Ariciano

ARICIANO.EARTH

Ari Jazmín Melenciano

(Ah-rree Hah-smeen Meh-lehn-see-ah-no)

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[Selected Works]

2025

Cosmeage: A Study

Culture as a Cybernetic Field

The Age of Black Metal

InnerCodex

Birds of Unfeathered

Cybernetics of Consciousness

Cosmeage

Symphosynthesis

Armenia Pavilion - Venice Biennale

Critical Imagination

2024

Black Metal Starship Program

Keynotes - Art/Research

Sundance: New Frontier

Theater of Meta-Interiority, Ensemble

2023

Forces of Thought: Interview

Paradoxical Intelligence

Sentient Code

Symphosynthesis de Otzkö Kazo

Celestial Florilegia

2022

Computational Anthropology

Synthesized Portraiture

To Sift

Finger User Interface (FUI)

Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler

2021

Bailaura

2020

Electrocology of Sound Travel

u¨Tu

Metamorphosis.FM

BIO

Ari J. Melenciano is an artist and cultural researcher working with perception, time, consciousness, and cybernetics as materials.

She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture at institutions including New York University, Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and Parsons School of Design. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai.

Melenciano is the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution dedicated to cultivating and Black imagination and culture while at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Afrotectopia has taken the form of festivals, think tanks, an international fellowship, a multi-university incubator, and a speculative design publishing platform.

Previously, she worked as a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, contributing to projects spanning machine learning on fingertip-scale hardware, creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and generative AI research, strategy, and development.

Approach

Her work examines how feedback, memory, and relation attune lived experience, and how these internal processes then shape culture. She uses imagination as a method to excavate interiority, expand the performance of culture, and recover what the archive has forgotten.

Mediums &
Methods of inquiry

Sound, performance, cinema, and computational systems; informed by cybernetics, phenomenology, and Black cultural archives; attentive to perception and lived experience.

Writing

Culture is the Cybernetics of Consciousness

Paradoxical Intelligence

Computational Anthropology and Exploring Identity through Artificial Synthesis

Terms Created:

Symphosynthesis (n.): A ritualized practice that bridges human and nonhuman perception through sound. It translates biological signals into sonic forms as a way of attuning to alternative modes of intelligence.

Meta-Interiority (n.): The practice of observing one’s internal experience with awareness of the act of observation itself. A recursive mode of perception in which reflection and experience co-generate meaning.

Meta-Cybernetics (n.): how inner awareness scales outward into culture, technology, and systems, through relational networks.

Terms Redefined:

Computational Anthropology: An inquiry into how computational systems model, interpret, and shape human identity and culture. It reverses the machine’s gaze to reveal the feedback loops between data, behavior, and social imagination.

Exhibited at

Montclair State Gallery (2025), Intelligent Mischief’s Futures of Repair (2025), Black Beyond’s Warpmode at Pioneer Works (2025), Kinfolk + Brooklyn Bridge Park (2025), Venice Biennale in Architecture (Armenia’s Pavilion, 2025), The Bronx Museum of Art (2025), Museum of Modern Art in NYC (2025), Museum of the Future in Dubai (2024), Montclair State Gallery (2023), The Museum of Moving Image (2022), Sundance Film Festival | New Frontier (2021), and The Studio Museum in Harlem (2020), New York University (2018), University of Maryland (2014)

Awarded by

The Eames Institute’s Curious 100 (2025), USA Artists Fellowship Nomination (3x - 2021-2024), New York University’s President's Service Award (2018), Urvashi Vaid / Melinda Paras Inclusive Programming Award (2018), Tisch School of the Arts Dean Fellowship (2017 - 2018), and (unexpectedly) the Bollywood Film Festival for Best Cell Phone Cinema Short (2018),

Teaching

From 2018-2025, Ari has taught 26 predominately graduate-level university courses at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), Department of Photography (DPI), and the Interactive Media Arts (IMA) Low Res Program | Pratt Institute‘s Communication Design Program | Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts (IMA) Program | The New School’s/ Parson’s School of Design Transdisciplinary Design Program | University of Maryland’s Studio Art and Immersive Media Design (IMD) Program | and Rutgers University’s School of Design

