Cohort of AI Ecologies Lab Projects
The lab introduces a diverse cohort of artists, technologists, and researchers from across Canada. The selection process prioritized projects that explore sustainable and ethical alternatives for digital creation, spanning a variety of mediums—including lichen bioindicators, XR, energy monitoring, and chatbots. Common themes explored include AI transparency, decentralized computation, bio-inspired sensing, and sustainable digital practices, each offering a glimpse into a future where AI serves both artistic and ecological well-being.
In collaboration with leading institutions—including the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, the Abundant Intelligences Program, and the Applied AI Institute—participants co-develop tools and methodologies that investigate a more sustainable future for digital arts.
Chat-BRB
Team members: Femke Kocken, Ivonna Bossert, Connor Cook, and Sura Hanna
Location: Montréal, Québec
Chat-BRB is set in a world where AI’s ecological toll remains largely invisible. This project will make its impact tangible by designing chatbot interfaces that reflect real-time energy strain. Chat-BRB hopes to disrupt the illusion of endless availability and encourage more conscientious use. Through visual, interactive and sonic cues, Chat-BRB will challenge users to rethink their reliance on AI. If digital tools can shape habits of convenience, they can also cultivate habits of restraint - an urgent necessity in an era of escalating environmental costs.
Lichen as Biosensor
Team members: Kelly Andres, Matthew Waddell and Brennan Andres
Website: https://kellyandres.xyz/
Location: Ferintosh, Alberta
Lichenlines: Symbiotic Semiotics is the research & creation of an immersive audiovisual performance that transforms lichen growth into a speculative alphabet of ecological change. Using time-lapse imaging, environmental sensors, and AI modeling, the project reveals the slow, silent narratives expressed by these symbiotic organisms. Lichen act as bioindicators—sensitive to air quality, climate, and pollution—tracing living scripts of resilience, adaptation, and warning. Through interactive biosemiotic storytelling and climate forecasting, Lichenlines invites audiences to perceive nature as a communicative system. What if we could read the past, present and future on the surface of a stone?
LoRes Moss Sky, Nightly Build
Team members: Eyez Li and Xijian Lou
Website: https://www.eyezdomain.com/
Location: Montréal, Québec
LoRes Moss Sky, Nightly Build reimagines AI as a decentralized ecosystem, transforming low-end devices into nodes for collaborative creation. Replace energy-intensive cloud systems with peer-to-peer networks where users co-build avatars embodying dual futures: a tamagotchi inspired creature and the distributive AI behind it. Powered by innovation of customized low-energy workflows and community-driven input, the project challenges centralized tech monopolies, cutting carbon footprints while democratizing creativity. Premiering a proof of concept at ISEA 2025, it invites participants to reshape AI tools through collective action—proving sustainable tech can thrive when rooted in ecology, not extraction. Can decentralized creativity balance innovation and responsibility? Will collaborative AI reclaim the power of creation to a wider community? We will see soon.
The Garden VR Case study
Team members: David Barlow Krelina (E.D. Films), Amélie Masson Labonté, Emily Paige, and Julien Coll
Website: http://davidbk.com/
Location: Val-Morin, Québec
This project explores storytelling within surreal, interactive, three-dimensional landscapes where players can navigate freely in stereoscopic 3D with six degrees of freedom. Building these immersive worlds involves creating concept art, level designs, and stylized 3D assets—processes that can be accelerated with AI. This project focuses on open-source AI models and tools that offer artists and developers a high degree of customizability, while comparing different production approaches and their ethical implications.
Visualizing Entropy Regularized Decision Algorithms
Team members: Dane Malenfant
Website: https://danemalenfant.com/
Location: Montréal, Québec
Artificial intelligence reinforcement learning agents have become much more effective by incorporating entropy—essentially a measure of randomness or uncertainty—into their decision-making processes. By maximizing entropy, these agents explore a wider range of possibilities and scenarios, allowing them to adapt to new obstacles without needing additional training. As a result, they become more flexible and efficient, conserving energy by learning once rather than requiring repeated retraining for unobserved phenomena. This project aims to advocate for and visualize the effect of maximizing entropy when training sustainable artificial intelligence.
Wattsup
Team members: Lionel Ringenbach a.k.a Ucodia
Website: https://ucodia.space/
Location: Vancouver, BC
Wattsup is an initiative aimed at raising awareness about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence by integrating energy monitoring into AI tools. The project will develop and implement energy counters that measure and display the power consumption and carbon emissions of AI operations in real-time, allowing users to understand their ecological footprint. By making energy usage visible in AI tools, energy monitoring can become a new standard and a required metric in all software using artificial intelligence. This transparency means we now have the means to measure our impact: no more flying blind.
MUTEK acknowledged the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Montréal for their support. This project is funded as part of the Cultural Development Agreement of Montréal, established between the City of Montréal and the Government of Québec.
Image Credit:
Catherine Breslin & Team and Adobe Firefly / Better Images of AI / Chipping Silicon / CC-BY 4.0
