Here are the selected participants for our first artistic and research residency season.
After evaluating innovative proposals across our key fields—Art, Cognition and Consciousness, and Payments and Games—we've chosen visionary projects that promise to challenge conventions, push the limits of human-machine collaboration, and truly expand our minds.
Meet the groundbreaking ideas and brilliant minds that will shape our exploration of artificially altered realities and open new pathways along the latent-space frontier.
Trippin’ Transformers: Inducing Artificially Altered States of Mind in Large Language Models
It is well known that AI hallucinates, but do machines trip? This current project aims to artificially induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC)—such as those triggered by psychedelics like LSD—within Large Language Models (LLMs). By systematically prompting and fine-tuning the model with psychedelic-oriented data (i.e., ASC scientific questionnaires and Reddit trip report community), I aim to create a measurable shift in its internal processes and encoding capabilities (e.g., embedding representations). To confirm the presence and extent of this induced “psychedelic” state, I will rely on the entropic brain hypothesis, which is the leading hypothesis for ASC, stating that increased entropy, which represents the level of unpredictability of the system, in neural activity might be a biomarker of alterations in consciousness. To further the investigation, this work will compare the LLM with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain under LSD and placebo (already analyzed and freely available). Past research focused on investigating artificially altered states in artificial intelligence, but no work until this moment connected it to the entropic brain hypothesis.
Rodrigo da Mota Abreu
Mycelial Orchestra: A Bio-Digital Work Guided by AI
Mycelial Orchestra is an interactive art installation that merges fungi (mycelium) with generative AI algorithms to create real-time visual and soundscapes. However, its most distinctive feature is that the creator of the project does not know how to execute it. She sets out to learn everything—from fungal cultivation to AI programming—relying almost entirely on the instructions provided by artificial intelligence itself.
Mycelial Orchestra questions the role of technology as a mentor and the limits of remote instruction (AI providing knowledge) in the creation of a complex artistic work. In the end, the result may reflect both the beauty of an organic-digital orchestra and the vulnerability and resilience of the human learning process, entirely mediated by artificial intelligence. Could this be a path to overcoming our limitations? Or a reminder that co-creation with machines is, in itself, a new philosophical and artistic challenge? I hope this approach brings the essential brainfuck—blending bio-art, artificial intelligence, and the idea that humanity’s greatest uncertainty may also be our best bridge to the new.
Bruna Mattos Moraes Guimarães dos Santos
Creativity In Vitro: An Interface for Imagination and the Petri Dish Artist
If a thought has never been verbalized, does it exist? And what if it could be materialized without passing through language?
Have you ever tried to recall the scent of a place you haven’t visited in years? Or heard an entire song play inside your head without the need for headphones? Our minds project entire worlds that never leave us. But what if they could? What if thoughts took shape without the need for hands, screens, or paint? What if imagination were a code that could be read and translated directly into visible matter? This is the challenge that fascinates me: transforming what happens inside my mind into something that can be experienced outside of it. To achieve this, I collaborate with the restless mind of scientist Eduardo Padilha, who helps me shape this experiment within the realm of possibility.
This project proposes the creation of an AI model capable of translating thoughts into images by reading brain waves. In a second phase, we explore the possibility of lab-grown neurons generating art autonomously, bringing forth reflections on creativity, consciousness, and the intersection between the human mind and biological systems.
