Ari
Melenciano
About
Ari Melenciano is a research artist and technoculture theorist creating tools, media, and conceptual frameworks that investigate intelligence, cultural memory, and the boundaries of computational legibility.
Email ↗
(Info sheet)
Mediums &
Areas of Inquiry
Computational systems, technoculture, pedagogy, design, cybernetics, phenomenology, Black cultural archives.
Environment, sound, performance, cinema, alternative modes of poetry, perception modulators.
Writing
Pelagñou: An Archipelagic Technoculture
(2026)
Culture is the Cybernetics of Consciousness
(2025)
Paradoxical Intelligence
(2023)
(extended list)
Vocabulary
Terms (Re)defined:
I use these terms to label practices and frameworks I utilize. They have a long-standing history, and I have redefined them by applying them contemporarily, culturally, and technologically:
Computational Anthropology:
A reverse engineering of the machine’s gaze to study, investigate, and reveal human behavior.
Critical Imagination:
Engaging with AI and advancing forms of technoculture with a balance between criticality (ethics, bias, history) and imagination (playful, possibility, creativity).
Embodied Mathematics:
Recognizing bodily movements as patterned gesture that is culturally learned, and becomes subconscious computation. It is particularly witnessed in dance, sport, cadence, and body language.
Created terms:
Incomputable Intelligence (and it’s glossary),
Alloentity,
Provocware,
Pelagñou,
Archipelagic Technoculture, Symphosynthesis
Presentations
Panelist at The New School’s F(r)ictions symposium on AI (2026) (video)
Guest Lecture at Futuress (2025) | on unpacking the Critical Imagination method
Curator’s Tour at Montclair State University for The Age of Black Metal exhibition (2025) | on consciousness as a technology
Keynote at University of Oregon’s Art School (2025) | on the philosophies and processes behind art practice
Guest Lecture at MIT Media Lab’s Lunch Lecture Series (2024) | on using AI as a tool for artistic expression and societal inquiry
Panel at Sundance Film Festival (2024) | on counter-logics for AI’s progression.
(extended list)
Interviews/Features
Interview with The Creative Independent (2025) | on staying curious and being intentional
Profile in Impulse Magazine (2025) | On developing Cosmeage
Interview (2024) | On ancient African civilizations, spirituality, femininity, creativity, pedagogy
(extended list)
Exhibitions
/Performances
/Screening
The Age of Black Metal (Afrotectopia, 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)
Sundance Film Festival | New Frontier (2024)
The Studio Museum in Harlem (2020)
(extended list)
Awarded by
The Eames Institute’s Curious 100 (2025)
(extended list)
Residencies/Fellowships
Rhizome and Mozilla’s Counterstructural Commons Residency (2026)
Pioneer Works’ Working Artist Fellowship (2025)
University of Maryland’s Inaugural Arts for All Artist-in-Residence (2024)
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Inaugural Future Imagination Fund Fellow (2020)
Eyebeam’s Rapid Response Artist Fellow (2020)
(extended list)
Teaching
Creative Experiments with AI*
(UMD IMD, 2024)
Myth, Rituals, and Sound*
(Hunter IMA, 2023)
Transdisciplinary Design
(Parsons, 2023)
Generative AI and Photography*
(NYU DPI, 2022)
Sounds of a Revolution*
(Hunter IMA, 2021)
Afrotectopian Ecologies*
(NYU ITP, 2021)
Electrotecture*
(NYU ITP, 2020)
Designing Club Culture*
(NYU ITP, 2018-20)
*created and designed the course
(extended list)
Alloentity
[Artifact]
(2026)
Alloentity
Alloentity
Alloentity builds on research developed in 2021 through Melenciano’s Synthesized Portraiture series, some of the first portraits created using subject-driven generative-AI technology.
This practice considered the increasing potentials of recontextualized identity outside of the subject’s choice and intention, and a study on personal and collective identity made possible by manufacturing with large language models.
This booklet contains a collection of the Synthesized Portraits alongside quotes from a century of thinkers reflecting on identity including Sylvia Wynter, Zadie Smith, and Carl Jung.