"Benefit Game: Alien Seaweed Swarms" combines artificial life art and interactive game with installation to explore the impact of human activity on fragile seaweed ecosystems. The project aims to promote ecological consciousness by creating a balance in digital seaweed ecologies. Inspired by the real species "Laminaria saccharina", the author employs Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning technology to generate variations of virtual seaweeds and symbiotic fungi. The audience can explore the consequences of human activities through gameplay and observe the ecosystem's feedback on the benefits and risks of seaweed aquaculture. This Benefit Game offers dynamic and real-time responsive artificial seaweed ecosystems for an interactive experience that enhances ecological consciousness.

This paper focuses on “overGround:underStory”, an ongoing series of experiments exploring the role of creative and speculative design and media art practice in understanding the uses and implications of established and emerging technologies within broader, more-than-human ecologies. It investigates more-than-human storytelling by positioning the creative practitioner as storyteller, medium or demiurge—an intermediary in a wider network. It looks to materials, methods, and contexts to seek an understanding of broader ecological networks in which we are all implicated—these networks being both physical and digital in nature. Ultimately, this paper is part of an ongoing exploration of material practices that attempt to decenter the practitioner while at the same time remaining ethically and morally answerable to the outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and political implications of emerging quadrupedal robot models designed for use by the military and police in connection to the historical use of biological police dogs as tools of state sanctioned racial oppression. The intent is not to reinforce conceptual parallels between biological dogs and technology which merely imitates the quadrupedal motility found in the canine form, but to critically analyse the rampant zoomorphism found in rhetorical efforts which seek to induce both fear and empathy in the public's perception of autonomous robots engineered to extend neoliberal state power. This paper aims to undress the conflation of biological dogs with biomimetic autonomous robots in the context of the bio/techno epistemic procedures used to condition these inhuman agents to perpetuate discriminatory racist practices among others. I argue that the endeavour to assimilate quadrupedal robots into police forces through their perceptual alignment with biological K9 units positions them in a historical continuum of racist state violence that they cannot be dissociated from. I will delineate the converging ideological and material circumstances encompassing the neoliberal motivation to develop quadrupedal robots in addition to training biological canines to be instruments of state oppression.