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". 

L.I.F.E. – Living Intelligence Lab is an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to artistic inquiry at the intersections of art, science, technology, and society. The laboratory approaches artistic practice as a rigorous mode of knowledge production that integrates experimental research, interdisciplinary methodologies, and dialogue across diverse fields of expertise. Its investigations encompass the broad field of multimedia arts, including, but not limited to, expanded animation, bioart, interactive art, performative data visualization, digital humanities, computational media, artificial intelligence, digital fabrication, and emerging technologies as interconnected modes of artistic research.

Intelligence is understood as a continuous field of emergence that unfolds through perception, adaptation, communication, transformation, and co-evolution across entangled living and artificial systems. Art functions as an active experimental field in which material, informational, affective, energetic, and computational processes interact into generative forms of knowledge, awareness, and consciousness. 

Responding to the profound transformations introduced by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, information science, advanced sensing technologies, and digital fabrication, L.I.F.E. cultivates meaningful dialogue among the arts, natural sciences, humanities, engineering, and design. Rejecting anthropocentric conceptions of intelligence and consciousness, the laboratory investigates how artistic practices can reveal, mediate, and critically engage with distributed phenomena that emerge through cross-scale relations in complex adaptive systems.

L.I.F.E. welcomes research and creative practices that envision transcendent scenarios as adaptive responses to contemporary global challenges, including ecological transformation, biodiversity loss, climate change, artificial intelligence, frontier technologies, misinformation, social polarization, public health, environmental justice, digital infrastructures, and the evolving relationships between biochemical and computational systems.

Brazilian Directory of Research Groups (DGP) – Lattes Platform: http://dgp.cnpq.br/dgp/espelhogrupo/833270

Research Lines:

CAFFS (Complex Affective Systems), a conceptual framework introduced and conceptualized by Clarissa Ribeiro, defines an interdisciplinary framework that explores how sensory and extrasensory inputs and outputs—from local and non-local quantum dynamics—interact within cross-scale planetary and cosmic ecosystems, involving networked environments in natural biochemical and artificial computational CAS (Complex Adaptive Systems), as well as within their convergences, superpositions, and entanglements. Drawing upon the concept of affect as the capacity to affect and be affected, the research line examines how interactions across local and non-local scales generate emergent transformations, adaptive behaviors, morphogenesis, awareness, and consciousness. The research line embraces dialogues between art, science, and technology in fields including, but not limited to, neuroscience, quantum biology, quantum physics, parapsychology, psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, chemistry and biochemistry, alchemy, genetic and molecular engineering, computational biology, and artificial intelligence. It also incorporates the concept of Molmedia, introduced and conceptualized by Clarissa Ribeiro, as a metaphorical reference to the scientific concept of the mole. Here, mol denotes not exclusively the quantitative amount of substance, but the informational exchange processes—understanding substances themselves as messages—occurring at the level of elementary entities such as atomic, subatomic, and molecular structures within a given system, whether living, artificial, or any possible hybridization thereof. We understand media (the plural of medium) as the intervening agencies, means, or instruments through which these informational exchanges occur. Within a self-organizing structure, these ongoing informational processes give rise, through emergence, to the self and to behavioral patterns that can be transformed, translated, transmuted, transferred, incarnated, and cannibalized.

Ecology-as-Cosmology: This research line investigates artistic processes and systems that experimentally explore the intersections of philosophy, human history, anthropology, sociology, ethnology, ecology, cultural studies, art history, digital humanities, and critical studies. It examines how artistic research can reframe and question established forms of oppression rooted in crystallized political, cultural, ethical, philosophical, and ideological worldviews. The line is particularly concerned with systems that restrict freedom of expression, bodily autonomy, and ecological relations; perpetuate gender inequality, gender-based violence, racial discrimination, and the marginalization of neurodivergent individuals; and contribute to the exploitation, contamination, displacement, destruction, or erasure of communities, cultures, plants, animals, and ecosystems. It also investigates mechanisms of censorship, the prohibition of themes and forms of expression, environmental destruction through contamination, burning, extraction, and fragmentation, and the suppression of cultural and biochemical diversity. Through artistic inquiry, the research line seeks to cultivate ecological awareness and cosmological perspectives that foster more equitable, plural, and interconnected ways of inhabiting the world.