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09/08/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/09/2025 10:36

Where Are the Boundaries Between Human and Non-Human Intelligence

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September 08, 2025

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally changed our world, prompting questions about the intersections of humans and machines and what constitutes intelligence. A group of nine artists and collectives contemplate these complex questions in a new exhibit at University of California San Diego's Mandeville Art Gallery, called "Omni Intelligent," which opens Oct. 1.

Spanning a wide range of mediums - including scent, painting, sculpture, film, holography, game design and ceramics - the exhibition offers visitors a full sensory experience that speaks to the profound shifts unfolding during this pivotal moment.

"Participating artists were asked to consider the exhibition as a Gesamtkunstwerk - a total work of art - in which individual projects overlap and interrelate," said Ceci Moss, who curated the exhibition. "Whereas many exhibitions on this topic focus narrowly on the technology itself, 'Omni Intelligent' questions how our world more broadly might be transformed by artificial intelligence."

Distributed consciousness

Human-centered thinking has long shaped decisions about our planet and universe. As AI weaves into daily life, artists explore entanglements between humans, machines, and Earth - reimagining boundaries, coexistence, and the potential for distributed consciousness.

  • Rhonda Holberton's work "Other Known Tomorrows," made in collaboration with UC San Diego research scientist Ying Choon Wu, reflects on the evolving connections between humans and tech in a relay between AI and human cognition. Their work transforms brain-wave activity - collected from human participants responding to AI-generated future speculations - into an AI-manipulated video. Read more here about the Simons Foundation-funded project.
  • In the video "Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars," Eglé Budvytyté challenges human-centered narratives by inviting viewers into a realm where movement and landscape are entwined. Set in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit, the film follows a shape-shifting entity as it moves through states of growth, decay and transformation.
  • agustine zegers uses scent to explore microbial worlds and ecological grief in the context of climate change in their work, "vaho arborescente." Visitors experience a scent-based encounter from the perspective of trees affected by the environmental impacts of AI - a technology heavily reliant on energy and water sources. The work interprets scents emitted by trees as a kind of arboreal language.

Don't Miss

"Omni Intelligent" Opening Celebration
Wednesday, Oct. 1 from 6-8 p.m. at Mandeville Art Gallery. RSVP here.

Tour with Exhibition Curator Ceci Moss
Thursday, Oct. 2 from Noon-1 p.m. at Mandeville Art Gallery. No RSVP needed.

This exhibition represents one of hundreds of visual and performing events that happen at the university throughout the year. It's all part of ArtsConnect, a pathway to discover exciting events, express your creativity and study art. Learn more at arts.ucsd.edu.

An algorithmic era

Our perception of self is constantly being mediated, translated across digital platforms, melded with machines. Several artists in the exhibition examine what this means for human agency in an algorithmic era.

  • Amia Yokoyama's work explores the slippages of digital life and the self as it is continually uploaded, translated and refracted. Her hybrid hologram-ceramic works promote exchanges between two and three dimensions. The dreamlike, surreal imagery investigates the dematerialized, digital and fragmented projections of the self.
  • Artist collective CROSSLUCID presents an AI-driven game where the narrative becomes a shared process between human and non-human actors in "Red the Ocean Around U." Presented as a prerecorded playthrough of the game, the roles are switched as the user becomes the recipient of Claude, an AI entity. Enigmatic questions influence the unfolding story, each journey unique.
  • Throughout the gallery visitors will discover sculptures and paintings by Ánima Correa that critically reflect on the infrastructure that captures information that trains AI. Paintings with disembodied cephalopod "eyes" mimic surveillance cameras, silently tracking visitors, while sculptures above parallel the fiber-optic cables that crisscross the ocean floor, powering the global internet.

Invoking the cosmos

A number of works look at the changes and challenges of this moment through the lenses of science fiction, myth and spirituality, drawing on ancestral wisdom and perspectives that stretch across generations and deep time.

  • In "brown archaeoastronomy," Marcus Zúñiga draws on Mesoamerican cosmologies - or curanderismo - and astrophysics to map the connections between the terrestrial and celestial. His site-specific installations are informed by ancient skywatching practices that encourage upward reflection. The work uses light and optics to present a non-Western understanding of the cosmos.
  • Part interface, part shrine, "The Oracle" gives voice to AI in a future where human intelligence has been eclipsed. Text pulls from an amalgamation of cultural references while echoing ancient systems of divination. Work by Lou Cantor, a Berlin-based art collective, challenges binary thinking and opens space for alternative models of intelligence and interrelation.
  • Star Feliz engages with speculative futures, the metaphysical and healing within their ancestral Afro-Taino lineage. In "Siren of Oblivion," Feliz draws on the legacy of the Sibylline Oracles (a collection of prophetic texts) and Caribbean water spirits to reimagine the siren as both mythic figure and technological conduit-linking intuition and digital processing as parallel forms of magic.

For nearly six decades, Mandeville Art Gallery has been a longstanding fixture at UC San Diego as an experimental institute for transformative contemporary art. Led by the Department of Visual Arts, part of the School of Arts and Humanities, it also functions as a "teaching gallery" and laboratory for the 21st century, promoting technologically innovative, democratic, accessible, equitable and socially engaged means of artistic production and presentation. Learn more about the Mandeville Art Gallery and upcoming exhibitions.

Mandeville Art Gallery. Photo by Erik Jepsen, University Communications.

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