As artificial intelligence blazes through the many fields of creative practice, perhaps now is the time to check the temperature of the smoldering remains.

At the heart of contemporary artistic and design practices lies worldbuilding — whether through speculative futures, design fiction, or immersive storytelling. The act of imagining new realities has become a central strategy for constructing alternative possibilities within our increasingly complex world.

Four themes made it possible to bring together a wide diversity of works in the exhibition:

The Making of Narratives

When humans co-write with the machine

Speculative Worlds

Using artificial intelligence to explore future scenarios

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

How do machines perceive our world?

Our Domestic Oracles

The growing influence of virtual beings on our everyday lives

Artificial intelligence is often presented to us as a modern demiurge, capable of bringing forth entirely new worlds. Yet it merely rearranges fragments of the past, drawn from the immense body of data that has been handed down to it. Rather than creating, it recomposes, recycles, and reinterprets.

Over the past decade, practitioners at HEAD – Genève have explored hybrid strategies of critical collaboration and contamination with artificial models, resisting the passive substitution of traditional tools with the latest fashionable ones. This exhibition presents a selection of these approaches, navigating the boundaries between the artificial and the authentic, shaping futures that neither human nor machine intuition alone could have conceived.

Depuis 2019, la HEAD – Genève (HES-SO) explore la nouvelle génération d’intelligences artificielles, en s’interrogeant sur la manière dont ces technologies transforment les processus créatifs.

  • Goodbye/Hello
  • Chloé Richard
  • 2024
  • Impression lambda sur aluminium
  • Arts Visuels
  • Intelligence artificielle : Midjourney

Capturing an apparently simple image of a fire burning against a white wall is impossible. The camera sensor fails to distinguish the intense light of the flames from the whiteness of the background: two luminous intensities that cancel each other out. Using an image generator, Chloé Richard creates an illusion — a simulacrum of a photograph — recreating what the camera cannot capture.

Fire, humanity’s first technology, produces light but also ashes. Suspended between appearance and disappearance, this work questions what our machines can — or cannot — see, simulate, and restore.

Eternal Us is a speculative device that redefines our perception of the afterlife. Created from an individual’s personal digital data and powered by artificial intelligence, this object proposes a new form of immortality, in which the memory of the deceased remains active and present.

At once trace, memory, and simulacrum, Eternal Us becomes an intermediary between the living and the dead. It materializes the digital presence of a deceased person, extending emotional bonds and questioning traditional spiritual beliefs. A generator of digital souls, at the crossroads of mourning, technology, and fiction.

And you — would you turn to Eternal Us to maintain a bond with a loved one who has passed away?
  • Artificial Biotope
  • Elsa Wagnières
  • 2024
  • Installation, 3D printing, silicone
  • Visual Arts
  • Artificial intelligence: Stable Diffusion

Inside every smartphone, around fifty minerals extracted from our environment participate in a largely invisible production chain. From these elements — bismuth, tantalum, lithium, copper, … — Elsa Wagnières imagines a speculative bestiary generated by artificial intelligence, composed of species capable of surviving in ecosystems devastated by industrial extraction.

Bismuthocris Chrysallis and Coleoptera Terbiumidae, embodied here as sculptures, populate a fictional biotope where the laws of adaptation are replayed. Their hybrid, translucent bodies and synthetic textures evoke a nature that does not disappear, but reconfigures itself. No longer opposed to technology, it merges with it in a new form of existence — strange, speculative, resilient — where artificiality may become a second nature.

  • Fogbound Harmonies
  • Basile Brun
  • 2024
  • Sound design
  • Master Media Design
  • Tools: Ableton Live, ShaperBox 3, Valhalla Supermassive, 84hp modular synthesizer, Mutable Clouds, Error Instrument, Bizarre Jezabel, Teenage Engineering EP 1320 Medieval, OP-Z, Arturia Microfreak
  • Artificial intelligence: Mubert, Aitubo
  • Link: soundcloud.com/notsointelligent/
not so intelligent · Fogbound Harmonies - oh deer

CComposed to be played at the edge of San Francisco Bay, Fogbound Harmonies is an immersive piece at the crossroads of ambient, witch house, hyperpop, and experimental techno. Lausanne-based musician Basile Brun (a.k.a. Oh Deer) blends AI-generated textures with electronic and modular instruments.

