“Critical Imagination” with Ari Melenciano

Using AI, sound, and ancestral memory to reimagine society, technology, and nature through speculative botany.

In this lecture, Ari Melenciano explores the intersections of imagination, technology, and cultural inquiry. Through her practice of “Computational Anthropology,” she engages AI as a tool to surface societal behaviors and the collective subconscious. Her work extends into sound, dance, and ancestral memory, experimenting with sensory experiences that challenge conventional narratives. Most recently, in her book Black Metal, she envisions speculative extraterrestrial botany, intertwining it with floramancy to rethink our relationship with nature and the unknown. Through these explorations, Melenciano invites us to consider how emerging technologies and artistic practices can expand our ways of knowing and being in the world.

Language: English with close-captions

Ari Melenciano (she/her) is an artist, designer, and educator working at the intersection of art, technology, culture, and pedagogy. Her practice spans improvisational dance as ethnomusicological research, exploring AI critically and imaginatively, and sonic compositions using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited globally, from Dubai’s Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Ari is the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution reimagining possibilities in art, design, and technology. Formerly a creative technologist at Google, she now speaks internationally and teaches at New York University (NYU), Parsons School of Design, and Pratt Institute in New York, USA. Afrotectopia’s latest project, Black Metal, explores creative futures through collective incubation.

This lecture is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise free online lecture series challenging dominant narratives of design, knowledge-making, and technological progress.

The lecture series has been curated by Valentina Alcalde Gómez and Adriana Palencia from the Latin American platform Matería Oscura, alongside Maya Ober from Futuress. It is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise larger collaborative project between the think & do tank Dezentrum and Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and Matería Oscura.

The program is possible thanks to a generous grant from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.