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This issue of PARSE explores how artistic research can respond to and represent different aspects of the dynamic interplay between more-than-human forces and culturally resilient structures. As we are situated within Sápmi, the lands of the Sámi people, this question can not only be explored within the academic structure, but in connection with land, culture and community. The contributions have been selected from the broad range of research presented at Hurricanes and Scaffolding: Swedish Research Council Symposium on Artistic Research, hosted by UmArts and held in Ubmeje/Umeå in December 2024. Drawing inspiration from Nora N. Khan’s contrasting concepts of “hurricanes and scaffoldings” as developed in her essay “Towards a Poetics of Artificial Super Intelligence”, artistic researchers identified the frameworks, practices, perspectives and themes that their practice can bring to the broader discourses of society, environment, technology and politics. This issue draws attention to a small sample of the extraordinarily diverse practices and methods employed in contemporary artistic research. The following editorial map includes artistic responses by each co-editor to the Hurricanes and Scaffolding theme.

This project explores a poetic engagement with autonomous entities to mediate human-human interaction.“Kissing Birds” is a set of motion interactive kinetic furniture for daily life, questioning what could be a creative potential of human participation in autonomous and intelligent systems and further investigating collaborative human-robot interaction toward empowering humanity. “Kissing Birds” consists of two shape-changing tables and a chandelier, where the creation of intricate kinetic motions produces a lighting interaction . Through a large-scale interface, it invites whole-body embodiments to build fluidity in social interaction that facilitates ‘a prep time’ before having a meeting. By aligning their steps while walking toward each other, this project allows people to create unique forms, functions, and values in engaging with technology. Through an experimental design scenario, this paper presents a new aesthetic possibility that is not anchored by finding an optimal solution or effective use and instead seeks to attend to the nuanced yet complex realities of human experiences as a creative resource.

If sensitive and fraught aspects of human experience are to be brought into design, an alternative design space is needed to build human-technology relations beyond problem-solving approaches. This paper describes a series of research through design projects embracing vulnerable human nature, arriving at an articulation of what poetic engagements with technology can be like. Through unfolding a more than decade-long design experimentation, this work aims at reimagining our current technologies and how we engage with them. Each design exploration mediates poetic interaction possibilities through expressiveness, feltness, and mediativeness in designing technology. These poetic qualities encourage people to rediscover their humanity, reconnect to their authentic selves, and reopen social connections.

“Poetic Layers” is an interactive installation that examines the consequences of bias when predictive and generative possibilities play essential roles in daily life. Since bias is perpetually present in design technology, this project explores its expressions rather than seeking to eliminate it. By bringing the aesthetic of bias upfront in interrelated social interactions, “Poetic Layers” involve four stages of interactions through a window, a sugar jar, a coffee pot, and a table, trained and acted by Machine Learning. They are designed to highlight a blindspot that allows imbalanced human interactions by indicating dominating human beings. In this regard, the act of crafting in creating 'Poetic Layers' transforms the abstract ideas of social equity into palpable experience as a provocation by rich materials exploration.

As new technologies enter everyday life, designs have to address new interactions between ethics and aesthetics as new possibilities also come with new consequences. A current example concerns Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the issues of bias that seem to come with its predictive and generative capacities. To explore bias further, we start with the question that if bias is present (and perhaps cannot be completely eliminated), what could it be like to instead work with its expressions? And could exploring an ‘aesthetics of bias’ allow us to come closer to where bias comes from in the first place, in how people relate to others? By practice-based research, this paper investigates how bias can be creatively expressed in technology design. We describe the interactive installation, “Poetic Layers”, consisting of a window, a sugar jar, a coffee pot, and a table, trained and acted by AI and Machine Learning (ML). Through these design experiments, we introduce four interactions to mirror and amplify biases in human relationships - dominance, exclusion, hostility, and fractured balance