The first sonic layers were created from the prompt “fog in a sonic form.” Following a misunderstanding with Aitubo, melancholic voices were generated and integrated into the composition.

Drifting music, tinged with distant echoes in the fog.

♫ Lights fade deep blue sea ♫ Dreams glow lost in me ♫ Bells ring waves crash free ♫ Silent tears flow gently ♫
♫ Bass thump heartbeats slow ♫ Gamelan echoes below ♫ SFX whispers low ♫ Shadows dance in the flow ♫
♫ Underwater dreams ♫ Lost in techno beams ♫ Hyperpop extremes ♫ IDM schemes ♫

not so intelligent · Arrival - RestoGastro

Arrival is an immersive sound piece evoking a ship’s entry into the port of San Francisco at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This auditory fresco, both dark and calm, unfolds within a fog-laden atmosphere, where each sound seems to emerge from the depths of the nascent industrial city.

Sound samples generated by the AI systems Suno and Mubert served as a starting point. Reworked through a modular synthesizer, then enriched with layers of percussion and synthetic pads, these sounds form a unique texture, blending mechanism and organicity.

A Hérens cow named Aera2025 begins to speak. With a synthetic voice, it delivers a sensitive account of a vanished world, suspended between animal memory and human ruin.

In this poetic and dystopian video, the disappearance of humans, solitude, the memory of the herd, and the transformation of interspecies bonds unfold through a fragmented, intimate, and sensory narration. Half animal, half machine, Aé’s voice becomes a collective memory: a trace of a submerged past, an echo of a possible future.

A post-apocalyptic reverie — an organic and technological testimony.

Inspired by a newspaper article about an ant invasion in Kenya, this project explores distinctive narrative traits of artificial intelligence: the linking of historical and fictional elements, the creation of composite characters blending real and imagined profiles, and the generation of ambiguous images that blur the boundary between archive and invention.

The participants imagined a series set in 1930, following the arrival of Pheidole megacephala, an invasive species that decimates local Crematogaster ants—essential to the balance of the savanna.

As the food chain begins to unravel, an international team installs a mobile laboratory in a train car. Their last resort: to release a biological agent along the railway to stop the invasion — at the cost of consequences revealed decades later. A work of speculative anticipation, in which old images become the soil from which a generated ecological fiction takes root.

Does the algorithm know us better than we know ourselves? What becomes of our relationship to the world when access to information is permanent and unlimited, and when artificial intelligence answers all our questions instantly, without hesitation? What remains, then, of the unknown? What new desires emerge in the face of such omniscience? And what do we do with the time it frees up?

In The Free Man – with AI, a character, ƒ, is in constant dialogue with his algorithmic assistant. His questions reveal his doubts, his fears, his fantasies. Yet far from becoming mechanized, ƒ paradoxically asserts his human singularity through the very interface that governs him. A portrait of our growing technological dependence, in which the human increasingly aligns with the algorithm — his mirror.
  • Everyone Left Tower 499
  • Margot Herbelin
  • 2024
  • Video game
  • Master Media Design
  • Tools: Unity, Polycam, TopMediAi, Procreate

Why did everyone leave Tower 499? That’s an excellent question. You see, the fauna of these environments is truly remarkable. Imagine yourself, embodied as a larva, witnessing the miracle of life unfolding before your eyes. It is a story of survival, adaptation, and endless wonder, revealed day after day in the hidden corners of our world. To build this universe, Margot Herbelin combined multiple analog and digital techniques: photogrammetry, a game engine, frame-by-frame animation, foley, digital drawing, speech synthesis, … This hybrid approach gives rise to a world that is sensitive and slightly off-kilter, poised between playful simulation and the rather classic format of the wildlife documentary.

