (Saltz et al.).
 7. ‘Going further than interaction, Barad’s intra-action problematises not only subjectivity but also the attribution of agency merely to human subjects (of science) - as the ones having power to intervene and transform (construct) reality. The reversibility of touch (to touch is to be touched) also inspires the troubling of such assumptions: who/what is object? Who/what is subject? (…) There is “intra-touching” (…) reality is a process of intra-active touch. Interdependency is intrarelational. As it undermines the grounds of the invulnerable, untouched position of the master subject-agent, that appropriates inanimate worlds. (…) This is thinking-touch as world-making.’ (de la Bellacasa 2017: 116 - 117)
 8. See How To. 
 9. See chapter 3 on this page for the text by Tripaldi. 

Works Cited:

• Colomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley. Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design. Lars Müller Publishers, 2016.
• Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI-Real Worlds of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021.
• de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig. Matters of Care - Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
• Leach, Neil. Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. An Introduction to AI for Architects. Bloomsbury, 2022.
• Machine Learning Paperspace. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN),’’ AI Wiki, 8 August 2022, https://machine-learning.paperspace.com/wiki/generative-adversarial-network-gan.
• Saltz, Emily, Lia Coleman and Claire Leibowicz. “Making AI Art Responsibly. A Field Guide.” Partnership on AI, 8 August 2022, https://partnershiponai.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Partnership-on-AI-AI-Art-Field-Guide.pdf.
• Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials. MIT Press, 2022.
• Wakkary, Ron. Things We Could Design For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. MIT Press, 2021.

2.  

 2. Intra-act with the Ornamutations AR filters

How to wear the Ornamutations AR filters?

- Visit the Artificial Intelligems Instagram account.
 - Click on the stars icon above the image feed.
 - The Ornamutations will emerge.
 - You can move, turn and scale the Ornamutations with your fingers on the screen. Play around with them, picturing them in various ways on the body (from a tiny ornament to an all-encompassing creature, morphing with the body). Please note: when you move your phone, ‘bring’ the Ornamutations with you by dragging them with your fingers, otherwise they move out of focus.
 - Make a screenshot of the Ornamutations on the body by tapping on the circle at the bottom of your screen.
 - Feel free to share your image(s) (@artificial_intelligems, #artificialintelligems). We'll be happy to see how you wear the Ornamutations, and share your photo on our account!  
 - Lost? Restart.

3.

 3. Laura Tripaldi on wearable technology, living tattoos and smart skins. 

Inspired by the book Parallel Minds - Discovering the Intelligence of Materials, Artificial Intelligems invited Laura Tripaldi for a textual reflection:  

In 2018, scientists from the Soft Active Materials Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the first living tattoo¹. It is a wearable device designed from a soft polymeric material known as a hydrogel, a stretchable and flexible substance capable of incorporating large volumes of water. The device was 3D-printed using an optimized ink formulation that can be molded and hardened into any desired shape, all while hosting and nourishing a live culture of genetically engineered bacterial cells. Systems in which living organisms, often genetically engineered, are incorporated into nonliving artificial structures are commonly known as biohybrid materials or living materials. These new materials are gaining increasing popularity in robotics and wearable technologies due to their capacity to selectively respond to a large set of stimuli and self-sustain over extended periods of time. When in contact with the human body, the living tattoo is programmed to sense the presence of specific substances on the skin of the wearer and to respond by exhibiting fluorescence. Printed in the shape of a futuristic hybrid between a tree and a computer chip, this second living skin promises to monitor crucial health parameters in real-time, without requiring any source of external energy.

Among the most cutting-edge developments in materials science and technology, I have been fascinated by the concept of smart skins: prosthetic devices that can be directly applied to the surface of the body for health monitoring or remote interaction with the digital world. The living tattoo is one among several examples of devices capable of transforming human skin into a unique and unexplored technological space. Technologies such as SkinMarks², developed by Google, and DuoSkin³, researched by Microsoft in collaboration with MIT, explore the possibility of extending the remote control of electronic devices by employing high-tech temporary tattoos. The research project DermalAbyss⁴, developed at MIT’s Media Lab, focused on incorporating biosensors in traditional tattooing techniques, producing permanent tattoos capable of changing their colour in response to physiological modifications in pH, glucose and sodium concentrations in the body.

The reason why I believe smart skins to be an especially interesting technology from a speculative perspective is related to a scientific and philosophical concept very familiar to all of us, but to which we rarely attribute the complexity it deserves. I am referring to the concept of the interface, which I would define as the space of interaction between human and technological bodies. Throughout the last two decades, our relationship with technology has been shaped by a single, specific kind of interface. The screen has become so pervasive that it has become the universal paradigm of what any technological interface should look like: flat, hard, and so thin and unobtrusive that it becomes almost invisible. Any Google Images search with the keyword “technology” should be sufficient aesthetic proof that the hegemonic cultural vision of the future is populated with ghostly and immaterial interfaces floating in the air like evanescent holograms and radiating an aseptic, bluish glow. But is this truly the only possible future for the interfaces to come?

