Artistic research today encounters the critical challenge of extending beyond its immediate context and bridging disciplinary divides. In a landscape where art, culture, and both local and global policy intersect within complex societal dynamics, the question arises: how can artistic researchers actively contribute to shaping these dialogues? We propose that addressing this question first requires understanding how artistic research can truly resonate beyond its specific contexts and disciplinary frameworks.
To foster this resonance, we introduce °'°Kobi, an AI-driven research platform designed to build connections across diverse fields and stimulate expansive, creative inquiry. Here, resonance is understood as the creation of a dynamic relationship between artistic research and the broader world—one that supports reflection, exchange, and a capacity for mutual transformation. As art and culture engage with increasingly interconnected challenges, there is a growing need for tools that transcend disciplinary boundaries to foster collaborative exploration. °'°Kobi is conceived to meet this need, establishing spaces for interdisciplinary dialogue and intellectual cross-pollination.
°'°Kobi functions to dissolve disciplinary silos by leveraging AI to process and integrate a diverse corpus of artistic and scientific publications into a connected knowledge ecosystem. Within this system, each knowledge fragment—whether a text, image, or media element—is assigned a semantic position in an interdisciplinary knowledge universe. Through advanced analytical processes, the AI identifies core concepts, keywords, and titles, establishing meaningful links between items based on thematic resonance.
For users, an AI chatbot manages interactions, responding to inquiries with contextually rich insights drawn from the knowledge base. These responses encourage users to explore alternative perspectives, uncover unexpected connections, and engage deeply with ideas across disciplines, thus fostering a fertile ground for interdisciplinary inquiry and creative engagement.
The dual nature of artistic education, which combines the study of theoretical disciplines like art theory and aesthetics with the development of skills and competencies through experience and practice, is now influenced by artificial intelligence technology. Beyond tools that utilize so-called 'artificial creativity' or 'pseudo-creativity,' concepts defining the unique creative abilities of machines, certain AI models are proving particularly useful in enhancing associative and combinatory creativity, essential in the early exploratory phases of an artistic project. This is the case with LLMs (Large Language Models), advanced AI models capable of understanding and generating natural language, which are integrated into the technological infrastructure of °'°Kobi, whose name explicitly reflects the platform’s nature and purpose.
The etymological choice, derived from the combination of the Greek terms “koinos” (κοινός), meaning “common” or “shared,” and “bios” (βίος), meaning “life” or “existence,” reflects an educational approach that embraces the notion of an ecosystem applied to learning contexts and digital archiving based on collective intelligence. Indeed, students, under the supervision of professors, can actively contribute to expanding °'°Kobi by creating projects within the Research Catalogue, a database that forms the platform’s knowledge base through a collaboration with the Society for Artistic Research.
In addition to being a system of interactions and sedimentation of memories, digital and biological, individual and collective, °'°Kobi allows for semantic exploration that facilitates a non-conventional cognitive process, open to multiple directions. By using the principle of proximity, the system identifies similarities and polar opposites by grouping related information, facilitating the organization, interconnection, and interpretation of complex ideas and concepts.
°'°Kobi presents itself to the user with two different interfaces: a chatbot, which allows for a conversation on a topic proposed by the user, and “Universe,” a constellation of thematic and conceptual nodes designed to be explored even in augmented reality. The Universe is characterized by spheres of different sizes and colors, which respectively distinguish semantic contexts, concepts, and keywords, interconnected by a network of lines created by the principle of semantic proximity. With these two exploratory modes, °'°Kobi offers an experience that informs and deconstructs, leading to unexpected places and expanding the horizon of discovery and learning.
Therefore, the AI-mediated educational environment promotes a non-linear learning process, acting as a catalyst for divergent thinking, one of the main indicators used to identify and measure creativity. Unlike convergent thinking, which focuses on finding a single correct solution or the best choice among predefined options, divergent thinking encourages an approach that explores unusual alternatives, new and original ideas—concepts that form the basis of the standard definition of creativity.
As an ecosystem fueled by the same artistic community that uses it, °'°Kobi proposes a paradigm of collective intelligence and creativity where processes are materially and temporally distributed, accommodating the needs and modes of a society interconnected and immersed in online realities. For digital natives, as highlighted by the entry “Creativity in the Future” from the Encyclopedia of Creativity (2020), creativity is no longer identified with the romantic image of the solitary and extraordinary genius but is rather a daily, collective, and relational activity, accessible to all and experienced everywhere.
Responding to Francesco d’Isa’s invitation to see artificial intelligence as a mirror, we present below a summary that outlines the internal structure of °'°Kobi, allowing the reader to undertake a meta-reading that captures the overlaps and dissonances between the processes that animate artistic creation and those that underlie the °'°Kobi knowledge ecosystem.