Can we replay the history of cinema like a video game? As one progresses through the famous game Inside by Playdead, a modified PlayStation reveals, in real time, visual and conceptual correspondences between the game’s images and the history of science-fiction cinema. With each gesture, an edit assembles itself, weaving a dialogue between body, machine, narrative, and play. The installation places cinema and video game side by side to bring forth a shared paranoid vision: that of a body hunted, substituted, instrumentalized — and the way each medium, in its own fashion, dreams of the prosthetic powers of the image. Long live the new flesh.

Inside, Playdead (2016) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) The Abyss (1989) Alien (1979) Altered States (1980) Artaud, Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu (1947) Atari Mindlink (1984) Baxter (1989) Blade Runner (1982) Brainstorm (1983) The Blob (1958) Brazil (1984) Caspar David Friedrich, Der Chasseur im Walde (1814) & Frühschnee (1827) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Coma (1978) Dark Star (1974) Dark Water (2002) Dawn of the Dead (1979) ET (1982) Frankenstein (1931) Françoise Bonardel, L’anti-œdipe ou le corps sans organes (2014) Futureworld (1976) Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood (2001) Hard Hat Mack (1983) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Ivan’s Childhood (1962) Jaws (1975) Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) The Matrix (1999) Metropolis (1927) Pikmin r (1967) Ringu (1998) Scanners (1981) Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country (2005) Shivers (1975) Super Mario Bros (1985) They Live (1988) The Thing (1982) Thriller (1982) Titanic (1997) Towards a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts (2010) The Tripods (1984) Westworld (1973) White Dog (1982) Zabriskie Point (1970) eXistenZ (1999)

Commissioned by Anthony Masure as part of his essay Design sous artifice, the project Davinci’s Insights explores relationships between graphic design and artificial intelligence through a series of five posters and a short film. In this experiment, Élise Gay and Kevin Donnot enter into a dialogue with the Davinci AI model. Together, they question the representations and projections that an algorithmic system can produce when asked to reflect on its own function. Each concept gives rise to a manifesto-object, generated in 3D via the CLIP-Mesh model: a Rubik’s Cube, a robot, a set of gears, a brain, and a book fitted with a processor.

Chamonix-Sentinelles is a tabletop role-playing game about the future of mountain regions. It offers a space to discuss alpine ways of life emerging in response to the multiple challenges of the climate crisis, and to suggest potential futures based on a set of textual and visual elements presented in the manual.

This material is enriched by iconography created through generative AI from archival images or photographs taken during the project. These images are used throughout the manual, as well as in a second book: a field notebook kept by an explorer of the region between 2068 and 2086.

  • Ada
  • Margot Herbelin
  • 2023
  • Graphic novel
  • Media Design, Illustration, Visual Communication
  • Workshop Co-creation with artificial intelligence
  • Under the direction of Étienne Mineur
  • Artificial intelligence: Midjourney, Dall-E, GPT-3, Disco Diffusion

In the post-apocalyptic graphic novel Ada, a solitary character rummages through the debris of obsolete technologies and encounters a speaking artificial entity. The story and illustrations were written in a collaborative back-and-forth between the AI and the illustrator Margot Herbelin. This included conversations with a chatbot, portions of which were directly copied and pasted into the dialogues. Each illustration is a hybrid mixture of strokes drawn by the artist and by the machine.

  • Faust: An opera for chimeras
  • Léonie Courbat
  • 2023
  • Libretto
  • Media Design, Illustration, Visual Communication
  • Workshop Co-creation with artificial intelligence
  • Under the direction of Étienne Mineur
  • Artificial intelligence: Midjourney, Dall-E, GPT-3, Disco Diffusion

In her costume book for an opera of curious creatures re-inhabiting the opera Faust, Léonie Courbat used Midjourney to rethink the various stages of her typical workflow as an illustrator. From these references, she then drew her own sketches, which she fed into the machine—receiving a new set of generated images that she could integrate into her final casting process. The final drawings shaped these creatures into the finished outcome, which she transformed into a riso-printed publication.

