Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, and Ecologies
The 2026 Special focus, Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, and Ecologies, explores the dynamic interfaces between nature, technology, and creative practices—all with a keen eye on how art practices can catalyze meaningful social change. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have challenged long-held notions of human agency and creative authorship, intensifying the urgency to grapple with the ever-evolving interplay of living systems and computational processes.
Aristotle writes, "Art takes nature as its model." Artificial intelligence is “modeling” its “Art” on the world’s creativity, training a powerful new “general intelligence.” By investigating the role of data—environmental, social, and personal—as both a raw material for artistic exploration and a source code for world-building, we invite discussions on the aesthetics of data, coding as a contemporary craft, and the philosophical implications of creating art at the cusp of ecological crisis and digital innovation. Central to our dialogue is how socially engaged art practitioners expand or redefine relationships to the natural and digital worlds, foregrounding issues of environmental justice, ethical artificial intelligence, algorithmic bias, labor-market disruption, automated labor, inclusive collaboration, and the culture of immediacy.
Through an interdisciplinary lens, researchers, artists, technologists, and community organizers are called to examine questions of environmental urgency, creative experimentation, and equitable frameworks for technological engagement. We seek to nurture dialogue on how ecological patterns inspire digital frameworks such as natural system-inspired algorithms—and, conversely, how computational advances influence our ecosystems from water and energy over-consumption to creating unprecedented images of ecosystems and predictions of weather events.
This conference provides a platform for envisioning collaborative, resilient futures—where socially engaged art practices foster community co-creation, reimagining public spaces, and mapping and modeling policies toward sustainability and shared well-being. We aim to reframe how emergent art, and technology can guide us toward more profound engagement with ecological systems and novel modes of social transformation—before it’s too late.