Participatory Conversational AI Installation / 2026

AI Bytes Terra

Artificial intelligence is usually spoken of as if it had no weight: a cloud, a conversation, an answer that arrives from nowhere. Every reply, though, is drawn from the ground. It depends on electricity and cooling water, on land given over to data centres and minerals extracted for hardware, and it leaves waste behind. AI Bytes Terra begins in the gap between how AI feels and what it consumes.

The work makes that argument deliberately literal. Language, the most weightless thing an AI produces, is given mass, and a living forest is left to bear it. Participation is not neutral: each question adds to the load, and what builds up in the landscape is not a message but a consequence.

The installation also runs on the kind of infrastructure it examines. It does not stand outside the system as a warning. Like everyone who uses AI, it is part of the cost it describes.

Exhibition: Interference
Prelude to Ibrida Festival 2026

Venue: Fondazione Dino Zoli Arte Contemporanea
Forlì, Italy

Dates: 1 September – 11 October 2026

Medium: Real-time 3D, conversational AI, spatial sound

Touring: Further venues, including universities

Team

Özge Samancı ozgesamanci.com ↗

Martuza Ferdous martuzaferdous.com

Sercan Şengün sercansengun.com ↗

Stephan Moore northwestern.edu ↗

Exhibition

Opening night, September 2026 · photographs by Özge Samancı

Press

Coverage of Interference, the group exhibition AI Bytes Terra is shown in

“The words, falling, do not merely inform – they crush.”

Emanuela Zanon · Juliet Art Magazine · 7 Sep 2026

Stills

A tree dissolving into pale drifting dust against a night sky — Dissolve

A tree breaking apart into bright green blocks of data — Corrupt

A tree burning, embers rising from the canopy — Burn