Team
Hugo Paquete (INET-md, Principal Investigator)
Period
2026 to 2029
Institutions involved (in collaboration or partnership)
Universidade de Aveiro
INET-md
Absonus Lab
Planetário do Porto – CCV
Others to be announced.
Funding
FCT (2024.09158.CEECIND)
Abstract
AI as Catalyst repositions Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a creative co-agent, rejecting its reduction to a mere tool. The project reveals the technological unconscious, hidden systems and infrastructures that shape contemporary experience.
From a perspective of techno-animism, AI is understood as a non-human agent with which co-creation is possible. This collaboration gives rise to three fundamental modes: algorithmic listening (listening distributed across humans, systems, and data), meta-listening (critical decoding and surveillance over invisible flows), and meta-production (creation emerging from the interaction between creator, algorithms, and informational flows).
The central concept is the AI‑Chimera: a hybrid entity challenging authorship, control, and intentionality, materialising in composition and performance. In Hyperobject Soundscapes, AI is understood as a hyperobject, an entity that transcends immediate human perception. AI Remix Collective explores collaborative musician‑AI performance. Glitch Ecology creates audiovisual landscapes from ecological data.
Tool-building is central to the project. A key artefact is the Cyberattack Sonifier, a prototype tool that converts cybersecurity events (intrusions, network scans, anomalous traffic) into rhythmic structures and sonic textures through AI intervention. The project introduces four compositional shifts: new sonic raw materials (real-time data streams), reconfiguration of the compositional gesture (prompting), distributed authorship, and unpredictability as method.
Ethical and critical dimension: the project addresses algorithmic opacity, bias, and surveillance in AI, positioning art as a space of resistance and cultural speculation in a world saturated with invisible technologies.
Keywords
AI‑Chimera; Algorithmic sabotage; Algorithmic listening,; Meta-production; Hyperobject; Techno-animism; Generative music; Technological unconscious.