SUPERRADIANCE

An interdisciplinary research lab investigating the nature of intelligence, consciousness and planetary systems through research-based art that bridges embodied experience with emerging technologies.

We know that we are deeply entangled within complex, interdependent networks and assemblages of life, composed of and embedded within expansive scales of intelligence, unfolding across multiple boundaries of self.

It’s one thing to intellectually know this, but how can we feel it, in our bodies?

Knowledge about the magnitude of the problems we face doesn’t, on its own, create the mindset to solve them. How do we metabolize this into an embodied response?

Our practice weaves together ancient biotechnologies like poetry, dance, and ritual, with artificial intelligence, simulations, and generative systems—combining computational media with scientific research to create works that explore our understandings of multi-scale cognition, consciousness, and ecological awareness through felt knowledge. Responding to the severance brought on by modernity, and working toward reconnection to the living world, we employ technological mediation as a means of exploring embodied experience rather than escaping it.

Our work ranges from large-scale responsive installations and performances to online interventions and publications.

Research Themes

Cosmosapience: Multiscale and Distributed Intelligence

Investigating the intelligence of the universe, and our place in the evolving landscape of minds.

Exploring cognition and intelligence across biological, technological, planetary, and cosmic scales, across diverse substrates and collectives.

Challenging the boundaries of self, biology, geology, and technology, contemplating the whole planet as a living cyber-organism which exists across space and time.

Ecology and the Technosphere

Cultivating ecological and environmental awareness as embodied, cognitive, and cultural practices.

Understanding technology as an ecological process, an emergent force within Earth’s biosphere and geology.

The Nature of Consciousness

Investigating consciousness, perception, awareness, and free will through artistic, scientific, and spiritual inquiry.

Technology and Societal Impact

Examining how emerging technologies shape social structures, and culture, ethics, laws, and rituals — past, present, and future.

Embodied Cognition and Expressive Human-Machine Interaction

Merging ancient biotechnologies like dance, ritual, and poetry, with emerging technologies, AI, and responsive environments to explore new modes of embodied cognition and augmented spaces for co-creative expression.

Leveraging insights from neuroscience and etc such as embodied simulation.

3min excerpts from Superradiance, 2024

Watch full film (12min) at superradiance.art

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'Making of' Superradiance, 2024

More information at superradiance.art

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Latest News & Updates

See more at shows.

Exhibitions

Performances

Talks and Panels

  • 2025 Design for Intelligence: Humans, Machines and Nature in Emergent Co-Creation, NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), San Diego, Dec 3 2025 - Speaker and panelist
  • 2025 USC Expanded Animation Seminar, USC, LA CA US - Guest lecture
  • 2025 UCSD Chancellor’s Associates Colloquium, La Jolla, CA US - Keynote speaker
  • 2025 MIT Critical Matters Group, MIT, Boston MA US - Guest lecture
  • 2025 Future Figures: Dance and Emerging Technologies, Jacob’s Pillow, Berkshires, MA, US - Speaker and panelist
  • 2025 Jeffrey B. Graham Perspectives on Ocean Science Lecture series, Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, CA, US - Keynote speaker
  • 2025 Spectra Synthesis lecture series with USC School of Cinematic Arts, Spectra Studios, LA, CA, US - Speaker
  • 2024 The Impact of AI on the Humanities lecture series at Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Claremont McKenna College, Athenaeum, CA, US - Keynote speaker
  • 2024 UnfoldX Festival, Seoul, South Korea - Speaker and panelist
  • 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, NY, US - Panelist
  • 2024 Venice Biennale, Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione, Venice, Italy - Artist talk

Press

About Us

Memo Akten

Memo Akten profile image

Katie Hofstadter

Katie Hofstadter profile image

Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter are Southern California based interdisciplinary artists and researchers, whose work investigates the entanglements of technology, embodiment, consciousness, and culture. Merging backgrounds in dance, writing, poetry, drawing, sculpture, computer science, artificial intelligence, computational art, and public practice, they create speculative simulations, data dramatizations, immersive installations, and narrative experiments that probe the human condition in an age of artificial intelligence and accelerating transformation.

Memo Akten is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and computer scientist working with emerging technologies both as creative medium, and as subject of critical inquiry. He creates Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatizations that probe the cultural, social, and ecological impacts of our contemporary techno-lifestyles, and the collisions between science and spirituality, modernity and ritual, self and collective intelligence. For more than a decade, he has worked with AI, Big Data, and our Collective Consciousness as scraped and shaped by the internet, to reflect on the human condition. He holds a PhD in creative explorations into Deep Neural Networks (aka ‘AI’) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Biennale, Tribeca Film Festival, Barbican, Grand Palais, Mori Art Museum; presented at leading academic conferences such as NeurIPS and SIGGRAPH; and featured in major publications including Wired, Art in America, NY Times, and the Guardian.

Katie Hofstadter is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work investigates the complex relationships between embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. Through her diverse practice, she explores the dynamics between knowing and feeling, and examines how emerging technologies shape both cultural narratives and direct experience. She is co-founder of several global public art campaigns such as the ARORA network, bringing together over 70 artists creating new AR monuments to diverse female and gender-expansive voices in public spaces; and the Climate Clock in NYC, a global call to #actintime on the climate crisis. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, museums, festivals, and public institutions, including the Venice Biennale, Tribeca Film Festival, British Film Festival, and Jacob’s Pillow. Her work has been covered by major media outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine. Her writing appears in leading arts and literary publications including Flash Art, The Believer, BOMB, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Right Click Save.

Together, their collaborative research and practice explore how emerging technologies—particularly AI and data systems—interact with the embodied, emotional, and ecological dimensions of human experience.

Why Superradiance?

When particles (e.g. atoms, molecules) are excited (e.g. with light), they enter a higher energy state. After a while, they release that energy, typically by emitting light. This is what we call fluorescence (or phosphorescence, depending on the specific process). Normally, each particle acts independently, emitting at random times. The emissions are uncoordinated, so the light waves interfere both constructively and destructively, and the overall intensity scales linearly with the number of particles (e.g. 10× particles → 10× brightness).

In some special situations, if all the particles are in quantum coherence, their internal oscillations are phase-aligned and they behave like a single system. They act collectively, perfectly in sync. The emitted waves interfere purely constructively, fully reinforcing each other. Now the intensity grows quadratically with the number of particles (e.g. 10× particles → 100× brightness), producing a super-bright burst of light.

This is Superradiance.