Animism Revisited: Worlding with Digital and More-than-Human Minds
ACM SIGGRAPH DAC SPARKS Session | May 29, 2026
What is SPARKS?
SPARKS — Short Presentations of Artworks & Research for the Kindred Spirit — is the monthly online series hosted by the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC). Each session brings together artists, researchers, and practitioners through a series of lightning talks followed by open discussion, all centered on a rotating theme at the intersection of digital art, computation, and critical theory. Sessions are free, held on Zoom, and open to the global community.
We want to take a moment to genuinely thank our moderators: Michael Just — transdisciplinary artist, PhD candidate at City University of Hong Kong, and incoming Assistant Professor at Bilkent University. Michael brought philosophical rigour and real warmth to the conversation. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon — architect, artist, curator, and media arts scholar, whose doctorate from UCSB and work at DigitalFutures has shaped an impressive global community. Gustavo’s curatorial instinct made this session what it was.
And thank you to Bonnie Mitchell for coordinating the series behind the scenes — the invisible backbone of every SPARKS session.
The Session
On Friday, May 29, 2026, the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community hosted a SPARKS session titled “Animism Revisited: Worlding with Digital and More-than-Human Minds”, moderated by Michael Just and Gustavo Alfonso Rincon.
The session approached animism not as a relic of the past, but as a living epistemological framework — a way of knowing and making relations with a more-than-human world. Drawing on Nurit Bird-David’s theory of animism as a relational epistemology, and on perspectivist philosophies that understand worlds as ontologically plural and situated, the session explored how creative practices might reopen and complicate animist ways of sensing, valuing, and coexisting.
Rather than locating intelligence in isolated computational systems, the discussions centered on how the convergence of artificial and biological intelligence already enacts cognition as a shared, relational process. Techno-animism and digital animism — the idea that technological objects become partners in distributed agency, memory, and care — formed the theoretical backbone of the day’s conversations. Artists and designers were framed as uniquely positioned agents: able to shape how these new relations look and feel, and to question which cosmologies they reproduce or transform.
Our Presentation
Decolonial AI and Quantum Imaginaries: Translating Scientific Knowledge through Indigenous Design and Media Architecture
— Ina Conradi Chavez & Mark Chavez
This is the presentation that Mark Chavez and I brought to the session — work that sits at the convergence of quantum art, generative digital techniques, and decolonial methodology, and that we have been building together for some time.
Our talk presented a practice-based approach to translating complex scientific knowledge — specifically quantum phenomena — into immersive, public-facing media artworks firmly grounded in Indigenous design systems. Rather than treating scientific visualization as a neutral process, we framed it as a critical interface: a space where scientific abstraction, cultural knowledge, and public perception can be held in creative tension. The question driving our work is not just how to visualize science, but whose frameworks shape what becomes visible — and what gets left out.
Drawing on large-scale installations, experimental animation, and urban screen projects developed at Nanyang Technological University and with international partners, we examined how media architecture and AI-driven visual systems can function as curatorial tools for re-situating scientific narratives — actively moving them beyond the Eurocentric epistemological frameworks that have long dominated science communication. Central to our approach are the principles of biocultural worlding and symbolic design logic: the conviction that how we visualize knowledge is never innocent, and that generative pipelines can either reinforce or dismantle inherited hierarchies of knowing.
Through selected case studies, we demonstrated how collaborative art–science production models can support new pedagogical and exhibition strategies for ethical AI and media-based science communication. What matters most to us is working with Indigenous cosmologies — not as aesthetic borrowings or surface references, but as rigorous, consent-grounded epistemological collaborations that genuinely enrich both artistic and scientific discourse.
Link to Webinar recording https://webinartv.us/watch/f2e8a6d427b4781dc4fd6e05648343f67f3e4286
Other Presentations
Skin Series: Techno-Animism
— Vivian Xu
Vivian Xu presented Skin Series, a set of speculative wearable devices that explores animal perception through embodiment. Referencing biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt (lifeworld), the series challenges the humanist body construct in favor of an open, elastic phenomenological body. Through custom-designed wearables that map animalistic sensory capacities onto the human form, Xu’s performers enact a process of “becoming other” — a techno-animism realized through the body itself. 🔗 vivianxu.studio/skin-series
Performing Care: Towards a Techno-Animism of Relational AI
— Natalia Fuchs
Natalia Fuchs examined what it means to perform care in the context of relational AI, investigating how notions of ritual, reciprocity, and emotional labor might be embedded into interactions with machine systems — and what ethical and aesthetic stakes are involved.