Courses she has designed and taught include: Designing Club Culture (NYU), Electrotecture (NYU), Afrotectopian Ecologies (NYU), Sounds of a Revolution (Hunter), Myth, Rituals, and Sound (Hunter), Creative Experiments with AI (UMD)

Keynote/
panelist

SXSW, MozFest, Google Design’s SPAN, Harvard, MIT Media Lab, SVA, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Oregon, Fordham, ArtCenter, California College of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, DePaul University, the Pratt Institute, Univ. of Wisconsin, University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, Georgia State, Geneva School of Design, Pacific Northwest University, Whitman College, SUNY Fredonia, Queens College, Wesleyan University, University of Denver, Today at Apple (5th Avenue, NYC), Dubai Future Forum, Sundance Film Festival, NYC Design Pavilion, Simons Foundation, EYEO, Knight Foundation, New Museum, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, IDEO, Code/Art, Cooper Union, Black Portraitures, TUMO, Eyebeam, ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication, International Center of Photography, Iterations.Online, Women of Color in Engineering Collaborative, Design Academy Eindhoven (Netherlands), The Apollo Theater, Instrument, Kinfolk Foundation x Brooklyn Bridge Park, Montclair State University, Futuresss, Eyebeam, The Lincoln Center

Residencies/
Fellowships

Pioneer Works’ Working Artist Fellowship (2025), University of Maryland’s Inaugural Arts for All Artist-in-Residence (2024), New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program Research Fellow (2021), ONX New Media Artist (2020), New York Live Arts Artist in Residence (2020), Maryland Institute College of Art Artist-in-Residence (2020), New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Inaugural Future Imagination Fund Fellow (2020), New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program Human-in-Residence (2020), Pioneer Works Technology Resident (2020), Eyebeam’s Rapid Response Artist Fellow (2020), New Inc + Nokia Bell Labs + Rhizome Experiments in Arts and Technology Artist (2019), Culture Hub Technology Resident (2019), Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow (2019), University of Denver’s Center for Open Source Arts Inaugural Contributor-in-Residence (2019), New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program “Postdoc” Research Fellow (2019), Processing Foundation Fellow (2018)

Juried

Prix Ars Electronica, New Media Animation (2024, 2025)

Creative Capital Award Panels (2020–2022)

United States Artists, Knight Art + Tech Fellowship (Inaugural Jury 2021)

Interaction Design Awards (IxDA) Jury (2020)

Commissions / Consulting

The New York Times (Animation Artist)

GIPHY (Animation Artist)

The National Endowment for the Arts (Writer)

Carnegie Museum of Art (Writer)

Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School (Writer)

NYC Department of Education (Curriculum Advisor)

Creative Capital (Community Design Consultant)

Apple’s Made in NYC Mentorship Program (Mentor)

Last Updated 25.7.1

Otzkö Kazo presents:Cosmeage: A Study
Released on Metalabel
December 2025

Otzkö Kazo presents:Cosmeage:
A Study
Released on Metalabel
December 2025

[Website]

Originally experienced as a film, Cosmeage has traveled from NYC's MoMA to Los Angeles's The Music Center. The film explores Black cultural gestures through embodied sensorial memory, and pan-African diasporic sound, all while situated within surrealist architecture. This release translates the film into a tactile form of nearly 200 cinematic stills and process images.

“Cosmeage: A Study,” is the first artifact of Otzkö Kazo, released on Metalabel. The name, "Cosmeage," is a portmanteau of cosmos and lineage. This work expands our understandings of memory: stretching beyond being a record of one's lifetime, but also what we've each inherited from lineages spanning as far as the cosmic. Through dance and sound, the latent memory stored in the subconscious is surfaced. Cosmeage translates this ancestral affection into a study on aesthetics. This work materializes Ari Melenciano's research inquiries on Black cultural gesture, as she uses it to expand the theory of "Embodied Mathematics."

Originally experienced as a film, Cosmeage has traveled from NYC's MoMA to Los Angeles's The Music Center. The film explores Black cultural gestures through embodied sensorial memory, and pan-African diasporic sound, all while situated within surrealist architecture.

