hAIbrid

hAIbrid @ Berlin, 28 May 2026

Fusing digital and physical space into hybrid space (starting with early projects in 1988), Hybrid Space Lab’s work focusses on formulating desirable futures. With a sense of agency, we strive at transforming hybrid space from a cultural perspective in a way that reflects how we, as a society, wish to live. We approach technological developments from the designers, the architects, the landscape architects, the urbanists point of view in order to transform technology so that it meets our needs and desires.

In our current era of “permacrisis”, there is a profound need—and simultaneously an opportunity—to develop shared visions and unlock desirable futures. The word “crisis” derives from the Ancient Greek “κρίσις” that entails the notion of decision. Crises can be transformative, providing the opportunity to rethink and reimagine our world. By approaching change with a sense of possibility—and with the hope that a desirable future is attainable—we are more likely to be receptive to opportunities to positively influence transformation.

Hybrid Space Lab focusses on formulating and designing desirable futures. By using artistic speculation and cultural production to explore sought-after futures and by (re-)searching futures with an un-disciplined transdisciplinary approach with the creatives’ transformative force we contribute to opening potentialities for desirable change.

By exploring uncharted territories, creatives possess the power of imagination as well as the ability develop visions and craft new narratives. Speculation and imagination are therefore strategic tools for navigating complexity, fostering innovation, and building adaptive futures with more inclusive common grounds.

We have been experiencing an unprecedented acceleration in technological innovation: it took 1,700 generations for humans to develop language, then 300 generations to invent writing, and 35 generations for that to lead to the invention of the printing press. Then, focusing on the 20^th and early 21^st century, we see the development of telegraphy and photography in the 1910s, of telephony and silent film in the 1920s, of radio and sound film in the 1940s, of television and mass media around 1955, the introduction of the fax and integrated circuits around 1970, of PCs and networks around 1985, of the World Wide Web around 2000, of smartphones around 2007, of tablets around 2010, of Internet of Things around 2013 …—so try to picture the immense potential acceleration that is set to be unleashed by the upcoming of Quantum Computing. And in recent years, we have been experiencing the rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence across all sectors, drastically transforming society at an unprecedented pace—with this trend expected to gain additional momentum.

Between these technological accelerations and its consequences, care should therefore take center stage, shifting the focus from the question “How can a system be optimized?” to the question “How to nurture human and non-human well-being?”. By approaching developments with a sense of agency, as an active practice, we aim at fostering desirable futures—from “Agents of Change” to “Agents of Care”!

Pursuing such an approach of “inhabiting technology”, we developed in 1989 with the project “Public Media Urban Interfaces” visions of combined public urban and media networks, strengthening the public character of media space and of urban space and formulating the concept of hybrid space. Since the Internet and digital technologies were still in their infancy at that time and their applications had not yet been established, we could with great freedom speculate about possible alternative scenarios for the interaction of digital and urban networks and develop models that would enable all city dwellers to actively participate bottom-up in media culture, anchoring the Digital in our urban experience.

“Public Media Urban Interfaces” has served as our “meta-world,” and over the course of several decades, we have developed projects based on its network paradigm and logic, giving rise to a wide range of new fields of work, such as ‘Soft Urbanism’, ‘Hybrid Diplomacy’, ‘NatureTecture’, and ‘Networked Architecture’.

This reflects the changes in the nature of our environments. In our networked environments, the distinction and polarity of private (domestic) versus public space is dissolving. Public and private (domestic) environments are becoming intermingled and blurring; and examples of such networked hybrid spaces are to be found everywhere in in our daily lives: in our homes becoming so-called ‘smart’ and our cars networked spaces; in the implosion of intimacy on so-called Social Media; in the media presence of war intruding into our living rooms; and in the islands of private (communication) space created by mobile phones within public urban space. Physical spaces and objects should therefore not be viewed in isolation. Instead, they should be considered in the context of and in relation to the networked systems to which they belong.