As part of a series of workshops led with Étienne Mineur, designers at HEAD experimented with co-creation strategies in which artificial intelligence becomes one collaborator among others. These video interviews revisit those hybrid experiments. Léonie Courbat, Margot Herbelin, and Étienne Mineur share their creative processes, critical uses of generative AI, and the productive tensions between human imagination and algorithmic particularities.

  • Bloom
  • Margarida Correia, Karol Szmigielski, Wenyan Xu
  • 2025
  • Speculative project
  • Visual Communication
  • Workshop Tending the Digital Compost
  • Under the direction of Crosslucid
  • Artificial intelligence: Alias

In this workshop, artificial intelligence is approached as a living compost — an unstable soil where ideas decompose, mutate, and regenerate. The participants immersed themselves in the metabolic processes of machine cognition, experimenting with its flows, its slowness, and its unexpected surges.

Images, texts, and fragments were combined, diverted, remixed — in a shared gesture of sensuous making. This collective work brought forth an ambiguous artifact: at the boundary between the organic and the synthetic, shifting traces of a dialogue between humanity, machine, and fiction.

This project received research funding from HES-SO. Since the appearance of tools such as DALL·E, Midjourney, or ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligences have been upending the fields of design and artistic creation. These machine-learning technologies are not mere instruments: they redefine the gestures, roles, and intentions of creators.

This public-domain manual—designed collaboratively and tested in pedagogical contexts—offers a series of concrete exercises to support the teaching of these tools in art schools. It provides teachers and students with critical and practical reference points for exploring AI not as black boxes to endure, but as protocols to understand, détourne, and reinvent. Conceived to be shared, expanded, and transformed, this guide is an invitation to collectively appropriate the stakes of the digital, and to build creative practices that are attentive, situated, and emancipatory.

Playing at Being Human is a video-philosophical exploration that reactivates the thought of Helmuth Plessner, a founding figure of philosophical anthropology. Through his lens, the human rediscovers itself as a living being—organic, traversed by the world’s flows as much as it takes part in them. But here, it is not only a matter of revisiting a work: it is a matter of activating it, making it resonate in the present.

In the face of the crisis of anthropocentrism, this approach proposes a radical shift: rethinking the place of the human by weaving new links with what eludes it — whether animal, vegetal, or algorithmic. The project thus becomes an experimental ground where thought is not only stated: it is played, embodied, and put into images.

In a symbiotic dialogue between two artists and a philosopher, concepts and forms respond to one another, challenge one another, and extend one another. From this close collaboration emerge new, sensitive, sometimes disconcerting hypotheses — so many attempts to think and feel otherwise. How far would you be willing to play to reconfigure what it means to “be human” in the era of the non-human?

In this critical essay, Anthony Masure explores the metamorphoses of design in the age of artificial intelligence. The text is structured in three parts. The first, “Context,” situates generative AI within the history of computing and cybernetics, showing how these technologies emerge from a behaviorist view of the human psyche. The second chapter, “Political implications,” examines the ethical, political, and ecological stakes amplified by—or opened up through—generative AI. The final part, “Creative potentialities,” draws on interviews with creative studios that approach design as a critical lever, capable of deconstructing dominant fictions and opening paths toward emancipation.

Created as part of the research project Design and machine learning: automation in power?, this experimental website extends reflections on the transformations of graphic design in the age of artificial intelligence. It includes 15 interviews conducted by Alexia Mathieu with artists and studios pioneering the use of machine learning in design: Boyd Rotgans, Cristobal Valenzuela, Deniz Kurt, Feileacan McCormick, Kévin Donnot, Marta Revuelta, Martin Tricaud, Meredith Thomas, Nadia Piet, Nicolas Barradeau, Rifke Sadleir, Simone Rebaudengo, Superposition Studio, Étienne Mineur.

The site also extends Anthony Masure’s essay Artificial Design, mobilizing two AI systems: Davinci-003 for automated text generation, and DALL·E for image production from keywords extracted from the corpora.