1. Making Intelligence: Open Tools for AI Literacy
Members: Stavros Didakis, Gottfried Haider, Bogna Konior, J.H. Moon, Flora Weil, Anna Greenspan, Eric Parren
This research cluster advances creative AI literacy, toolmaking, and open-source development. We open up AI and machine-learning technologies for creative and critical engagement, developing systematic approaches to both their philosophy and practical application. By making complex systems easier to grasp, adapt, and experiment with, we foster technical fluency alongside cultural and artistic understanding. Working directly with models, we support new forms of expression that extend imagination, agency, and perspectives on artificial intelligence.
2. World Building: Game, Speculative Design, Mixed Realities
Members: John Brumley, Stavros Didakis, Inmi Lee, J.H. Moon, Flora Weil, Xingchen Zhang
This cluster develops interactive narratives and embodied experiences across gaming platforms, augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality environments. We develop systematic approaches to game design, XR storytelling, and spatial computing while investigating how immersive technologies can preserve cultural memory, create shared experiences, and transform our relationship with digital and physical space.
3. Networked Media and Expanded Web
Members: Leon Eckert, Gottfried Haider, Viola He, J.H. Moon
This cluster investigates creative possibilities of networked systems. We examine web technologies and protocol design, alongside researching algorithmic culture, data's social impact, and open-source toolmaking that democratizes technical knowledge. Through technical development and artistic experimentation, the group explores how distributed networks, connected devices, and computational frameworks shape new forms of creative expression, social organization, and cultural production.
4. Critical Making: Fabrication, Robotics, Physical Computing
Members: Rodolfo Cossovich, Andy Garcia, Marcela Godoy, Gottfried Haider, Inmi Lee, Eric Parren
This cluster engages with embodied computational systems through hands-on practices of physical computing, hardware prototyping, robotics, and fabrication. We examine how machines mediate human experience while developing inclusive design frameworks that center alternative modes of human-computer interaction.
5. Experimental Time-based Media
Members: John Brumley, Junnan Chen, Leon Eckert, Viola He, J.H.Moon, Eric Parren
This cluster examines novel and experimental practices in film, video, performance, and sound. Combining creative exploration, interdisciplinary research, design fundamentals, and technical training, the group investigates how expansive forms of time-based media create and transform the ways we experience reality.
6. Agentic Environments: Responsive Architectures & Urban Futures
Members: Junnan Chen, Stavros Didakis, Andy Garcia, Anna Greenspan, Xingchen Zhang
This cluster designs and investigates systems that transform how buildings and cities sense, respond to, and shape human inhabitation. We explore responsive architectures and urban interfaces through environmental sensing networks, kinetic structures, and adaptive materials that react to climate, occupancy, and urban flows. By prototyping autonomous architectural systems and thinking with the evolving urban histories, the group examines how emerging technologies reconfigure spatial experience, ecological relationships, and collective urban life.
7. Future Ecologies and New Materials
Members: Marcela Godoy, Laura Tripaldi, Anna Greenspan, Andy Garcia
This cluster reimagines the boundaries between nature and artifice by studying the materials, organisms, and systems that constitute future ecologies. We experiment with intelligent matter, biofabrication, and environmental sensing to explore how technology might cultivate new modes of coexistence.Incorporating social responsibility into our approach, we advocate for practices that benefit communities and our society. Combining ecological philosophy with material practice, we prototype sustainable and symbiotic engagements with the living world.
8. Embodied Interfaces: Accessibility, Tangible Interaction & Human-Centered Design
Members: Rodolfo Cossovich, Marcela Godoy, Andy Garcia, Viola He
Designing inclusive interactions through wearable technologies, assistive devices, and tangible interfaces, this group co-creates adaptive technologies with diverse communities, particularly focusing on accessibility for people with motor impairments and disabilities, while exploring how physical computing, robotics, and haptic systems can extend human capabilities and foster more equitable technological futures.
9. Philosophy of Emerging Technologies
Members: Junnan Chen, Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior
This research cluster explores the philosophical, historical, and cultural dimensions of emerging media and technologies. We investigate the genealogy and speculative futures of technologies across diverse geopolitical contexts, with particular attention to East Asian and Eastern European perspectives on technology, ecology, digital culture, and the intellectual history of artificial intelligence.