With politics, the economy, warfare, culture, knowledge development, and social interaction in general increasingly taking place within the realms of information-communication networks, digital networks have been in the recent decades fundamentally transforming the way we live, interact, and perceive our world. Digital networks are influencing and interacting with our physical places, thereby transforming the social, economic, and cultural organization of our societies as a whole. Consequently, the focus is shifting away from a mindset based on clearly defined categories and identities as well as discrete units, toward interconnections and networks.

Conscious of the interdependence of humans, animals, and plants, and with a comprehensive understanding of nature as a web of relationships—as a network—we are developing the KOSMOS project.

Drawing on the understanding of culture and of sustainability as necessarily polyphonic practices, the KOSMOS project involves international cultural players, artists, creatives, and other experts in collaborative practices. KOSMOS evolves into a fictional universe that is gradually enriched, narrated, and constructed through the interaction of an international network of participants. This co-creative approach favors mutual contamination and enrichment across different fields, practices, and backgrounds, thereby enabling experimentation and developing meaningful models to discuss and envision.

KOSMOS is developed as a platform that can be accessed from anywhere, serving as a meeting place where experiences are processed in formats such as online symposia, discussions, and workshops. Through the content it generates, KOSMOS evolves into an archive of international contemporary cultural debates and discourses. At the same time, KOSMOS is anchored in physical space through mobile interfaces that can travel internationally and support hybrid workshops around the globe, thereby embedding KOSMOS in sociocultural environments worldwide.

Current challenges such as the climate crisis and the increasing loss of biodiversity compel us to overcome the nature-culture divide, as this dichotomy between humans and their environments is closely linked to worldviews that consider humans as separate from—and superior to—the context from which we emerge. KOSMOS is committed to a worldview that regards nature and culture so closely interwoven that they cannot be considered separately, and therefore also focuses on alternative narratives that integrate other systems of knowledge and ways of conceiving the world that could help us address the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Taking into consideration the current global climate and biodiversity crises, the fictional landscapes of KOSMOS weave therefore together possible utopian and dystopian futures into imaginary worlds—in the most genuine sense of world-making and world-generating, as a cosmogony, creating possibilities for future existences.

By developing an international network of exchange that addresses both cultural as well as environmental challenges, KOSMOS reflects the approaches of two prominent German intellectuals: the brothers Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), who researched the networked character of culture, and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who explored nature as a networked system. The project’s name pays homage to Alexander von Humboldt’s magnum opus “Kosmos”, which explores the natural world in the intricate interplay of all its elements and dimensions. Published between 1845 and 1862 in the encyclopedic spirit of the era, the work chronicles Humboldt’s travels and observations. Rich in imagery, it stands as a beautiful, comprehensive, and insightful exploration of the natural world—one that continues to inspire and shape scientific thought to this very day.

Offering space for more-than-human alliances and innovative venues dedicated to global cultural interaction and exchange, KOSMOS is an attempt to create a public-oriented visual map of knowledge about the interconnectedness of our world—with the aim that its ever-expanding speculative worlds challenge, inspire, and inform our thinking. KOSMOS thus integrates worldbuilding methodologies drawn from the gaming sector alongside artistic processes of constructing imaginary worlds; feeding into and contributing to making other future worlds possible—by imagining them and telling their stories. As an experimentation space for our common nature-cultural futures, and grounded in a regenerative approach centered on care for both humans and non-humans, KOSMOS views our hybrid habitats as networked living systems.

The development of the KOSMOS project has been accompanied and supported by our ongoing experimental work with our custom-made AI-agent “hAIbrid”. This AI agent—first piloted during workshop sessions such as our “Animal Club” workshop at the Amsterdam Dance Event in October 2022, or our “Humboldt Futures: KOSMOS” workshop in Berlin in January 2024—assisted us in facilitating the public presentations of the workshop results. With “hAIbrid” we were able to enrich the workshop participants’ largely speech-based public presentations in real time: we transformed their statements into prompts and, within fractions of a second, generated visualizations that served as an additional layer to the presentations—commenting upon them, satirically exaggerating them, and expanding them through “hallucinations” and absurdities, thereby further evolving the concepts and ideas that had been developed.