This release translates the film into a tactile form of nearly 200 cinematic stills and process images. Each have been printed and placed into individual pockets within a booklet, encouraging a slower and non-linear still-cinematic experience, with a deliberate study of the body.

And, a set of postcards extend this archive further. Each function as single frames recalling moments from the film.

Limited run of 12 editions 💫

--

Artist info: Ari J. Melenciano is an artist and cultural researcher working with perception, time, consciousness, and cybernetics as materials. Over the past few years, she has converged these inquiries into Otzkö Kazo, an emergent post-cultural ecology.

Critical Imagination:Culture as a Cybernetic Field

Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise
October 2025

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.

--

This event 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.

This event was possible thanks to a generous grant from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

The Age of Black MetalMontclair State University Galleries 2025

“Welcome to The Age of Black Metal by Afrotectopia” curator’s intro video and full tour video,

Black Metal originated as a kitchen table art book that reimagines the future of space travel, through the lenses of Black culture and spirituality. The book emerged from an Afrotectopia-led incubator, in collaboration with MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The project features contributions from artists Jordan Caldwell, Kordae Jatafa Henry, Jeremy Kamal, and Ari Melenciano.

The Age of Black Metal builds upon the foundational ideas of the book and translates the text into a fully immersive experience for visitors to explore each conceptual chapter–from metaphysical training manuals, botanical consciousness, and self-alignment protocols–through participatory installations. The exhibition is set centuries in the future, imagining a timeline where society has been profoundly shaped by the principles of Black Metal. Ultimately, visitors will not only bear witness to the societal effects of Black Metal, but also leave transformed in some way. This exhibition also features an additional 14 Black and Pan African innovators that are uniquely expanding Black imagination through their crafts.

The Age of Black Metal invites all to imagine the futures that Black culture can build, if given space to expand without limit.

Exhibition curation, conceptual direction, and spatial design by Ari Melenciano

Programming and partnerships by Alyssa Villaseñor

Exhibition fabrication by Eric Mitchell

Photography and Videography by Shane Nourie

InnerCodex2025

Every emotion has a birthplace.

InnerCodex (2025) is a dual installation consisting of Radio Azueli and the Periodic Table of Emotions.

Radio Azueli is named after an archetype within a myth I have been developing over the past couple of years. Azueli is an archetype of origin, emotions, and the womb, while taking the form of the sea. In this installation, Radio Azueli uses sound to simulate the experience of being in a mother’s womb. Our time in the womb is also an inheritance of our mother’s emotional landscape. We notice how her heart beats and how her body responds to the sounds and stimuli she engages with, and we subconsciously draw patterns from them.

The Periodic Table of Emotions is a cartography of feelings. The table places emotions across a variety of spectrums, such as past to present, “positive” to “negative,” and inward to outward. It shows how all emotions are connected, and highlights when a feeling is being experienced in or out of balance. These spectrums reduce the act of pathologizing or judging how we feel, so that we can better navigate toward their causes.

There is a third and invisible aspect to this installation, which is the space between the two pieces. It represents how, as we grow in agency and leave our mother’s womb, everything we surround ourselves with becomes a new womb. Our circumstances and environments influence and shape our perceptions just the same.

Commission and exhibition by Intelligent Mischief

Curation by Mia Imani Harrison

Exhibition Design by Mayola Tikaka

Culture is the Cybernetics of Consciousness2025

We often equate human consciousness with neurobiological processes, computational logic, and machine-readable patterns. This paper explores how consciousness also emerges through culture, memory, relationships, and sensorial experience. It is continuously shaped by inherited and evolving feedback systems. AI, cybernetics, and design must begin to reflect this broader spectrum of sentience and cultural intelligence, or risk reinforcing reductive, colonial, and mechanomorphic models of mind.

Sub-arguments

Our tools (AI, media, platforms) shape our perceptions, often invisibly.
Legibility, feedback, and conditioning create behavioral culture.
Mechanomorphism flattens naturally complex ways of being.
Consciousness cannot be reduced to logic and standardization.
AI is great for external optimization but design intelligence requires inward attention.

Originally presented as the opening keynote for Instrument’s company-wide convening on June 6, 2025, this essay grounds those explorations in the lens of popular culture, using it as a shared language of relatability.

