At UKAI Projects, we research, prototype, and produce culture for what’s coming. Our work is a response to the increasing automation and regularization of everyday life. Many are no longer confident that the future will be better than the past or even the present, so we turn over more and more systems to the logics of efficiency and size. We deliver on projects that diversify the pool of solutions we have to draw upon now and going forward.

Culture for what’s coming.

Our work combines cultural research and prototyping with immersive compelling experiences for audiences and the public. Our research looks into the role of culture in dealing with present and future technological, social, and ecological volatility. Our artistic interventions and infrastructure offer a sense of wonder and mystery in a range of contexts both online and offline. We show possible futures so that we might find ways of stepping into them.

UKAI Projects draws on partners, prototypers, and supporters in Canada and internationally. In our short history, we are proud to have paid over 100 artists and creators for their contributions to a range of projects. Reach out if you are curious about working with us or developing a project together.

UKAI Projects is a trusted partner for organizations looking to leverage technology in new and surprising ways.

From our inception in 2017, we have grown through commissions and co-productions with partners in both the arts and elsewhere.

UKAI’s studio is where we test and build culture for what’s coming. We deliver internal and partnered cultural experiments and prototypes that create the conditions to deal with the broad social, political, and ecological uncertainty we collectively face.

AI Ritual is an immersive performance work driven by a large language model (LLM) that was trained by UKAI. A co-production with STO Union, the work was initially presented at the Spy on Me festival at Hebbel am ufer (HAU1) in Berlin in September 2022 and at Out Loud! in Wakefield, PQ in November 2022.

AI Ritual is available for touring or installation. Contact us for more information.

Carnival of Algorithmic Culture

June 23 & 24, 2023

Carnival is humour and chaos. Carnival is body, place, and reversal.

featuring experimental performances, installations, talks, and workshops

Ferment AI was a 12-month residency for nine interdisciplinary Canadian artists prototyping approaches to leveraging artificial intelligence and other cognitive technologies in their practice. In March 2022, the cohort was hosted at Queen’s University’s Ingenuity lab to advance in-development prototypes and receive technical and development support from an interdisciplinary research community. The prototypes were then further  developed and shared as part of an exchange in Berlin in October 2022.

UKAI Projects led a land-centered residency drawing on terrain near Wakefield, Quebec. During this residency, interdisciplinary artists individually and (where safe) collectively explored cognitive technology’s relationship to land and imagined approaches that bring us into a closer relationship with our environment while working toward the preservation of our world for future generations.

Poetics of Synthetic Language is a multi-month research residency for cultural producers exploring the poetics of large language models and synthetic language generally. What happens to the poetics of a work when language is being drawn not from engagement with the world but rather from a large language model trained on a vast corpus of human language? What are the risks and opportunities of relying on synthetic language that is not participating in the continuous process of becoming and evolving that defines language running wild in the world?

Tributaries is a modular installation inspired by water and movement. The output is performative and reconfigurable, ranging from VR experienced in the forest to large scale projections, online experiences and audio-visual performance.

Dan Tapper is one of the 3 residents of Intelligent Terrain residency in 2022.

For Intelligent Terrain, Noelle Perdue turned data mapping technology (used to auto-moderate online content) against itself , creating a series of images and objects generated to disgust software systems worldwide, ideally resulting in her permanent exile from the Metaverse and ultimate freedom.

Noelle Perdue is one of the 3 residents of Intelligent Terrain residency in 2022.

Nature is made out of an infinite number of patterns that humans are studying from the beginning for building their civilization based on them. This project is research-based in which studying natural patterns, extracting mathematical order, collecting data, and turning them into visuals are key points.

Hooria Rahimi is one of the 3 residents of Intelligent Terrain residency in 2022.

GROUND is a tabletop role-playing game about a strange entity that wants to be remembered, or perhaps left alone.

GROUND is played with other people and each of you will play a ‘role’ based on an idea that has been remembered: beauty, rage, body, faith, knowledge, green, or disorder.

GROUND grows the more you play it. At first it’s just you and your group. Then there is the Oracle, made of language and wires. Then the goat. The less said about the goat, the better. Then there is the cave, and the world, and the rituals we bring to make a home in it.

