From January 23, join the “Wilding AI Lab” at MONOM, Berlin’s center for spatial sound, for a four-day public experiment merging cutting-edge machine learning experimentation and spatialized audio. Featuring workshops, discussions, experiments, and an open studio, the lab invites sound artists, musicians, and the public to explore the radical potential of generative computational systems. Led by Beth Coleman, Portrait XO, Alexandre Saunier, and Maurice Jones, “Wilding AI” unpacks the black boxes of multimodal machine learning systems to imagine untamed futures of sound and technological experimentation.
Day 1 centers on storytelling and world-building in the age of algorithmic and generative computational culture, drawing inspiration from Beth Coleman’s book Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds. In this groundbreaking exploration of generative AI and artistic practice, Coleman channels the themes of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy to interrogate kinship, community, survival, and transformation through processes driven by large language models and other generative computational frameworks. Using these tools as “interspecies vehicles,” Coleman and her interlocutors challenge us to rethink racialization, cognition, and computability, while contributors address black computing, indigenous AI, relational temporalities, and the repetitive hum of digital systems.
Coleman’s Reality Was Whatever Happened, produced in 2023 in K. Verlag’s Processing Process series, frames AI as a site of both ethical tension and aesthetic opportunity, prompting readers to imagine wild, (de)generative futures. This provocative book resonates deeply with the ethos of “Wilding AI,” inviting participants to interrogate the narratives of liberation that surround large data models and to explore unexpected reconfigurations of images, bodies, and worlds.
The “Wilding AI Lab” unfolds at a crucial moment, as generative technologies accelerate to reshape and challenge aesthetic practices, ethical paradigms, and the boundaries of human-machine collaboration.
Against the backdrop of this week’s gathering of tech leaders seeking to consolidate power—eschewing global agreements like the Paris Accord and threatening multispecies survival for generations—this gathering convenes an urgent counterpoint, probing the boundaries of large data models as a tool for liberation, reconfiguration, and envisioning more equitable futures for humans and beyond.
For a detailed overview of the program please visit monomsound.com/events/2025/1/23/monom-x-ctm-present-wilding-ai-lab