Read essay, here

Birds of Unfeathered2025

Birds of Unfeathered
2025

An autonomously spatialized soundscape, experienced in Augmented Reality, of diasporic memory and resonance. Birds of Unfeathered bypasses borders to reflect how life forms, both human and more-than-human, exist in dialogue, shaping each other’s rhythms and ways of being.

Commissioned by Kinfolk Foundation and exhibited in partnership with the Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Interview, here.

Photos by Micah Milner amd Van Lynn

Cosmeage2025

Cosmeage
2025

Cosmeage is a portmanteau of cosmos and lineage, naming the continuity of sentient memory that spans across time, ancestry, and celestial intimacy.

Cosmeage is rooted in a developing theory: that our bodies hold memories beyond our own lived experience, memories that span across ancestral lineages. Through encounters with sensorial inputs, like instrumentation and sound, this embodied knowledge can resurface. Cosmeage celebrates the memories we never lived, yet know.

Exhibited in the form of a film exploring pan-African diasporic sound and embodied sensorial memory.

Screened at NYC’s MoMA curated by the Creativity Lab, to Los Angeles’ The Music Center.

Previously on view at the Bronx Museum of Art

Featured on Impulse Magazine and Hyperallergic

Runtime: 19:42 minutes

Dancing, Motion-capture facilitation, 3D rendering, 3D animation, film scoring, and film editing by Ari Melenciano

Armenian Pavilion at Venice Biennale2025

Armenian Pavilion at Venice Biennale
2025

At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2025, the Republic of Armenia presents "Microarchitecture Through AI: Making New Memories with Ancient Monuments." The pavilion brings attention to the challenges facing cultural heritage today, particularly loss through climate change, conflict, and neglect, while exploring how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence may offer new methods for preservation and reinterpretation.

The Tumo Center for Creative Technologies scanned hundreds of significant and at-risk structures (due to climate change and conflict), which our broader team of technologists, designers, and researchers transformed into the foundation for a generative AI model. One capable of simulating and fabricating new architectural forms that reimagine memory, heritage, and preservation.

Curated by Marianna Karapetyan, a collaboration between Electric Architects, TUMO, Calfa, Ari Melenciano, and MoNumEd.

Contributed conceptual direction and creative framing.

Featured on TheNationalNews

Photos by Electric Architects

Symphosynthesis | Biosonification Performances2022 - Present(2025)

Symphosynthesis | Biosonification Performances 2022 - Present(2025)

Symphosynthesis is a term coined by Melenciano to describe a practice that treats plants as active collaborators in sound design. Through this approach, biosignals are translated into rhythm, tone, and harmonic sequences. These works extend the practice of biosonification by intentionally merging multi-sentient behaviors by using botanical and photosynthetic data that is further modulated by human activity to create immersive, ritualistic sonic compositions.

Symphosynthesis (n.): An emergent form of sonic composition arising through interaction between botanical electromagnetic behavior and human sound modulation, translating plant energy into generative soundscapes. Rooted in both technological and ancestral sonic practices, Symphosynthesis frames plants simultaneously as collaborators and interlocutors in a shared field of consciousness. It mirrors the transference of energy in photosynthesis, transforming invisible life processes into audible experience, and operates as a ritual technology for bridging human and nonhuman perception.

Critical Imagination | Keynote Series
2022-2025

Critical Imagination | Keynote Series
2022-25

A survey of work created between 2022-2025, dissection of process, collection of research, methods of creativity. This presentation explores a spectrum of intelligences from artificial, to ancestral, to embodied.

Topics:
- Studying society with AI (“Computational Anthropology” )
- Study of Identity
- Study of Interiority (psychoanalysis)
- Creating speculative histories
- Surveying alternative forms of logic
- Designing creative frameworks
- Building an artististic ontology (mythopoesis)
- Alternative forms of consciousness
- Sensorial catalysts for ancestral memories
- Creating archives for the future (Black Metal)

Full video from keynote at University of Oregon, here.

