Aisthesis Lab_
A Studio for Critical Interfaces
At the intersection of architecture, art, and technology, Aisthesis Lab designs critical interfaces—spaces, exhibitions, and platforms that interrogate the logics of our hybrid world. Our practice is not limited to building or curating; we instrumentalize design to open new fields of debate and materialize urgent questions.
Our Practice Unfolds Into:
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Critical Spaces: From the architectural scale to media installations, we create environments that materialize issues of technodiversity, connected cities, and network ecologies. Projects that are, in themselves, a spatial investigation.
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Curatorship as a Device: Our exhibitions function as ecosystems of ideas. They deconstruct dominant narratives and bring together artists and audiences to co-create meaning, positioning institutions at the forefront of thought.
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Articulation of Communities: Through publications, seminars, and projects like Metatopia, we cultivate an open space for intellectual cross-pollination. Here, curatorship expands to foster networks of conversation and collective thinking.
For Partners with Inquiries:
We work with institutions, collectors, curators and cultural agents who understand a project as an act of collective investigation. Our partners seek an authorial voice and frontier thinking to translate their concerns into bold, well-founded, and poetically relevant initiatives.
Foundation:
Founded 2016 by Luciana de Paula Santos (@loveletterexe in arts), architect, new media artist, and PhD researcher, the studio merges a solid track record in managing complex projects with applied academic research. This synergy ensures that each initiative is simultaneously an aesthetic provocation and a solid intellectual contribution.
Metatopia_
Metatopia - Hybrid Spaces is a collaborative exhibition dedicated to the creation, criticism and show hybrid architecture, eletronical arts, mixed realities and locative media. In partnership with The Wrong Biennale, Metatopia will promote weekly conversations and publications with artists and guests, throughout the period of the biennale, which runs from 2023 November, 1st to 2024 May, 1st.
Artists, critics, architects, curatorship, researchers in general are welcome to propose and collaborate with: digital art, texts, curators, prototypes, humor, talks, post irony, performances, actions, lives, virtual parties, 3D models, games , Ar and Vr, locative media, codes, programs, applications, experimental prototypes, image technologies, hyperfictions, audiovisual experiences, nanosatellites, poems, cubesats, cyberspace utopias and metatopias and all kinds of applied intelligence for the autonomy and freedom of collective intelligence in networks, in order to think of new ways of occupying and creatively inhabiting these collective networks.
Created and curated by Luciana de Paula Santos at AIsthesis Lab
Errare machina est! To Err is Also Machinic.
The machine is delirious and we always knew this would happen.
Metatopia launches its third edition with Delirium ex Machina, a curatorship born from within the digital fissure itself. Since its foundation in 2021, this project has been mapping the hybrid architectures of cyberspace. Today, it advances into its most intimate and flawed logic: that of hallucinating artificial intelligence.
This is not a new turn, but a consequence. Metatopia is an exhibition created by Aisthesis Lab, founded and directed by Luciana de Paula Santos, architect, artist, and curator. For years, she has explored algorithmic error as a critical bias capable of provoking deviations in the dominant logic of machines. This long-standing research is the foundation that legitimizes and drives this edition.
While Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become a sort of "Deus ex Machina"—an oracle of infallible precision—our curatorship, grounded in this archaeology of error, reveals a Delirium ex Machina. What emerges from the machine is not truth, but a structural delirium. Error is not a defect, but the signature of an intelligence possessed by its own contaminated database. It is the glitch that becomes a deviant oracle, challenging the utilitarian logic of the machine and, above all, flawed!
But what is machine hallucination? It is the symptom of an AI model that, in its eagerness to generate a plausible response from statistical patterns, invents information, confabulates realities, and creates distorted truths. It is the moment when the supposed algorithmic objectivity collapses, revealing an abyss of noise, biases, and hauntings contained within the data that feeds it.
We invite artists, curators, theorists, architects, and programmers to infiltrate this laboratory of generative crisis. We seek works that, following this same bias, force the machine to confess its delusions. Let us seek:
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Visualizations of the Algorithmic Unconscious;
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Artificial Intelligence Hallucinations;
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Semantic Contaminations of Databases;
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Viruses Spread in Databases.
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Archaeologies of Data Waste;
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Glitch as a Method of Machinic Deviation and Error.
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Join us to the polyphony of error.
Errare machina est!