Animism and Ontological Perspectivism in the Western Context: A Trucker’s Perspective
— Halbe Hessel Kuipers
Kuipers offered a fascinating philosophical detour into Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological perspectivism, contrasting it with classical animism and anthropomorphism. Using Serge Bouchard’s anthropological study of Québécois truckers and their animistic relationship with their machines (Du diesel dans les veines), the talk argued that Western modernity contains plural ontologies within itself. Bridging Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism with Spinoza’s conception of affect, Kuipers proposed that a trucker’s attunement to their vehicle constitutes a lived cosmology — one that challenges the modern bifurcation of nature and culture.
Steering Through the Inner Residue
— Ting-Chun Liu & Leon-Etienne Kühr
Liu and Kühr presented a video installation that uses recursive feedback to investigate the media specificity of generative AI. By feeding diffusion model outputs back as inputs — without any textual prompt — the work bypasses human intention entirely, allowing the machine to navigate its own aesthetic tendencies. Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), the project reveals the internal residues of generative systems, raising questions about authorship, intention, and machine creativity. 🔗 vimeo.com/1171767792
Uncanny Portraiture: Capturing a Breath of Emotion
— Randi Matushevitz
Matushevitz presented her ongoing research into moving image portraiture and generative AI character development, exploring empathetic simulation as a way to bring inanimate characters to life. Working with iPhone apps, vector masks, and AI tools, she traces the development of characters from still to moving image, pursuing what she calls “uncanny empathy” — a mirroring of facial expressions and emotional gestures across communities. 🔗 youtube.com/@randimatushevitzart
Trout Telephone
— Peijing Mou
Mou introduced Trout Telephone, a telematic art installation that creates a communication system for trout across habitats fragmented by dam constructions in the Arroyo Seco watershed of the Los Angeles basin. Two actuated trout-tail sculptures — one upstream in forest, one in a coastal lagoon — are linked through a real-time network, creating a technical call-and-response across divided ecological zones. The work offers a more-than-human model of ecological care and communication, reorienting technological connections toward non-human perception. 🔗 melodymou.com
From Objects to Subjects: Rethinking Machine Vision through Perspectivism
— Hugo F. Idarraga Franco
Franco’s talk examined object recognition systems such as YOLO not merely as technical tools but as dispositifs that extend colonial logics of classification. By transforming the world into discrete, measurable objects, these systems echo the production of exteriority described in theories of raciality. Drawing on perspectivism, the talk proposed an alternative: what if machine vision could encounter a plurality of perspectives rather than fixing entities into static categories — recognizing not only objects, but subjects? 🔗 hugoidarraga.com
Closing Reflection
Animism Revisited brought together a remarkable range of practices — from wearable sculptures and recursive video installations to decolonial media architectures and telematic ecological art. What united them was a shared refusal to treat technology as a neutral instrument, and an insistence that how we make and relate to computational systems is always already a cosmological act. The session made clear that digital artists are not merely illustrating these questions — they are actively doing the philosophical and political work of re-worlding.
For Mark and me, being part of this particular gathering felt significant. Our work on Decolonial AI and Quantum Imaginaries sits exactly at this intersection — between scientific knowledge, cultural cosmology, and the question of who gets to shape how things are made visible. Being in conversation with practitioners approaching these questions from ecology, philosophy, wearables, and machine vision reminded me how much richer the work becomes in dialogue. Thank you to Michael Just, Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, and Bonnie Mitchell for creating the conditions for that kind of exchange.
The full recording of the session is available at the ACM SIGGRAPH DAC website — I encourage anyone curious about these questions to watch and reflect. 🔗 dac.siggraph.org/sparks/2026-05-29_animism-revisited
Reference
ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community. (2026, May 29). Animism revisited: Worlding with digital and more-than-human minds [SPARKS session]. ACM SIGGRAPH DAC. https://dac.siggraph.org/sparks/2026-05-29_animism-revisited/
