APRiCot Garden 2025: Research as Regenerative Practice.“Artistic Intelligence as Practiced Incommensurability” by Antonia Majaca

In this  lecture, Antonia Majaca unfolds a radical epistemological framework that reimagines how knowledge systems might coexist beyond both conflict and subsumption. Drawing on Lynn Margulis's revolutionary concept of symbiogenesis—where evolutionary innovation emerges through incorporation rather than competition—Majaca  explores how artistic intelligence, with its capacity to embrace ambiguity, embodied knowledge, and non-linear causality, offers unique tools for cultivating what she terms "practiced incommensurability"—holding together different epistemologies without forcing false synthesis. Unlike the epistemology of machine learning and correlational statistics that seeks to eliminate complexity, artistic intelligence thrives precisely where calculation falters: in the realm of the ephemeral, the contradictory, the felt rather than computable. This "contradictory universal” offers an alternative path beyond both relativistic fragmentation and totalizing synthesis—a necessary intervention for navigating the interlocking crises of our planetary condition.

About: Antonia Majaca

About: APRiCot Garden 2025: Research as Regenerative Practice