ReWilding AI represents the culmination of research projects exploring the radical mattering of narrative ecologies via immersive and distributed intelligence. Presented by Radical Matter proto-Centre, RCA School of Arts & Humanities and Digital Direction, School of Communication. Funded by AidLab, the first research platform that focuses on the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with design. AidLab was jointly established by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and the RCA, and is funded by the HKSAR Government under the InnoHK Research Clusters. Day 01 - Polymorph Friday 21 March 2025 , 10am-5pm On Day 1 of ReWilding AI, we invite you to experience a sensuous playful world of light, vibration, creatures and multi modal ‘time shelters’ inspired by the psychedelic skin transformations and emergent camouflaged topologies of cephalopods. We call its most recent iteration: Polymorph. Here you will walk amongst a complex adaptive generative system that integrates continuously retrained AI models via sensors, camera inputs, and diverse data streams. The experimental architecture in Polymorph II explores this emergent and distributed synthetic operation by translating incompossible sensorial domains—such as sound to image or electric signals to movement—generating unpredictable outcomes through this dynamic circulation. Polymorph evolves through continuous interaction with its environment, continuously retraining itself in response to air currents, body movements, and electromagnetic fluctuations, all of which are reflected in its outputs. Its emergent outcomes are both ‘undecidable’ and ‘unique’ - a wild encounter integrating processes and outcomes arising from the system's fluctuations and dynamics. Here unique operational patterns that depart from the conventional reliance on randomness for novelty in generative AI systems become the hallmark of its assets. Day 02 - Weather Spores Friday 28 March 2025, 10am-5pm On Day 2 of ReWilding AI, we invite you into the wondrous world of Weather Spores. Via our AI Toolkit and game board, here you will travel through a multi-dimensional maze of five immersive portals, shapeshifting across knowledge systems and new materials, encountering AI through the throw of a dice. Portal 1: Forest – where you will go on an augmented wander through dense 1000-year-old forests, experiencing the symbiotic interspecies intelligence of funghi, birds and the entangled visual, sonic and sensuous relationships that exist between the geosphere, atmosphere and electronic Noosphere; Portal 2: Ana-Cartographies – where you can navigate across expanded geographies of urban AI data systems, underground cables and complex arrays of energy-hungry cooling systems built along the route of the former British colonial all red-line. Or fall through to Portal 3: Extractivism (Capital pAIns) – where present-tense archaeologies of the supply chains that deliver AI – from mineral extraction, nanoscale manufacturing and e-waste, through algorithm design, data harvesting and cleaning by ghost-workers, to deployment and resistance in society can be witnessed and shared. Here we encounter a performative exploration of AI’s hidden planetary and human costs, bringing environmental sustainability into AI design futures. Portal 4: Unknowing/Asemic (or How meaning gets made) – here you will play with carbon and blow straws and ‘sticky encounters’ via the strange and wild worlds of ‘emergence’ and ‘indeterminacy’ to create art-driven algorithms to re-think the very nature of ‘generative’ AI as experimental, emergent materialities that literally ‘make’ or ‘create’ sense. Or step sideways to Portal 5’s Open Deck, where the very fundamentals of linear and non-linear thinking and creating triangulate with the political, the cultural and ethical to encourage different forms of individual and collective agency. Weather Spores will lead you into the stunning and paradoxical ecologies of AI, through new logics for AI storytelling grounded in indeterminacy, emergence and entanglement, querying the temporalities and geo-politics of AI, and rethinking immersive generative AI from the ground up and for the common good. Presented by RCA’s Radical Matter Research proto-Centre and Digital Direction Principal Research Leads: Johnny Golding and Tom Simmons Senior / Postdoctoral / Technical Research Associates: Samuele Albani, Sonia Bernac, Jonathan Boyd, Jeremy Keenan, Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, Maggie Roberts, Rian Stephens, Shira Wachsmann, John Wild and Tao Xie