A workshop series by Dr Sarah Barns and Irina Panovich, asking what kinds of intelligence we need to gather — in both senses of the word — in a time of increasingly capable AI.
This space is shaped by the thinking of everyone who enters it.
Intelligence is not exclusively human. The habitats, creatures, waterways, soils, and ecosystems of a place carry their own forms of knowing — patterns held across deep time that no machine or human mind fully comprehends.
A mangrove system reading tidal shifts. Mycelium networks distributing nutrients. Migratory birds navigating by magnetic fields. These are not metaphors. They are intelligences.
This terrain is a collective space. When you submit a brief — who you are, what you're working on, what question you carry — it enters an embedding space and shifts the landscape.
Where more participants' thinking converges, the terrain rises. Where the space is sparse, it feels like open ground with its own quiet presence. Not empty. Open.
Contributions shape the terrain, not populate a feed.
The workshop happens on Aboriginal land. Country is not a backdrop. It is an active, intelligent, relational presence. Country-centred methods understand that land, water, sky, and all living systems hold knowledge and agency.
The most sophisticated AI system is still a newcomer in a world of ancient, distributed, multi-species intelligence.
Submit a brief to shape the landscape. Your words will be embedded into the collective space — positioned by conceptual kinship, not alphabetical order. You'll find others thinking near you.