SYMBIOCENTRIC AI
Sebastian Baurmann, Lena Thiele, Felipe Sanchez-Luna, Pascal Staudt & Valentin von Lindenau / Germany
SYMBIOCENTRIC AI is a sensory environmental installation that invites visitors to experience intelligence not as human possession, but as a living web of relations between beings, environments, and adaptive systems — a relational way of knowing. It asks what kind of intelligence we envision at a time when AI increasingly shapes how we coexist.
For centuries, Western cultures treated intelligence as something uniquely human — defined by logic, reason, and control. This belief placed humans above other forms of life and shaped extractive ways of living. Today, artificial intelligence systems are increasingly built on these foundations, allowing a human-centred understanding of intelligence to act in the world at scale. This understanding is no longer abstract, it is becoming infrastructure.
But what if intelligence were never ours to claim?
SYMBIOCENTRIC AI is a sensory environmental installation that invites visitors to experience intelligence as something that emerges through relationships — between bodies, living environments, and the systems we create. It reflects a philosophy of sensing the world, where intelligence is relational, encountered through interaction rather than held as a human or technological possession.
Set along a path of interactive mirror sculptures in parks, forests, or botanical gardens, the installation responds to both human presence and environmental conditions. Breath, movement, wind, temperature, and climate data subtly influence evolving visuals and soundscapes. No single element leads, each interaction alters the system’s behaviour over time.
Artificial intelligence operates as part of this ecology — not to interpret or explain, but to carry traces of interactions forward. It remembers changes over time, allowing intelligence to appear as something shared, distributed, and alive.
The work creates a space of participation. Visitors sense how their presence affects others, how living systems shape behaviour, and how intelligence emerges from relations rather than within any single agent.
At a moment when artificial systems increasingly influence how the world functions, SYMBIOCENTRIC AI invites a different way of imagining intelligence. What new perspectives emerge when intelligence is no longer framed as a purely cognitive function, but as something that resonates, relates, and co-evolves between us?
