L.I.F.E.

*The photo shows a strong form of quantum entanglement. Paul-Antoine Moreau, of the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy, said the image was "an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature". 

The L.I.F.E. Living Intelligence Lab investigates artistic research at the intersections of art, science, technology, and society, approaching artistic practice as a mode of knowledge production that brings together experimental processes, interdisciplinary methodologies, and dialogues across diverse fields of inquiry. The lab explores how contemporary artistic practices can contribute to understanding, experimenting with, and making perceptible the emerging relationships among biochemical processes, computational systems, ecological dynamics, and cultural practices.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, information science, and digital technologies are profoundly transforming artistic creation, knowledge production, and the interactions among biochemical, computational, ecological, and cultural systems. Yet these transformations are often examined within disciplinary boundaries, limiting meaningful dialogue among the arts, natural sciences, humanities, and engineering.

In response, the lab explores Living Intelligence as an emerging interdisciplinary research paradigm that understands intelligence not as a property of biological organisms or artificial systems alone, but as a distributed, relational, and evolving phenomenon arising through dynamic interactions among biochemical, computational, ecological, technological, social, and cultural processes. Rather than reducing intelligence to cognition or algorithmic computation, the lab investigates the conditions through which diverse forms of intelligence emerge, transform, and co-evolve across complex systems.

By integrating artistic creation, scientific inquiry, and technological experimentation, the L.I.F.E. Living Intelligence Lab develops new conceptual, methodological, and aesthetic approaches that position artistic research as both an epistemic practice and an experimental platform for generating knowledge, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and addressing the ecological, technological, and societal challenges of the twenty-first century.

http://dgp.cnpq.br/dgp/espelhogrupo/833270

L.I.F.E. — Living Intelligence International Festival

From a panpsychic and holistic perspective, L.I.F.E. unfolds as an inquiry into intelligence as a vibrational continuum—one that traverses atoms, bodies, ecologies, and planetary systems. Intelligence here is not localized in cognition nor confined to biological organisms but emerges as a field condition, a distributed resonance across matter, energy, and intricate relations.

In dialogue with the behaviorist perspectives, art is approached as an operative system, an activated milieu in which interactions do not represent reality but participate in its becoming. At a quantum-inflected scale, this suggests that artistic processes can be understood as subtle modulations within entangled fields, as micro-events of vibration that reverberate across perceptual and material domains.

Such a framework invites us to consider morphogenesis as a continuous negotiation between forces—informational, affective, and energetic—unfolding across enmeshed and confluent scales. Intentions dissolve and ferment into dynamic ecologies of relations, where outcomes are less produced than emerge through situated interactions.

L.I.F.E. expands beyond the anthropocentric frame of intelligence, acknowledging that what we call “understanding” cannot be fully grasped by a single mind, nor even by the aggregated cognition of one species. Instead, it becomes accessible only through a plurality of existences, each inhabiting distinct yet entangled perspectives. 

Within this horizon, the festival invites submissions as proposals, artworks, performances, and workshops accompanied by short (1-2 pages) manifestos envisaging transcendent scenarios as adaptive solutions considering global risk that shall include, but are not restricted to, the following: 

Geoeconomic confrontation

State-based armed conflict

 Extreme weather events

Societal polarization

Misinformation and disinformation

Economic downturn

Erosion of human rights and/or of civic freedoms

Adverse outcomes of AI technologie

Cyber insecurity 

Inequality 

Lack of economic opportunity or unemployment

Concentration of strategic resources and technologies

Critical change to Earth systems 

Natural resource shortages 

Disruptions to critical infrastructure

Asset bubble burst 

Debt Disruptions to a systemically important supply chain 

Decline in health and well-being Involuntary migration or displacement

Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse

Biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards

Inflation

Pollution

Insufficient public infrastructure and social protections

Infectious diseases

Non-weather related natural disasters

Censorship and surveillance

Crime and illicit economic activity

Adverse outcomes of frontier technologies

Intrastate violence

Online harms

Source: https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2026.pdf

Transcendent scenarios serve as powerful, forward-looking frameworks that enable adaptive solutions by encouraging us to look beyond incremental changes and envision fundamentally different futures. These scenarios act as visionary decision-making navigational tools, sophisticatedly envisaging opportunities to test strategies against high-end, disruptive, or transformative possibilities beyond biased data-oriented framings.

L.I.F.E., in this sense, is not an event to be consumed but a field to be inhabited—a proposition that intelligence is always already plural, relational, and in excess of capture. It is through this excess—this irreducible complexity—that new modes of sensing, knowing, and becoming may begin to surface.

tracks:

1. Entropycene and the living beyond humans   Estelle Flores