The project developed through a set of distinct but complementary questions brought by each member of the group. This plurality of approaches made it possible to formulate a shared research environment around AI. The project drew on a set of prior research trajectories that each member brought into the collaboration as a starting point. Johnny Golding brought her philosophical framework of emergence, developed through her broader work on post-Newtonian analytics. Her account of non-instrumental poietic praxis as a way of engaging distributed synthetic systems, together with her investigation into the possibilities opened by systemic incompleteness, shaped the lab’s line of inquiry. Maggie Roberts brought her long-term research on the distributed transformations of cephalopod skin, especially the logics of pattern, shifting figure-ground relations, and the sensorial  instability of underwater environments in which octopus bodies move continuously across multiple states. This research informed the design of complex adaptive dynamics in AI systems attuned to physical conditions. Jeremy Keenan brought his research on dither, the productive role of noise, and the translation between sensory modalities with physical computing. His expertise in building generative environments in Max/MSP shaped the project’s approach to sound, treating it as an active element within the training cycle and the wider activity of the AI system. Sonia Bernac brought research on datasets, arguing that cross-dataset relations can be learned dynamically rather than fixed in advance, and that multimodal systems can remain responsive to environmental or contextual inputs. She also brought work on complexity, using phase change to understand how systems self-reorganise and shift their mode, or mood, of operation.

Across these different lines of inquiry, the research converged around camouflage, the productive use of noise, incommensurable systemic logics, and the conditions under which systems change.