Palavers and the Plurinet

What does more-than-human artificial intelligence do, how does it look, and how do we interact with it?

2025
Summary

Palavers and the Plurinet is an ongoing project that explores who artificial intelligence is for, what it looks like, and how we engage it and it with us. It started as a response to the ThingCon 2024 open call brief entitled “Generative Things” (https://thingscon.org/opencall/). The brief asked “designers to imagine possible futures of Generative Things and create provotypes”. Overall, my response to this brief aims to explore who AI is for (notably beyond humans), how humans engage with AI’s and AI networks, other forms of “generativeness” (i.e., not just generated through AI), and an exploration of “weirdness”. The current form of the palavers constitutes a base, an experience crystal the grows in response to each palavers experience and contains fossils of the experiences, and some kind of carriable object called the “osmosis conduit” that enable each palaver to collect information to feed back to the Plurinet. The Plurinet is a more-than-human-in-the-loop network of creatures, agents, digital twins, sensors, etc. The Plurinet network harnesses the idea of generative adversarial~collaborative networks. These networks harness the creative potential of adversarial and collaborative entanglements between biological and technological entities and are produced and maintained through various inputs. The Plurinet converses through each palaver by chiming in with phrases like “we speak for the crows” before giving their verdicts on human actions and their impacts. These verdicts and subsequent advice might not directly benefit humans.

The work was supported by colleagues from the Poly Collective (or Poly) community of practice.

This is a live project and will be update periodically.

Initial Ideas and Concepts

The preliminary forms of the palaver were a mixture of conventional forms such as 360 degree cameras and personal assistances and forms inspired by crab eyes and just rocks. In the crab eye designs I also wanted to explore additional frictions where a human engaging with a crab eye palaver would have to find something to put it in or prop it up with. In all of the designs was the idea that some or all of a palaver could be carried around and allowed to listen in on human decision making.

These ideas were also explored in a pair of “one pagers” that expand the ideas of the Plurinet and Weird AI.

Experience Crystal Experiments

Creating the experience crystals was one of the more complex areas as it required me to learn more about Blender, notably the geometry nodes. I was quite satisfied with the results and if time permits I will explore more types.

Current Palaver Version

Following the first exhibition, I iterated the palavers’ form. The current version combines primitive shapes for most of the main components of the palaver, which in turn draws more attention to the “weirdness” of the experience crystals.

Prototyping

I started by 3D printing the designs in full and at scale. The crystals were the most interesting to print and required intricate supports to hold up the tiny extrusions. This was not without error including some printer blockages. In the next phase I hope to explore a multi-material version that uses woods and ceramics for most of the components and a yet-to-be-decided technique for a full scale version of the crystals.

Exhibitions

This work has been exhibited at two different venues (ThingsCon and the Generative Things Salon) with a third to follow as part of celebration of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam at an event called Future Fest. The images below is from the second exhibitions.

2025
Summary

Palavers and the Plurinet is an ongoing project that explores who artificial intelligence is for, what it looks like, and how we engage it and it with us. It started as a response to the ThingCon 2024 open call brief entitled “Generative Things” (https://thingscon.org/opencall/). The brief asked “designers to imagine possible futures of Generative Things and create provotypes”. Overall, my response to this brief aims to explore who AI is for (notably beyond humans), how humans engage with AI’s and AI networks, other forms of “generativeness” (i.e., not just generated through AI), and an exploration of “weirdness”. The current form of the palavers constitutes a base, an experience crystal the grows in response to each palavers experience and contains fossils of the experiences, and some kind of carriable object called the “osmosis conduit” that enable each palaver to collect information to feed back to the Plurinet. The Plurinet is a more-than-human-in-the-loop network of creatures, agents, digital twins, sensors, etc. The Plurinet network harnesses the idea of generative adversarial~collaborative networks. These networks harness the creative potential of adversarial and collaborative entanglements between biological and technological entities and are produced and maintained through various inputs. The Plurinet converses through each palaver by chiming in with phrases like “we speak for the crows” before giving their verdicts on human actions and their impacts. These verdicts and subsequent advice might not directly benefit humans.

The work was supported by colleagues from the Poly Collective (or Poly) community of practice.

This is a live project and will be update periodically.

Initial Ideas and Concepts

The preliminary forms of the palaver were a mixture of conventional forms such as 360 degree cameras and personal assistances and forms inspired by crab eyes and just rocks. In the crab eye designs I also wanted to explore additional frictions where a human engaging with a crab eye palaver would have to find something to put it in or prop it up with. In all of the designs was the idea that some or all of a palaver could be carried around and allowed to listen in on human decision making.

These ideas were also explored in a pair of “one pagers” that expand the ideas of the Plurinet and Weird AI.

Experience Crystal Experiments

Creating the experience crystals was one of the more complex areas as it required me to learn more about Blender, notably the geometry nodes. I was quite satisfied with the results and if time permits I will explore more types.

Current Palaver Version

Following the first exhibition, I iterated the palavers’ form. The current version combines primitive shapes for most of the main components of the palaver, which in turn draws more attention to the “weirdness” of the experience crystals.

Prototyping

I started by 3D printing the designs in full and at scale. The crystals were the most interesting to print and required intricate supports to hold up the tiny extrusions. This was not without error including some printer blockages. In the next phase I hope to explore a multi-material version that uses woods and ceramics for most of the components and a yet-to-be-decided technique for a full scale version of the crystals.

Exhibitions

This work has been exhibited at two different venues (ThingsCon and the Generative Things Salon) with a third to follow as part of celebration of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Amsterdam at an event called Future Fest. The images below is from the second exhibitions.

© 2025 Matthew Lee-Smith

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