Wilding AI as collective research-creation: resisting narrative and technological closure

Wilding AI is an ongoing public experiment for sound and media artists, researchers, engineers, students and publics. Collectively, they engage with innovative research-creation epistemologies and methodologies to explore speculative AI futures using large-language models (LLM), generative AI sound and spatialized audio. Wilding AI aims to resist premature attempts at narrative closure and technological stabilization as currently driven by dominant paradigms of generative AI that seek to establish a common, statistical and aesthetic “middle ground”. Instead, we follow B. Coleman’s call for an AI “that can be free – if not to imagine then to generate – speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not” (Coleman 2021).

In this article, we explore how collaborative artistic practices create spaces to challenge dominant technological narratives and open spaces to develop alternative sociotechnical imaginaries. We discuss the research-creation project Wilding AI, which brings together a collective of media and sound artists and technologists engaged in collaborative artistic and technical creation, with regular participation in public festivals. We narrate the development of the ongoing Wilding AI project from its inception in early 2024 to its milestone open lab during the 2025 edition of the CTM Festival in Berlin, before discussing how the project’s collaborative and public nature provides a foundation for fostering critical narrative and technical engagement with contemporary AI advancements.