Critical Imagination

This lecture explores 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.

Event 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.

May 29, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
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June 19, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
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with Laura Campaz (they/them)
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June 27, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
On Curating and Meaning-Making: Anthropological Tools and Collective Knowledge Production
with Farah Hallaba (she/her)
Social Anthropologist & Visual Ethnographer

Jul 31, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine
with Neema Githere (they/them)
Artist & Researcher

Aug 28, 2025  | 6 pm CEST
Healing as Technology: Reclaiming Ancestral Knowledge in the Amazon
with Bárbara Santos (she/her)
Visual Artist & Independent Researcher

Sep 26, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
MIKRO BIOCINE Speculative Ecosystem Creation through Poetry, Film, Language Games, and Hacking
with Caos Ludd (they/them)
In-disciplined Artist

Oct 23, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Critical Imagination
with Ari Melenciano (she/her)
Artist, Designer & Educator

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.

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