Being trained as a chemist, and having worked extensively in the field of materials science, I have learned to think of interfaces differently. In chemistry, the interface, far from being a merely virtual surface, is first and foremost a material space where different bodies can actively interact to transform each other⁵. Think of a drop of oil in a glass of water. The oil forms a spherical surface in contact with the water, but adding soap to the water will dramatically change the behaviour of the oil, breaking its surface into smaller droplets until an entirely new phase of matter - an emulsion - is formed. As the soap molecules migrate to the interface between oil and water, new properties emerge, to the point where the identity of either of the two starting materials - the oil droplet and the water - is entirely transfigured. Soft and biohybrid technologies such as the living tattoo capture this material and transformative dimension of the interface, in which the surface of our bodies is transfigured through the productive encounter between human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, natural and artificial materials.

This model of the interface as a space for the production and cross-contamination of materials and identities is particularly relevant to our relationship with contemporary technologies. After all, our physical bodies and cultural identities are in a state of constant and dynamic evolution in the face of our increasing promiscuity with technological artefacts. I find it surprising that the skin, our primary and most sensitive interface with the world, has been so far almost entirely overlooked in the design of electronic interfaces, which in turn seem to increasingly favour visual perception to produce a disembodied experience of the digital world. This digital disembodiment appears to me as a radically political issue, as it artificially reproduces the fiction of a universal human subject while excluding the diversity of our material bodies from the space of technology.

Tattoos, make-up, jewellery, and body modifications, both physical and digital, technological and traditional, are certainly superficial adornments, but their superficial nature should not be misinterpreted as insignificance. A materialist, relational-ontological view of interfaces should teach us that the skin is not the passive envelope of a pre-constituted subject, but an active carrier of identity and meaning. To imagine new ways in which our skin can be transformed into a technological interface is to open ourselves to the possibility of redefining how we inhabit digital spaces. As augmented reality has become an increasingly familiar experience, I have been fascinated by the ambiguous potential of AR digital filters to either conform our image to patriarchal and colonial beauty standards or transform our bodies into surfaces of aesthetic experimentation. At its core, this is a conflict between two opposing views of the interface: on one hand, the interface as a passive surface, designed to enforce pre-established identities; on the other hand, the interface as an active material space of self-actualization and expression. Artificial Intelligems’ work with Ornamutations and Ornamisms moves precisely in this latter direction. Their hybrid approach to digital technologies interrogates the ability of interfaces to redefine the boundary between materiality and virtuality, opening a productive space of creative intervention between our bodies and their cultural meanings.

1. Xinyue Liu et al., 3D Printing of Living Responsive Materials and Devices, Advanced Materials 2018, 30, 1704821.
 2. Martin Weigel et al., SkinMarks: Enabling Interactions on Body Landmarks Using Conformal Skin Electronics, Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3095–3105.
 3. DuoSkin research project website: https://duoskin.media.mit.edu/
 4. DermalAbyss research project website: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/d-Abyss/
 5. This view of the interface as a space of ontological openness nourished by difference that sustains identities as an emergent property of relations was presented by philosopher Branden Hookway in his 2014 essay Interface. “A preliminary definition of interface might then be as follows: the interface is a form of relation that obtains between two or more distinct entities, conditions, or states such that it only comes into being as these distinct entities enter into an active relation with one another; such that it actively maintains, polices, and draws on the separation that renders these entities as distinct at the same time as it selectively allows a transmission or communication of force or information from one entity to the other; and such that its overall activity brings about the production of a unified condition or system that is mutually defined through the regulated and specified interrelations of these distinct entities” (Branden Hookway, Interface, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014, p. 4).

dr. Laura Tripaldi is a writer and independent researcher. She holds a PhD in Materials Science and Nanotechnology. Her work interrogates the speculative aspects of contemporary technologies from a posthuman and feminist perspective, focusing on the concepts of self-organization, artificial life, softness, and material interfaces. Her book Parallel Minds - Discovering the intelligence of materials was published by Urbanomic in 2022.

The Ponton contribution is made in collaboration with Swillen’s research interns and PXL-MAD students Esther Verstreken, Guus Vandeweerd and Senneke Van de Wygaert.
 AR filter: Guus Vandeweerd
 Photographer: Alexander Popelier, AVANTGAND BV © 2022
 Model: Ebenezer Ankrah
 Editor concept text: Mary S. Lederer