Anyspace? Whatever. (AW) is a solo exhibition and participatory arena on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The project interrogates the “smart city” and the politics of generative AI, making invisible systems of data extraction and governance legible and contestable through physical making, play, and technologically mediated dialogue. Supported by the USRAO AI & Creativity Commission, this work serves as a critical platform for reimagining civic agency in the age of automated systems.

Exhibition Works and The Rotunda Centering the physical works was paramount to testing our research hypotheses in a public setting. The Rotunda functioned as the core architectural and conceptual anchor of the gallery space. Funding from USRAO CRAIONS enabled the material fabrication, technical integration, and spatial design required to bring this complex work to life. By engaging directly with The Rotunda and surrounding pieces, visitors were invited to experience the tangible intersections of spatial computing, material design, and automated systems rather than encountering these concepts solely in the abstract.

Artist Reflection

At rootoftwo, our practice has always been fundamentally concerned with making the invisible systems that govern our lives legible, tangible, and contestable. Since our studio’s formation in 1998, we have utilized physical making and computing practices to subvert and reimagine the democratic dilemmas arising from ubiquitous computing, surveillance, and the under-imagined futures of the so-called “smart city.” Anyspace? Whatever. (AW), was conceived as a provocation, an emblem, and a host site for reciprocal exchanges and people’s assemblies, the exhibition is designed to instigate creative actions against the frictionless, unconsenting data extraction of contemporary urban life.

We find our conceptual framework for the project and exhibition deeply resonant with the vital policy mapping currently being published by the US Regional Arts Organizations (USRAO) through their CRAIONS (Creativity and AI: A Policy Observatory) project. Specifically, the observatory’s framing texts on Attribution & Accountability and Cultural Infrastructure & Ecology capture the exact tectonic shifts we are addressing in our studio practice. These texts articulate a systemic breakdown in how creative work—and by extension, civic identity—is recognized, valued, and sustained. We want to take this opportunity to reflect on these frameworks, examining how the unbundling of attribution and the collapse of our cultural ecology necessitate new forms of architectural and civic resistance.

The Breakdown of Legibility and the Disaggregation of the Self

The CRAIONS essay on Attribution & Accountability correctly diagnoses a structural tidal wave: the basic legibility of creative work is breaking down. The traditional mechanisms we have relied on for centuries to establish authorship, assign credit, and enforce legal accountability assumed a world in which humans made things, and that we could verify that human presence. Both of these assumptions are now defunct. 

At rootoftwo, we view this disaggregation not merely as a crisis for intellectual property, but as a profound spatial and civic vulnerability. Anyspace? Whatever. takes its starting point from Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of “any-space-whatever”—the propositional, highly surveilled spaces visualized in corporate smart city literature. In these spaces, the citizen’s identity is similarly disaggregated into extractable data points: biometric likeness, movement patterns, and behavioral essence. When an AI model scrapes the “artistic essence” of a living creator—extracting a lifelong accumulation of aesthetic decisions to power a generative tool—it mirrors how the sensor-laden city extracts the “civic essence” of its residents without explicit consent.The policy responses to this extraction are struggling to keep pace.

We believe, whether we are discussing AI and emerging technologies impact on creativity or its larger impact on society, it must be in terms of explicit, transparent negotiation. At the center of our MOCAD exhibition is The Rotunda, an immersive architectural installation that invites visitors to engage with a custom AI system. Rather than presenting this technology as a neutral background condition, we designed the interaction so that participants’ contributions gradually and transparently reshape the installation’s evolving public voice.  All of the works in the exhibition carry Human – Machine Collaboration (HMC): Visual Standards for Research and Publications labels created by the Dubai Future Foundation. https://www.dubaifuture.ae/hmc/. 

There are also additional layers of labeling and consent related to The Rotunda. We are actively prototyping what “consentful, place-based technology” looks like when the traditional layers of attribution have failed. Voluntary labeling relies on trust without enforcement or verification, provenance infrastructure as discussed in the framing text can be stripped, and recent news articles have made clear that watermarks and detection software all have failings. While these are acute issues for the arts and creativity, this extends to all knowledge production and dissemination. A common refrain in our discussion about AI, robotics, and other advanced emerging technologies is that like the climate crisis they are “planetary and existential” and our policy, governance, social, and economic structures are not fit for purpose. 

