• Join a role-playing game as an employee at The Ministry of AI Spills, and be part of a world where disability saves society 
• Step into the habitat of AI enabled artificial tortoises
• Honour ancestral knowledge to share and grow decolonial community apothecaries using a radically small AI robot powered by the sun
• Play a musical instrument in a failure free performance environment
• Leave your stresses behind and connect with others in a playful forest experience 
• Be transported to the year 2084 in a sci-fi future where AI has entwined with slime mold

I love knowing that the practices of mimicking the natural world have been happening since humans came into existence. This is actually an ancient practice, a recovery rather than a discovery.” (adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)

What if, instead of being the thing that separates us from the world, and ultimately supplants us, artificial intelligence is another flowering, wholly its own invention, but one which, shepherded by us, leads us to a greater accommodation with the world?” (James Bridle, Ways of Being)

September 2024, Bristol: Watershed and MyWorld are delighted to unveil six new prototypes for More than AI Sandbox, which are the result of the programme which awarded six teams £45k to experiment creatively with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The prototypes will be presented at a public sharing at Watershed in Bristol on 20 September 2024, where visitors are invited to meet the teams and play with their creations.   

In the creative and cultural sectors AI has already had a significant impact on everything from writing, visual arts and music to filmmaking, games and performance.  Through More than AI Sandbox the six teams have turned their experimental ideas into creative prototypes that utilise the potential of AI and the diverse intelligences in our world for new forms of expression and accessibility, exploring how we might learn from and collaborate with them, whilst grappling with the complexities of what this intelligence is and how we might use it.

Jo Landsdowne, Executive Producer at Pervasive Media Studio says, 

“Artificial intelligence is becoming ever more part of our daily lives (whether we notice it or not). So, now is the time to ask how we want it to be used, to what ends, and who do we think should be leading that work? When I look at this brilliant group of projects and people I think - YES! These are the kinds of experiments that excite me about the future.”

The six More Than AI prototypes are: 

A (re)imitation of life

CREATORS: Domenica Landin & Playfool (Daniel Coppen & Saki Maruyama)

What can a tortoise teach us about AI? What if AI models could learn from non-human minds?

The evolution of AI has significantly impacted our world with Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT already reshaping human life and less visibly non-human life primarily through the resource intensive processes involved. Inspired by the work of cyberneticist William Grey Walter, who in the 1940s created robotic tortoises sparking early debate about non-human artificial minds, this project explores how AI could become more ecologically relevant. By placing AI (in the form of LLM) into the bodies of artificial tortoises along with multiple sensors, A (re)imitation of Life encourages the creatures to adopt a non-human perspective of the world, and so foster a deeper ecological attunement in the technologies we develop.  

The Conductor 

CREATORS: Created by pyka (Miles Warren, Gary-Martin Morgan, Leigh Davies & Greg Ryan) 

How can AI enable those who can’t play a musical instrument gain access to musical experience? pyka invites you  to become performers with The Expression Orchestra, an existing suite of alternative, easy to use digital musical instruments designed to broaden access to musical performance for everyone. Their AI powered Conductor will sit at the centre of the experience, able to interpret the interactions between performer and instrument creating a failure-free performance environment showing the potential of Machine Intelligence to enhance creative expression by honouring performer intentions that would previously have gone unheard.

apothecary network

CREATORS: The Upsetters (Marcus Berdaut, Zoe Palmer, Javie Huxley, Zaina Nesayem, Valerie Oyiki)

The apothecary network uses creative technology to share and grow decolonial community apothecaries.  Their prototype is a low-tech webapp  built on a radically small AI robot powered by the sun, designed to be a meeting place between people and plants based on knowledge researched by Zoe Palmer, herbalist and afrofuturist apothecary. The Upsetters centre collective care and joyful connection with nature honouring ancestral knowledge and intuitive practices. All are welcome to be guests in this space created for and by Black, Brown, racialised and diaspora communities.

Glory Mold: 2084

CREATORS: Produced Moon & Studio Areté

In an abandoned server farm in 2084, the light of one last server continues to blink. Wrapped around it are the tendrils of an intelligent slime…enter the world of Glory Mold: 2084, an immersive installation and interactive experience in a speculative sci-fi future where AI development has been entwined with the organic world. Inspired by slime molds – incredible problem solving unicellular organisms that can learn, move and grow with no centralised nervous system, live for centuries and are deeply sensitive and responsive to their environment. The project extends to workshops inviting organisations and individuals to interrogate the world of Glory Mold as a tool to reflect on their own work and strategize for a more equitable future. 

CripShip* 

CREATORS:  Poetic Computation ( Joseph Wilk), Jon Somerscale & Cathy Mager 

Disability saves society from big tech! CripShip is a roleplaying game where disability saves society from big tech, where play teaches resisting and breaking AI in the real world. Players take on the role of employees of the Ministry of AI Spills, an underfunded government agency investigating cases of AI Foundation Models spilling slop into the world and the companies that are responsible. Players investigate cases, interrogate Foundation Models & discover clues about their suitability.  

X-files meets Hackers with a bureaucratic twist. 

*Crip is a term that we, along with some of our community, have reclaimed through disability scholarship, culture and activism. You can read about Crip reclamation here: https://nowthenmagazine.com/articles/crip-a-story-of-reclamation 

Kinship Wayfinder 

CREATORS: Surfing Light Beams  (Harmeet Chagger-Khan),  Beta-Jester (Adam Clewes-Boyne), Raucous (Sharon Clarke) & Helen Brown

Kinship Wayfinder is an invitation to play together, share stories, create social connections and leave your stresses behind using the collective intelligence of nature and AI. Armed with just a knapsack containing aromatics and sustenance and a tablet as your wayfinder, teams of three people are invited to enter a playful, forest experience where they explore and connect with the trees and each other to discover the fate of a group of dendrologists (tree scientists), who mysteriously vanished 30 years ago whilst on the hunt for the fabled Methuselah, the planet’s oldest tree whose rings hold critical information about the future of the earth's climate. 

Emma Boulton, More Than AI Sandbox producer, Watershed says “

Sandbox is back and this year we have six fantastic projects experimenting with artificial intelligence. AI is everywhere, however, its development can be a mystery to us. Sandbox felt like the space to not only explore AI creatively but better understand the wider impact of it. I am excited to see teams scratch beneath the surface of AI so that we might reflect and redefine relationships to and with it."

The showcase is part of Watershed’s Other Minds season which runs throughout September to explore different kinds of intelligence - animal, mechanical and collective - through a series of events, screenings and talks.  

More Than AI Sandbox is part of the MyWorld IDEAS programme, supporting small companies with high-risk ideas through community building, research and development and audience engagement locally and internationally.

---