When I am faced with an open-ended question, my first instinct is to read. For many years I believed I was a bit of a one-trick-pony. I could read and write, and think complex thoughts, but, unlike my artist friends, I could not materialize my thoughts into beautiful, visual works of art. This limited understanding of art or artistic capability as rooted only in the capacity to produce visual pieces followed me for many years, but broke down slowly as I engaged more with systems of making that reshaped my perspective.
When I completed my undergraduate studies, I believed I would have a linear, literary-focused career. However, like most, my life took on a different trajectory and instead I spent the next ten years working in technology and urban design.
What I did not understand at the time was that this trajectory was not a total shift away from the elements of literature and storytelling that I loved – opportunities to understand and examine our world in new ways, through new eyes – but more of a shift toward it at the scale of systems.
The questions I had once approached through novels and close reading began reappearing in infrastructures, platforms, and institutions. Why our streets were shaped in particular ways, how to build memory into spaces, what it takes to create a harmonious community. I started to see design systems as cultural and narrative ones, where memory, interpretation, and curation were central operations.
Today, I am a doctoral student with a focus on institutions of memory. Archives are necessary and ancient infrastructure, but in the past few decades, the parties with a monopoly on data storage are for-profit tech companies with political ambitions. This creates an interesting tension around what gets saved, how much of it is accessible, and who gets to access it.
Now, what I am increasingly interested in is more than the technical or political dimension of this tension, but the kinds of intelligence required to work inside it. It is here that my thinking around artistic intelligence begins to take shape, as something that becomes absolutely necessary within systems work.
This question first began to percolate in my mind during my earlier work in smart cities, where I became interested in how large scale systems are designed not only technically, but socially and narratively. In this sense, I have found myself influenced by Bruno Latour’s work on actor-networks, particularly the idea that infrastructures are assemblies of human and non-human actors producing a shared reality. The city is never just infrastructure and built environment, it’s also a story about communities, coordination, governance, and who is allowed to belong within its boundaries. Once you begin to see cities this way, you also begin to notice that design work is always already a form of storytelling, even when it presents itself as purely technical.
I lived for a period in Amsterdam and worked Berlin, both of which gave me a new perspective on complex cities. I supported a start up working to make it easier for other start ups to scale and access capital, and that work was deeply multi-disciplinary, as so much of urban work is. Managing a project with so many factors requires a level of whimsy, unending optimism, and elastic thinking that stretches to accommodate new challenges.
It also requires moving between different registers of reality without privileging one as fully authoritative.
In retrospect, I would connect this to what Anna Tsing describes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, where systems are not coherent wholes but contingent arrangements that hold together through uneven and often fragile coordination.
This attention to how systems actually assemble themselves is something I later recognized in certain approaches to urban design. Gehl Architects has had a unique and global impact on urban design with their focus on people focused place making. Their approach was novel in how it treated observation as a design tool, paying close attention to how people actually inhabit space rather than how they are assumed to move through it. Jane Jacobs’ earlier work in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is an important precursor here, particularly her insistence that urban order is produced through lived complexity rather than top-down abstraction. What I find particularly moving is the fact that within this framework, seeing, noticing, and attending are central design instruments.
SPACE10, Ikea’s innovation lab, worked to investigate issues around future living, sustainability, and the role of design in everyday life. What interested me most in this context was both the speculative nature of the work and the way research itself was staged as a design practice. I had a professor who really engrained in me that, as a researcher, sometimes no findings are also findings. You cannot always predict what the outcome of an experiment will be, but leading with curiosity and openness creates a channel for deeply interesting outcomes. This also connects to Donald Schön’s idea of the “reflective practitioner”, where professional knowledge is something that emerges through iterative engagement with uncertain situations. It also resonates with more contemporary work in design anthropology, particularly the idea that speculation is itself a method of inquiry rather than a departure from it.
Across these experiences, I kept returning to a similar idea, the ability to hold multiple systems of meaning at once without collapsing them into a single logic was necessary and additive in all situations.
I spent the first part of my career in urban design, working with smart city and architecture firms redesigning public spaces. What struck me most was that these teams were built of urbanists, designers, engineers, facilitators, government relations experts, mobility researchers and more. Each role required a particular specialty, but most importantly, each team required a capacity to think broadly, to reimagine new and engaging possibilities, and to hold together competing constraints without resolving them prematurely. This confluence of experiences and a greater willingness to meet colleagues and partners in the middle reflects the John Law’s idea of “messy realities”, where full clarity is always only partial, as we contend with competing or conflicting ideas.
At this point, I started to notice that what I was describing was not just a feature of urban design, but something closer to a general condition of working across complex systems. It is also where my reading began to feel directly connected to practice rather than separate from it.
Rasheed Araeen described the work of renowned Pakistani contemporary artist Imran Mir as an “attempt to create a world that is not entirely reflective but contemplative”.
His work was geometric, non-figurative, and non-representational, and creates a space where seeing is not immediately converted into recognition.
I have many of his pieces saved on my computer and I look at them often, thinking about how perspective shapes so much of our experience of the world. I have found myself returning to this idea of contemplative world-making, where attention itself becomes a practice that resists immediate resolution. This also aligns with Susan Sontag’s argument in “Against Interpretation”, where she suggests that interpretation can sometimes flatten the encounter with form rather than deepen it.
This idea of resisting immediate resolution is also what I encountered in my undergraduate studies in comparative literature. The close reading practices I developed there now feel continuous with the kinds of interpretive work I find myself doing in infrastructure studies, where one is constantly reading systems as texts, and texts as systems. This methodological overlap is something that also appears in the work of Franco Moretti, particularly his notion of “distant reading”, which shifts attention from individual texts to patterns across large literary systems. Both approaches require attention to relational meaning rather than isolated elements.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement is one of the texts that made this connection most explicit for me. The book is dedicated to interrogating the stories we tell ourselves about climate change, and why these narratives are not more widely discussed outside of technical or climate sectors. Ghosh approaches the topic as a writer, and breaks down the “derangement” of ignoring climate change with a deep awareness of the western canon. What makes the work compelling is not only its argument, but its form, where narrative becomes a method of revealing the limits of what dominant frameworks can accommodate. This also resonates with Lauren Berlant’s work on “cruel optimism”, where attachment to existing narrative structures can persist even when they no longer serve lived conditions.
In this sense, Ghosh and Mir are not unrelated references in my thinking, but part of the same conceptual thread. In Mir’s work, there is no insistence on representation as explanation. In Ghosh’s writing, there is a similar refusal to let narrative remain purely descriptive or neutral. In both cases, form becomes a way of exposing what otherwise remains structurally unseen.
When I bring these threads together, what I am circling is a definition of artistic intelligence that does not sit inside art practice alone.
Instead, it appears wherever there is a need to work across incompatible systems of meaning without forcing premature coherence. It is present in how urban projects are assembled across disciplines, in how infrastructure is read as narrative, and in how stories shape what becomes thinkable as a solution.
What I continue to return to is that artistic intelligence is not a separate domain of expertise. It is a mode of working with incompleteness. It allows for multiple forms of knowledge to remain active at once, without forcing them into a single explanatory frame. In that sense, it is as much about reading as it is about making, and as much about interpretation as it is about design.
And if this remains unfinished, it is because I do not experience it as a settled concept. It is something I recognize in practice before I can fully define it in theory, and something that continues to shift as I move between research, reading, and work.
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