Luisa Ji
Luisa Ji is a multi-disciplinary creative, designer, and strategist. She is the Studio Lead at UKAI Projects where she designs and delivers arts programming, digital strategy, and digital infrastructure for cultural production, through principles of transvaluation and prefiguration. She believes that people need to participate in the experiences of art and author their own stories through art, rather than viewing artworks from a distance. Most days, she finds herself stewarding provocative arts programs and projects that embody polyphony and a profound sense of weirdness.
Living systems of ecological succession and perpetual change are foundational to how Luisa delivers experiences that invite people to inhabit digital or digitally augmented worlds with curiosity and wonder. She draws connections between experiences of migration (digital and physical) and narratives (official and non-official) of species that are non-endemic to a particular bioregion as useful metaphors when designing conditions for collaboration, cooperation, and the mending of relationships. As an avid gardener, Luisa is interested in various cultural practices, experiences of diaspora, techniques, and technologies (hybrid of rediscovered and emerging) that can be found while tending soil and applied through interacting with the biodiversity in urban environments.
Q&A
What problems are you interested in solving?
Obscuring our relationships with the natural world only exacerbates the issues we are collectively facing: failure of centralized infrastructure, habitat loss, increased surveillance, and most importantly, losing our agency in creating better futures. I'm deeply concerned about our collective futures under accelerating climate damages, not because of the disasters, but the lack of cultures, tools, and techniques tangible enough for us to make new worlds and keep making art together when "normal" centralized systems fail. Creating "solutions" or "ways of solutioning" is urgent yet takes time. I want to keep developing the thoughts around integrating our fundamental being into understanding how digital infrastructure can better our lives rather than holding us hostage under capitalism and colonial constructs.
What areas of work can people contact you for?
Digital strategy, cultural production, arts programming, art as infrastructure, ecological aesthetics. Multidisciplinary collaborations leveraging digital and non-digital algorithmic systems.
Where can people find you?
ground-work.studio
ukaiprojects.com
