Ari Melenciano

Artist 
Designer 
Technologist 
Researcher 
Theorist Biography,  
Email

Selected Works, Interviews, Essays, Talks:
Cosmeage
2025

Screened at MoMA curated by the Creativity Lab
Currently on view at the Bronx Museum of Art

Cosmeage is a portmanteau of cosmos and lineage, naming the continuity of sentient memory that reverberates across time, ancestry, and celestial intimacy. It proposes a theory of ancestral memory that travels across one's biological lineage and reactivates through multi-sensory stimuli. Situated within diasporic and psycho-spiritual thought, it treats memory as not merely psychological but inheritable; stored in body, nervous system, and energetic field, accessible through non-linear experience and somatic catalysts. Cosmeage is not what is remembered, but what remembers through you.

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

Runtime: 20 minutes
Category
Design, Sound,
Dance, Motion Capture, 3D Rendering, Art, Film, Film Score
Sympho-synthesis

A form of Bio-sonification

2021-ongoing

The act of using botanical or photosynthetic data to generate immersive sonic compositions; a form of environmental computation through plant-based signal capture.

This practice treats plants as collaborators in sound design, allowing biosignals to be mapped to rhythm, tone, and harmonic sequence.

Symphosynthesis is about listening differently.

Category
Sound,
Botany, Art
Critical Imagination
University of Oregon
2025

A survey of work created between 2022-2025, dissection of process, collection of research, methods of creativity

Topics:
- Studying society with AI (“Computational Anthropology” )
- Study of Identity
- Study of Interiority (psychoanalysis)
- Creating speculative histories
- 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, here.



Category
Research,
Lecture,
Pedagogy,
Art,
AI, Design
Cont’ Keynotes
 Various Locations
2023-2025

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)


Category
Research,
Lecture,
Pedagogy,
Art,
AI, Design
Black Metal Starship Program

(Book/film tour)

 Various Locations
2024-2025

Experimental Kitchen Table Art Book (limited edition, 500 copies) on speculative design and the future of space travel through a cultural and spiritual lens

Collaboration between Afrotectopia, MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program

Designed by WeShouldDoItAll (WSDIA)
Printed by Small Editions
Supported by the Ford Foundation
Included artists: Jordan Caldwell, Kordae Henry, Jeremy Kamal, 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)

Purchase, here.


Category
Design, Producer, Art, Publishing, Lecture, Film,
Film Score
New Frontier: Let’s Rebrand AI

Sundance Film Festival

 2024-2025

“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.

Category
Panel, AI

Theater of Meta-Interiority 2024

A body of work that explores mythopoesis through psychoanalysis, sentience, enlightenment.

Essay, here.

Category
Research,
Art, Studio, Mythopoesis
Forces of Thought

Interview
2024 

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.

Category
Interview, Art, studio practice, research, pedagogy
Paradoxical Intelligence2023 

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

Full essay, here.

Category
Research, Essay, AI
Sentient Code2023 

Keynote given a Iterations.Online

Full video, here.

Category
Lecture,
Research,Sentience, Consciousness

©2025Ari Melenciano