Our custom-made AI-agent “hAIbrid” is based on a local “Low-Rank Adaptation” (LoRA) model that fine-tunes a large, pre-trained AI model for our specific task of image processing, without consuming significant computational resources. In its initial phase, “hAIbrid”‘s LoRA draws upon a database of our own visual content. At a later stage, this database is set to be expanded to include visual contributions from KOSMOS participants. As a practice rooted in collaboration, it will thus enrich the KOSMOS project’s creative network with a networked creative tool. “hAIbrid” will evolve into an experimental ground for creative “Common Grounds”—analogous to those “Common Grounds” on natural, cultural, digital, and urban levels, whose resources are collectively shared, managed, and sustainably preserved by a community.

The LoRA constraints within “hAIbrid” enable the control of the formal visual language of the AI ​​image generator’s output. Nevertheless, acting as an autonomous agent, “hAIbrid” also enriches the creative process through “uncontrollability”—specifically through unintended results and serendipitous, accidental “mishaps.” Thus, “AI hallucinations”—often perceived as a threat—can actually enrich and support creative processes, as well as stimulate inventiveness, by broadening horizons, helping the brain forge new connections, and thereby fostering innovation.

In the course of the creative process, the visual results generated by the AI ​​are selected, combined, fused, and transformed. This combination of a networked instrument and an analog processing, blends the tangible richness of physical creative workflow with the boundless connectivity and versatility of digital realms.

Generative AI is rapidly infiltrating all life, drastically transforming creative practices and disciplines, with AI systems embodying the values of those who fund, design, and train them. The development of these techno-social systems is today largely dominated by the AI industry, wherein opaque power (infra)structures encode societal visions characterized by inequality, discrimination, and bias—potentially leading to an ‘AI-pocalypse’. From the perspective of the design and creative sectors, it is therefore imperative to influence these developments by having cultural agents appropriate this emerging technology.

It is important to also note that the uncritical use of generative AI can lead to a lack of diversity, with similar ideas, solutions, and designs emerging. Human creativity can function as a counteragent in this context—a creativity that infuses AI-driven workflows with originality, cultural relevance, and emotional depth. This synergy between human creativity and AI holds the potential to amplify human ingenuity—particularly with humans contributing creative leaps, conceptual reinterpretations and imaginative problem-solving approaches, which AI is unable to replicate. Simultaneously, AI possesses the capacity to accelerate ideation processes, expand the solution space, and dismantle technical barriers. In this process, human imagination becomes the limiting factor—thereby assigning an ever-increasing importance to human creativity.

Therefore, in our age of AI, human creativity represents the ultimate competitive advantage: while machines excel at making predictions based on what already exists, humans possess the creative power to imagine what could be—to imaginatively explore futures. Although digital generative tools have the capacity to instantly recombine and optimize content, they still nonetheless exhibit shortcomings missing lived experience, emotion, and original intent. Human creativity—characterized by its ability to embrace imperfection, take risks, and disrupt established conventions in order to develop truly novel concepts—can serve as the decisive catalyst for innovation. In the era of AI, creativity constitutes a fundamental human advantage, as it ranks among the few competencies whose value actually increases as automation advances.

Today, the new conditions of the emerging society of networked creativity force us to experiment in order to discover and develop new modes of operation. This also requires new viable business models in conjunction with societal strategies that can provide sustainable support for the creative economy and the society of networked creativity. This necessitates a broad-based societal debate. A discussion of this nature would go beyond the still narrow boundaries of a professional field, placing the practices of networked creativity at the very core of a discourse addressing broader societal issues—envisioning and designing our common futures.