Creatures is an ongoing research project at the intersection of sculpture, embodied artificial intelligence, and sensor-based robotics. The work centers on autonomous bodies that respond to environmental cues and feedback. These sculptural organisms are driven by an embodied multimodal AI model, allowing them to interpret and respond to their surroundings with a form of artificial emotionality.
The system integrates a layered network of sensors, including proximity, touch, motion, pressure, sound, light, temperature, humidity, as well as bio-signal interfaces. These inputs feed into a neural architecture that fuses sensory modalities to produce context-dependent outputs: bodily movements (via servos or soft actuators), light patterns (LED matrices, RGB arrays), and spatialized soundscapes. The result is a dynamic sensory loop in which the project speculates into perception and expression, turning the exhibition space into a responsive emotional field.
The conceptual foundation is rooted in the term vesen – evoking creatureliness, essence, and being – and the idea that both organic and synthetic materials might hold or enact agency. Responsive elements include non-living matter such as ferrofluid and artificial muscles, as well as living materials like houseplants. These elements are treated as sensate extensions of the robotic body, allowing the piece to speculate on machine–material empathy and interspecies interfaces.
Audience members become co-agents within this system: through movement, proximity, and touch, they engage a kind of shared sensorium — a corporeal interface that activates the machine’s embodied emotional vocabulary. This negotiation between input and response establishes a speculative feedback loop that dissolves the stable boundary between human and machine.
Rather than viewing technology as a discrete tool, Creatures proposes a symbiotic framework in which the machine becomes an extension of the human body, and vice versa. The project challenges prevailing assumptions about cognition, emotion, and sentience — asking what it means to feel with and through non-human systems, and how agency might emerge in materials we don’t traditionally associate with life.