SYMPHOSYNTHESIS_02122026
Released on Metalabel
February 2025

[Website]

A symphosynthesis
Four tracks
1:09:32

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A stream of sonic consciousness between botanical behavior and human modulation, Symphosynthesis is an ongoing performance series by Tzi (Ari Melenciano).

In this soundscape, electromagnetic energy from fig tree leaves modulates drum resonance and harmonic textures, and influences its non-syncopated pulses.

The full soundscape is one hour nine minutes and thirty two seconds in total duration.

Cosmeage: A Study
Released on Metalabel
December 2025

Cosmeage:
A Study
Released on Metalabel
December 2025

[Website]

“Cosmeage: A Study,” is the first public artifact of post-culture Otzkö Kazo, released on Metalabel. The name, "Cosmeage," is a portmanteau of cosmos and lineage. This work expands our understanding of memory beyond the record of a single lifetime, toward what is inherited across lineage spanning as far as the cosmic. Through dance and sound, Cosmeage translates this ancestral affection into a study on aesthetics. This work materializes Ari Melenciano's studies 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.

Limited run of 12 editions 💫

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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

Full lecture video, here.

This lecture unpacked a framework that has unfolded throughout my art and research practice, titled “Critical Imagination.” It consists of three central pillars:
1. Excavate interiority -- develop language for the undercurrent threads within lived experience
2. Expand the performance of culture -- assess and reconsider the social codes we operate from
3. Recover what the archive has forgotten -- making space for pluralistic ways of being and knowing that dominant systems have excluded

This lecture used 9 different projects that I've developed over the past few years, as case studies. Sectioned into 3 groups:

Group 1: Excavating Interiority

Project 1: Synthesized Portraitures - recognizing the plasticity and emergent nature of identity, the performance of identity, and it's adaptability through recursion, initially by way of generating self-portraits with AI

Project 2: Theater of Meta-Interiority, Ensemble - designing an art residency to study my own artistic ontology, converting psychoanalysis into an automythopoetic practice as a foundational framework to the body of work created thereafter

Project 3: InnerCodex - including the development of the Periodic Table of Emotions as a relational cartography, mapping our emotions across spectrums to better understand the invisible influences to our perception

Group 2: Expanding Performance of Culture:

Project 4: Computational Anthropology - reverse engineering the machine's gaze, particularly through AI to study societal behaviors

Project 5: The Age of Black Metal - a phenomenological experiment transforming "speculative design" into an experiential reality through an art exhibition

Project 6: Culture as Cybernetics - an essay that considers culture as an ongoing and emergent product of cybernetics

Group 3: Recovering What the Archive Forgotten

Project 7: Cosmeage - a film that reconsiders how memory exists, is accessed, and can be witnessed, all by way of dance and sound

Project 8: Celestial Florilegia - a synthesis of a worldly collection of ritual practices as a tool to unveil the subconscious

Project 9: Symphosynthesis - an ongoing performance series that explores sound as a tool to modulate human consciousness and materialize botanical activity

These works are influenced by many pan-African, indigenous, and Eastern rituals and modes of thought that I've been studying for more than a decade. Understanding how cultures around the world have existed, how my own have existed (being Black American, Dominican-American), have been central to ways I reimagine how technologies can exist and be in relation. To create space for play, while also being aware and critical. All are the ongoing motivations for Critical Imagination, an area of work that's squarely in it's seed stages, and that I'm eager to continue cultivating. 🌿

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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

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

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

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

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.

© ARICIANO 2025