Keynotes on Art/Research Practice
2023-2024

Keynotes on Art/Research Practice
2023-24

Select list of keynotes sharing research on:
- Critical and imaginative uses of AI
- New Media and Studio Art
- Computational Anthropology
- Psychoanalysis to Mythopoesis
- Artistic ontologies
- Consciousness

Sites:

- Rochester Institute of Technology |
A2RU Closing Keynote
- Parsons School of Design | Design and Technology (video)
- Montclair State University (video)
- MIT Media Lab | Future Sketches (video)
- WhatIf Summit (video)
- The Host.is (video)

Black Metal Starship Program
2024

Black Metal Starship Program
2024

Purchase a copy of Black Metal, here.

The Black Metal Starship Program was an immersive book and film screening tour inviting communities around the country to multi-sensorially experience the world of Black Metal.

What began as an incubator, led and designed by Afrotectopia, in partnership with MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, with additional support from the Ford Foundation, culminated into an artifact of speculative futures.

Afrotectopia commissioned and incubated artists Jordan Caldwell, Kordae Henry, and Jeremy Kamal, with Ari Melenciano in collaboration, to reimagine the future of space travel. Their collective efforts conceptualized Black Metal, which Afrotectopia self-published. Black Metal became an experimental kitchen table art book (limited edition, 500 copies), and a manual on realizing one’s own potential.

The book was designed by WeShouldDoItAll (WSDIA) and printed by Small Editions

The Black Metal Starship Program book and film tour was organized and produced by Ari Melenciano.

Book tour stops:
Lower East Side Girls Club (NYC), Culture Hub (NYC), Simon’s Foundation (NYC), The Reading Room (TX), ONX (NYC), Design Academy Eindhoven (Netherlands), Laundromat Project (NYC), MIT Media Lab (MA), Rutgers University (NJ), Hunter College (NYC), NYU (NYC), IDEO, Pioneer Works (NYC), University of Maryland (MD), Ohio State University (OH)

New Frontier: Let’s Rebrand AI
Sundance Film Festival, 2024

“New Frontier alumni artists and creative technologists who have been working on the vanguard of design and technology for decades come together to interrogate the profile of so-called AI technologies in popular culture, share their creative practice, and ask, “What do we need this powerful tech to do for us right now?” Do we need to rebrand artificial intelligence altogether?”

Panelists: Rashaad Newsome, Sandra Rodriguez, Navid Khonsari, and Ari Melenciano.
Moderated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Full video, here.

Theater of Meta-Interiority, Ensemble
2023-2024

From 2022-2023, Ari designed a residency to study her own artistic ontology, which she has named Otzkö Kazo. Through techniques of psychoanalysis and mythopoesis, she designed a phenomenological framework as the foundation to her art practice. Each artifact she has created since, exists along a lineage of these studies. In January 2024, these works were shared in self-produced exhibition titled, Theater of Meta-Interiority, Ensemble.

Through this work she coined the term, “meta-interiority”

Forces of Thought | Interview
2023

Ari Melenciano's lesson 'Forces Of Thought' explores the arrangements of her thoughts and artistic practice. In this lesson, she shares whether understanding has a role to play in creating art. Reflecting on her own experience surfacing and organizing information as a Creative Technologist and as a Teacher. Within her studio and research practice, she is currently designing epistemologies for artistic expression that explore the collective conscious and unconscious.

Listen, here.

Photos by Katarina Felix

Paradoxical Intelligence
2023

An essay commissioned by the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Full essay, here.

Sentient Code2023

Sentient Code
2023

Keynote given a Iterations.Online

Full video, here.

Celestial Florilegia2023

Celestial Florilegia
2023

Speculative botany of outerspace, mapped to a multidimensional spiritual tool

Created within Afrotectopia’s New Forms Incubator in partnership with MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and published within the culminating experimental art book, Black Metal.

Purchase, here.

Synthesized Portraiture
2022-2023

Exhibited at Dubai’s Museum of the Future

Essay on “Computational Anthropology and Exploring Identity through Artificial Synthesis”, here.

Computational Anthropology2023

Computational Anthropology
2023

Computational Anthropology is a series of work engages with AI through a critical and societally-reflective lens. How is AI able to reflect back to humans their tendencies and patterns.

