Art as the Space Between Systems
This project emerged from a refusal to treat data as neutral or storytelling as decorative. Through a year of critical experimentation supported by the OpenAI Researcher Access Program, this work interrogates the architectures of artificial intelligence and participatory art as overlapping systems of meaning-making. From the beginning, the focus was not on producing outcomes, but on destabilizing the assumptions that structure how narratives are captured, classified, and deployed. Traditional research frameworks were treated not as templates to improve upon, but as artifacts to be dismantled. Data, within this context, is not raw material — it is already coded with power. We approached it not as something to analyze, but as something to confront.
A critical anchor in this process was the historical recognition that research has repeatedly been weaponized — its findings used to justify policies of erasure, assimilation, and dispossession. This context is not a backdrop; it is the system we are working inside. Every statistic becomes suspect. Every metric, a potential instrument of harm. As a result, data was handled not with objectivity, but with suspicion — interrogated, reframed, and recontextualized through a process of radical storytelling. This meant developing methodologies that allowed space for ambiguity, contradiction, refusal, and error. Artistic expression was not illustrative. It was foundational. It provided the space to re-encode experiences in formats resistant to quantification — formats that honoured complexity over clarity, process over product.
Rather than treat storytelling as a singular act, we engaged it as a plural, systemic phenomenon: oral, visual, digital, speculative. These narrative forms were not chosen for accessibility or aesthetic value, but because they offer structural resistance to datafication. The result is a body of work that blends art and analysis without resolving them into a single narrative. Resilience, within this framework, is not a virtue. It is a signal — a sign that something has been endured, survived, absorbed, and is now being rerouted. In this project, resilience is a system response, not a personal trait.
The involvement of AI — particularly access to advanced tools through the OpenAI Researcher Access Program — enabled a direct interrogation of machine systems from inside the loop. These tools were not simply adopted, they were stressed, repurposed, and bent toward community logic. We asked what happens when generative systems are fed with memories that were never meant to be archived, with epistemologies that refuse legibility, with cultural contexts that don’t translate. The outputs were not always clean. That was the point. They reflected the friction, the dissonance, the refusal to conform to the logic of the dataset.
This project is not a model. It is not a prototype. It does not scale. It was an event — a convergence of art, memory, language, and systems logic. It resists summary. It was built to hold contradiction, to stay open, to never fully stabilize. It is not complete, and that incompleteness is intentional.
