ARICIANO.EARTH




Ari Melenciano
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Ari Melenciano is an artist, designer, and systems thinker. Through her practice, she explores how computation and designed perception can be used to nurture new frameworks for understanding the world. 

She has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture across NYU, the Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai.  And, she is the founder of Afrotectopia, a pioneering social institution that builds communities at the nexus of culture, art, design, and technology. It has taken the form of festivals, think tanks, a multi-university incubator, an international fellowship, and an experimental art book. 

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


Extended Biography, here





Philosophy
Ari’s practice is rooted in the belief that knowledge is not only external or objective, but also internally generated and culturally plural. Her work explores how technology, design, and performance can illuminate the invisible architectures that shape human experience; particularly those rooted in the multiplicities of consciousness, cultural complexity, and diasporic logics.


Practice Her artistic practice is currently focused on motion capture performance, cinema, and sound design/composition; used as tools for building experimental systems of knowledge, engaging ancestral memory, and reimagining the relationships between the senses and sentience.

Other areas of her research include: cybernetics, identity, consciousness, pedagogy, neural behavior, processes of creativity, imagination, Black cultural archives, and technoculture.




Exhibited atBlack Beyond + 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), Ford Foundation (2021-2024), USA Artists Fellowship Nomination (3x - 2021-2024), New York University’s President's Service Award (2018), Tisch School of the Arts Dean Fellowship (2017), Urvashi Vaid / Melinda Paras Inclusive Programming Award (2018), and (unexpectedly) the Bollywood Film Festival for Best Cell Phone Cinema Short (2018)




Teaching
From 2018-2025, Ari has taught 25 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



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




Residencies/
Fellowships

Pioneer Works’ Working Artist Fellowship (2025), University of Maryland’s Inaugural Arts for All Artist-in-Residence (2024), 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)               









Last Updated 25.7.1
Selected works, talks, essays:





Culture is the Cybernetics of Consciousness2025We 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 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 Unfeathered
2025








Photos by Van Lynn and Micah Milner
An autonomously spatialized soundscape, experienced in Augmented Reality, of diasporic memory and resonance. Birds of Unfeathers 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.







Cosmeage
2025
Screened at MoMA curated by the Creativity Lab
Currently on view at the Bronx Museum of Art
Featured on Impulse Magazine and Hyperallergic

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 music or food, this embodied knowledge can resurface. Cosmeage isn’t about what we remember, but about what remembers through us.

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

Runtime: 20 minutes








Armenian Pavilion at Venice Biennale
2025























Photos by Electric Architects
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










Symphosynthesis | Biosonification Performances 2022-ongoingThe 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.








Critical Imagination | Keynote Series
2022-25
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.







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
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.




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
A body of work that explores mythopoesis through psychoanalysis, sentience, enlightenment. Creation of the term “meta-interiority”

Essay, here.







Forces of Thought | Interview
2023






Photos by Katarina Felix
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.







Paradoxical Intelligence
2023
An essay commissioned by the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Full essay, here.







Sentient Code
2023
Keynote given a Iterations.Online

Full video, here.











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

Published in Afrotectopia’s Black Metal art book

Purchase, here.

















Synthesized Portraiture
2023
Exhibited at Dubai’s Museum of the Future

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












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.





Sympho-synthesis de Otzkö Kazo
2023
Performance at the University of Maryland

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





To Sift
2022
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 Butler 2021The 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 Travel
2020
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.







Metamorphosis.FM
2020
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.






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