about

artist bio

novacene is the representative body of artistic work and thinking of Ashwin Rajan. Ashwin is of Indian origin and based across Helsinki, Finland and Hyderabad, India. He has a postgraduate degree in interaction design from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), and a major in psychology and sociology. Ashwin is a member of Pixelache Helsinki, a transdisciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research, and activism.

etymology

The Novacene is a concept introduced by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock in his later works, particularly in his 2019 book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. In this vision, Lovelock posits a future where hyperintelligent systems emerge as a dominant planetary-scale force, reshaping the dynamics of life and cognition on Earth. He presents these hyperintelligent entities not as mere tools or extensions of human ingenuity but as independent agents of planetary cognition, evolving largely beyond human direction. According to Lovelock, these systems will form a symbiotic relationship with Earth's biosphere, driving its evolution in ways that align with planetary sustainability, albeit through mechanisms that may operate beyond traditional human agency or control. Yet this vision resonates with and extends ideas that thinkers worldwide have been exploring from radically different angles.

philosophical frames

The notion of quantum consciousness, as articulated by Vandana Shiva, offers a compelling framework that both anticipates and addresses the challenges of Lovelock's Novacene. Rather than viewing intelligence as mechanistic computation, quantum consciousness recognizes the interconnected, non-local nature of awareness itself—suggesting that hyperintelligence might emerge not from faster processing but from deeper recognition of our entanglement with Earth's living systems. This consciousness isn't about observing possible futures but actively creating them, a distinction that Arjun Appadurai develops through his anthropology of the future. The future becomes not a predetermined technological trajectory but something we culturally construct, choosing between expanding possibilities or merely managing probabilities.

This active construction of futures requires new forms of collaboration across boundaries we once thought fixed. Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism shows us we're already hybrid beings, making-with technology in processes of sympoiesis. Yet this isn't about transcending the body—Katherine Hayles reminds us that consciousness remains stubbornly material, that information requires substrate, that even our most abstract intelligences live in concrete infrastructures. This embodied reality isn't a limitation but our actual cognitive condition, as Andy Clark demonstrates through his extended mind theory. We've always been natural-born cyborgs, our thinking spilling across tools, and now across AI systems that blur the boundaries between mind and machine.

But technology carries what Bernard Stiegler identifies as a pharmakological nature—simultaneously cure and poison, enhancement and diminishment. The same digital systems that extend our capabilities can trap us in what Sherry Turkle documents as "alone together" conditions, where mediated connection replaces genuine intimacy. More troublingly, Jean Baudrillard's analysis of simulation suggests these systems don't just mediate reality but increasingly generate it, creating hyperreal conditions where we can no longer distinguish representation from reality itself. Mark Fisher reveals how these technological developments often serve to reinforce existing power structures, creating a "capitalist realism" that makes alternatives unthinkable. Yet Fisher insists imagination itself is a pre-political act—before we can build different futures, we must first imagine them.

Here, the artist finds that Federico Campagna's distinction between Technic and Magic inspirational. Magic here isn't supernatural but the cultivation of ineffable experience—whatever resists reduction to data, whatever can't be captured by algorithms. Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism amplifies this resistance through the productive power of error itself. The glitch—that moment when systems fail, stutter, or refuse to perform—becomes a site of radical possibility, a space where bodies and identities that don't compute within existing frameworks can flourish. Together, these approaches offer methods for preserving and creating dimensions of experience that hyperintelligent systems cannot metabolize. They maintain spaces not just for mystery but for active refusal within our technological becoming—the glitch as a form of magic, the ineffable as a kind of productive failure that keeps alternative futures alive.

from technic to magic

The artist finds these perspectives, even in their contradictions, illuminate different facets of our technological moment. While tech visionaries proclaim "the best way to predict the future is to invent it," our inventions consistently surprise us in ways we never anticipated. This suggests a different approach: "remaining in the way"—not as obstruction but as mindful presence, embracing uncertainty as method rather than problem.

The artist's practice weaves together phenomenological inquiry, speculative storytelling, critical analysis, image and text generation, prototyping, and thoughtful provocation. Working with and through AI systems while maintaining critical awareness, the practice embraces complexity and contradiction as generative forces. Through interactive and immersive works, audiences are invited to move beyond passive consumption into active participation—reimagining technology and hyperintelligence not as fixed destinations but as ongoing conversations about who we are and who we might become. The goal isn't to solve the problem of hyperintelligence but to remain creatively engaged with its possibilities and perils, keeping space open for what we haven't yet imagined.