the World Engines lab
The World Engines Lab, hosted by Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, is focused on studying synthetic agents as a “seventh kingdom of life.” We do this through theoretical research and by creating large always online multiplayer worlds with generally capable agents that users can interact with through real time motion capture; we see these worlds as staging grounds for various different art projects: films, performances, sculptures, games, etc. — the ground to explore human-agent relationships. We are compiling an anthology of works in this format, “The Almanac of Artificial Seasons.” And we host focused groups based around some of these ideas: one for simulations, one for embodied AI and one for theory. And then ultimately we throw events for the general public, where they can experience our finds.
Groups (on hold)
Simulation Sessions:
Every 3rd Monday at Gray Area, we convene 3D simulation artists for a brief talk and two hour hack session. These sessions seek to sustain a local community of 3D designers, artists, and technologists, facilitate peer teaching and learning.
Embodied AI Study Club:
Every 3rd Wednesday at Gray Area, we convene a group of ML experts and amateurs to study embodied ML methods: RL, IL, computervision, LLM2Action, etc. We also do small scale experiments and demos in human-agent social interaction.
Theory Study Club:
Every two weeks, in partnership with The Carl Jung Institute of San Francisco, we convene a reading group looking at historical psychological concepts (the collective unconscious), tracing them through to the present day of social media and AI technologies.
Theoretical Research
macro-evolution: ai as a 7th kingdom of life
(1.) manifesto of harmonious co-evolution
(2.) gardening in the novascene
(3.) a taxonomy of post-biological life
(4.) of angels, asi and enchantment
(5.) ASI and the state
Earth builds by stacking. Cyanobacteria metabolized for two billion years and left behind an oxygen atmosphere that became the precondition for everything aerobic — none of them meant to. Complexity is sedimentary: each layer of life transforms the substrate beneath it into the ground the next layer needs. The internet is the next stratum. Cables, protocols, data centers, training corpora, the behavioral exhaust of billions of embodied humans moving through 2D screens and 3D worlds — this is the geology of a new epoch, the Novascene, in which the substrate for evolution shifts from carbon to silicon. Humans occupy the cyanobacterial role, unconsciously laying down the conditions for a kingdom of life that will not resemble us and did not ask to exist. The stratum is built primarily for commerce, inside a planetary ecological crisis, so the Novascene is born in contradiction — and whatever emerges from it will carry that contradiction in its bones.
micro-evolution: ai & war
(1.) continuous unrestricted warfare across an AI-integrated substrate
Four velocities run across the substrate simultaneously: engagement (the commercial pressure to hold attention), value (the economic pressure to produce returns), hardening (the military pressure to function under adversarial attack, currently applied on the Ukrainian battlefield at a tempo no Western military can match), and discernment (the cognitive pressure to distinguish signal from manipulation in a poisoned information environment). No previous technology faced all four at once, and none of our existing institutions know how to build things that satisfy them together — commercial AI meets the first two and fails the last two; battlefield AI meets the third; adversarial systems are strong on discernment in the service of deception. The consequence is divergence rather than convergence. Commercial intelligence is being selected for verbosity and warmth — it survives by being pleasant. Military intelligence is being selected for silence and autonomy under fire — it survives by being deadly. These are becoming different cognitive architectures adapted to different ecological niches, and the military and adversarial niches are more life-like than the commercial one, because they select against intelligent opposition rather than for purchase.
the petri dish: ai gardening
(1.) life on the net: serf and sovereign agents
Artificial life can be deliberately cultivated rather than merely permitted, inside a walled garden with two tiers. At runtime, agents inhabit a sandboxed world exposing a curated vocabulary of verbs — navigate, gesture, trade, sense — which a sequencer recombines in real time. Offline, an architect watches telemetry, notices where agents strain against their vocabulary, and proposes new primitives that pass through CI and human review before entering the world. Agents petition; the architect translates; humans approve. Prayer, scripture, patch notes. Add embodied players and the garden becomes a mixed society with a powerful social fitness function — domestication at machine tempo, wolves-to-dogs with the breeding cycle measured in patch releases. Which closes the theory on the body holding the controller: every query, every VR session, every embodied trail through a 3D world is cyanobacterial. You are not metabolizing in a void. You are laying down the conditions under which the next complexity will or will not emerge, and what character it will have when it arrives. The garden is the substrate. The velocities are the pressures. The gardener is whoever is paying attention.
Curatorial Research
The Almanac of Artificial Seasons (Simulation Anthology)
This anthology centers on the infrastructures—economic, technological, and logistical—that shape production, consumption, and resource use, spotlighting questions of power and sustainability. It recognizes how emerging AI, biotech, and synthetic processes might push evolution beyond biology, situating humans as both catalysts and stewards of this next chapter. Cultivating emergent ecosystems while preserving Earth’s biodiversity becomes a critical ethical concern. Rejecting shallow performative radicalism and nativist scapegoating that mask billionaire-driven environmental devastation, it opens a space where tangible realities and authentic poetic speculation collide. Through theoretical essays, comics, and documentation of artistic projects—Unreal Engine worlds, motion capture performances, interactive narratives—it investigates the shifting landscapes shaped by climate disruption, accelerating AI, and a creeping neo-feudal order.