This work was exhibited at Montclair State Gallery’s The Backend Exhibition of 2023.

Essay on “Computational Anthropology and Exploring Identity through Artificial Synthesis”, here.

Symphosynthesis de Otzkö Kazo
2023

Sympho-synthesis de Otzkö Kazo
2023

Performance at the University of Maryland

Live modular synthesis composition, with interpretive dancers, and art film projection.

To Sift2022

Commissioned and permanently collected by Giphy and the Museum of Moving Image, curated by Lindsey Howard.

To Sift explores our navigation of constant stimulation, external sources, and forces, and serves as a visual metaphor for the importance of intentional reception for aligning self-cultivation.

Finger User Interface (FUI)2022

Finger User Interface or FUI
( pronounced Foo-ey ) lets you control devices with the wave of a finger.

Using an Arduino, an IMU sensor, and TensorFlow, and a customized a machine learning model to recognize 5 gestures that control the animation and sound on a webpage.

This project is a part of a collection of experiments that shows the possibilities of building with TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers.

Created while a Technologist at Google’s Creative Lab

Launch the Experiment and get code, here.

Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler2021

The Guild of Future Architects in partnership with New York Live Arts presents, Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler.

The human interstitium is the fluid space between cell walls and organs. In this mesmerizing interactive WebXR experience, the interstitium is the liminal space where reality shifts, challenging us to harness the power of our radical imagination. Dip into this primordial pool and find innovative artists working at the intersection of art, film, science, music, and technology. They are divining inspiration from Octavia Butler and creating portals on your desktop to alternate dimensions—making the invisible visible.

Official selection of the New Frontier program at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival

Artists: Sophia Nahli Allison, Idris Brewster, Stephanie Dinkins, Ari Melenciano and Terence Nance

Creative Technologist Lead: Ari Melenciano

Baïlaurâ 2021

Baïlaurâ considers frequency in four dimensions: sound, auratic energy, kinetic energy and a quantization of the subconscious. Designed with computer vision, machine learning and modular synthesis, bodily movements engage with the algorithms to explore new forms of electronic ritual and divination, and the relationship between sound and dance. In its simplest essence, movement in response to the synthesized soundscapes is converted into data and interpreted into a visual language for the viewer to decipher. This hands free interactive version is created specially for people passing in front of the vestibule at Live Arts and simplifies the experience to create a visual representation of movements through patterns and colors. The full version of Baïlaurâ is an expanded web experience that can be played with on your own browser at home. Baïlaurâ is a commissioned by Bill T. Jones New York Live Arts Live Feed Residency Program.

More info, here.

Electrocology of Sound Travel2020

This project explores the relationship between planetary topographies, ecologies in the midst of quarantine, and abstract soundscapes. Ari Melenciano has materialized this relationship through an audio-visual webVR platform. Each of the 5 pages are dedicated to major cities around the world. Imagery is captured from Google Earth to showcase their local topographies in WebVR. Portals throughout the webVR experience share sounds of a modular synthesizer where Ari has developed algorithms to convert the cities' climate data during COVID-19's quarantine into voltage-controlled current for the synthesizer to amplify into abstract soundscapes.

This project was created by Ari Melenciano in less than 72 hours was commissioned as part of the ENTER program by Onassis USA.
The data for this project was sourced from the World Air Quality Index database.

Website, here.

üT¨u
2020

üT¨u was developed while a Rapid Response Fellow at Eyebeam, in 2020.

“Melenciano worked on a prototype for a 3D rendered online interactive environment via webex titled üT¨u that aims to use experimental pedagogy guided by biomimicry philosophy, indigenous ancestral intelligence, speculative design, and whole systems practices for new forms of gathering, exploring, and experiencing the web. üT¨u simulates a utopian society rooted in natural intelligence, and is designed to be a digital render of a potential future that advances society for more equitable, humane, and sustainable ecological orientations.“

Eyebeam profile

Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry‘s Art && Code: Homemade transcription of Melenciano’s keynote on January 15, 2021.

Metamorphosis.FM2020

Metamorphosis.FM is a multi-modality webVR healing environment. Based off of research on Eastern and African diasporic sound techniques and psycho-geography.

Website, here.