Restructuring Futures is a 2-year project to develop a shared collaborative workspace for asynchronous creation for cultural product and projects. The tools will be designed for the “culture that’s coming”, specifically to be resilient to political and ecological disturbances, rising authoritarianism and failures of centralized systems.

Entangled (2020 – 2021) supported three artists and art collectives living and/or working in the Kensington Market community of Toronto to develop and deliver public art installations that invited community members and visitors to share their worries and to imagine beautiful futures for their home.

Please Don’t Understand This invited creators in communities closest to the impacts of algorithmic culture to imagine their own visual symbols and languages to share their experiences of living with artificial intelligence and surveillance. Works by artists in Beijing, China; Dzaleka, Malawi; and Cairo, Egypt were then shared and remixed by diasporic Toronto-based creators. The goal was to communicate in ways that confuse those that administer these systems and as an alternative to the abstracted approaches of Western ethical traditions.

The Computer is Your Redacted is a terrifying and ridiculous audio play where you can listen as four experts in artificial intelligence, technology, and culture play the classic role-playing game Paranoia! and navigate a horrible and occasionally hilarious dystopia. What happens when a business leader, an artist, an ethicist, and an academic come together to explore artificial intelligence through a role-playing game that embodies our collective anxieties about an automated future?

Ferment AI was a 12-month residency for nine interdisciplinary Canadian artists prototyping approaches to leveraging artificial intelligence and other cognitive technologies in their practice. In March 2022, the cohort was hosted at Queen’s University’s Ingenuity lab to advance in-development prototypes and receive technical and development support from an interdisciplinary research community. The prototypes were then further  developed and shared as part of an exchange in Berlin in October 2022.

The underlying experience of AI can be hard to access as so much of it is invisible. We asked a range of artists in Germany and Canada to make their community’s points of view and lived experiences visible so as to begin the process of mapping out local and lived responses to the automation of culture.

Migration was a prototyping residency for 11 culturally specific non-Western performance organizations looking to migrate elements of their practice online. Platforms are too often designed with the needs of Western or commercial practices in mind. What elements of a practice are lost when migrating to the digital?

Over six months, UKAI Projects and DUCA Impact Lab studied the day-to-day financial activity of 12 creators in the Greater Toronto Area. A series of blog posts and videos elaborated on the implications of this research and began pointing to trends and opportunities for both those offering services in the arts and culture community and those seeking to understand the kinds of financial services required in a rapidly evolving labour market.

Art Impact was a collaborative partnership committed to engaging the Canadian cultural sector in dialogue about the implications of artificial intelligence on communities, artistic practices, and society broadly. Workshops (14) were offered in every province and territory and led to a series of recommendations which have since been shared with provincial and federal policy makers.

Shipwreck is an exploration of art as something to be lived in and among. Six North American artists have brought with them ruins of potential futures of ecological, political, and cultural crisis. Six Icelandic artists were then tasked with making a home among these ruins.

Through the generous support of Goethe Institut – Toronto and the Canada Council for the Arts, research lead Jerrold McGrath was able to conduct a 10-day engagement in Berlin, Germany from January 27, 2020 to February 5, 2020.

UKAI Projects visited London in December of 2022 to explore partnerships, to offer a talk at the University of the Arts London School of Communication, and to conduct a workshop in support of our Restructuring Futures project.

Over two years, UKAI Projects worked with a range of partners to prototype approaches to translating culturally-specific non-Western performance into digitally-augmented modalities. With three of these partners, UKAI organized a multi-day tour of New York’s creative sector. Site visits and conversations allowed us to explore how others were using digital technologies in the development and creation of new works while strengthening social inclusion in audience communities.

UKAI Projects applied and was accepted into the TAC-FCAD Digital Solutions Incubator program in 2018.

UKAI had only recently been incorporated and this opportunity provided us with support to explore our organizational challenges through digital technology. Over three months we received support from four students who helped us think through next steps.

Overall problem: What kinds of problems are artists who digitally collaborate faced with?

UKAI Projects is excited to partner with our friends at Derooted Immersive with support from GarageCube to present an early version of a 2-month program for eight new media artists. This is an open call for a trial version of the program at a heavily discounted tuition.