Anyspace? Whatever. serves as an antidote to the sense of inevitability surrounding contemporary technology and public life, fostering active participation and visionary thinking. Far from being a neutral intervention, The Rotunda functions as a platform for public reasoning and an exercise in deliberative democracy that actively challenges the power dynamics embedded in current concepts of innovation. By rejecting the framing of AI as a “neutral tool,” we instead position technology as a site where specific cultural, economic, and political biases are inscribed. Through this approach, we empower the public as co-authors who define the terms of engagement, thereby reclaiming agency from the “systemic inevitability” often imposed by these platforms.

Anyspace? Whatever. The Rotunda. Installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, July 11–September 20, 2026. Photos by: Timothy Johnson.

The Pipeline Problem and the Collapse of Cultural Middleware

The crisis of attribution is only half the equation. The CRAIONS framing text, Cultural Infrastructure & Ecology, diagnoses a more insidious, path-dependent crisis: the collapse of the cultural pipeline. The trust layer is in crisis, and the underlying ecology is being dismantled. As the CRAIONS observatory notes, the nonprofit model that supported American arts was already failing; AI has simply accelerated this systemic collapse.

We are currently diagnosing a profound paradigm shift using outdated metrics. In the absence of clear, measurable data, policymakers often mistake an absence of evidence for an absence of harm.

Our production of The Moment—a series of computer-generated shorts for the exhibition—serves as a direct case study in this systemic instability. We built our workflow around Google Flow, a platform designed for creative expertise. Its abrupt deprecation just days before our exhibition, replaced by the business-centric Google Vids, was not a mere software update; it was a symptom of infrastructure collapse. We are witnessing the systematic dismantling of creative-grade tools in favor of commercial interfaces designed for extraction rather than support.

For a studio like ours, years of professional mastery allowed us to navigate this volatility, but the warning is clear: we are hollowing out the capacity for authored, deep, and consistent creative work. While new commercial tools can mimic the aesthetics of a commercial or a social media story, they cannot replicate the years of “flight time” required for true creative discernment. When we replace rigorous, discipline-specific infrastructure with generic platforms designed for mass consumption, we do more than change software—we erode the embodied experience necessary for invention and structurally undermine the future of creative labor.

Prototyping New Civic Scaffolding

This dual crisis—the hyper-individualized breakdown of attribution and the macro-level collapse of our cultural ecology—presents a profound democratic dilemma. If the traditional “middleware” (the critics, venues, public funders, and mediating institutions that sort, evaluate, and sustain community dialogue) is collapsing, what replaces it?

We cannot wait for permanent policy solutions to catch up to the speed of algorithmic extraction. We must actively build new, temporary scaffolding for civic imagination. This is the core functional premise of Anyspace? Whatever. The exhibition transforms MOCAD’s galleries into a participatory arena. It is not merely a collection of aesthetic objects; it is a temporary middleware institution.

Through cooperative engagements like our tabletop game 463NCY (pronounced agency), we invite players to navigate a surveillance-driven city, forcing them to confront ethical dilemmas surrounding autonomy, data ownership, and resistance. By moving these conversations from the abstract realm of policy white papers into the tangible, embodied space of a museum gallery, we are positioning play, speculation, and co-creation as essential tools for civic survival.

We must reassert inflections that express curiosity, dismay, and ambivalence about the role of technology in shaping the public and the private. If AI is going to fundamentally change how our brains work, how our cities are governed, and how our culture is sustained, then our engagement with it cannot be limited to optimizing productivity. We must demand training data accountability not simply to protect individual intellectual property, but to preserve the cultural commons for the next generation. We must fight for an ecology where AI is utilized to spark expansive creative thinking—operating in a dynamic interplay of compression and tension with human artists—rather than acting as an engine for wholesale substitution.

Negotiating the Future

The future of our digital and physical worlds is not predetermined; it is something that must be negotiated together. The frameworks provided by the USRAO’s CRAIONS project offer an essential lens for this negotiation, cutting through the inevitable-progress narratives pushed by the tech sector to reveal the functional realities of what is actually at stake.

As we continue to host these vital conversations through our project Anyspace? Whatever. at MOCAD through September 20th, we invite policymakers, technologists, and the public to join us in this ground-up visioning work. Reimagining the civic machine requires more than just better software; it requires a renewed commitment to the ecologies that sustain human flourishing. Through critical research, tangible interaction, and collective inquiry, we can build the equitable, consentful architectures necessary to thrive in the age of generative systems.

AI Transparency & Methodology

This reflection serves as the official final report to the USRAO CRAIONS project, documenting the outcomes, methodological frameworks, and critical insights generated by our recent exhibition. Generous support from the USRAO CRAIONS project directly funded the development and realization of our centerpiece installation, The Rotunda, anchored alongside the broader body of works presented in the gallery.

Attribution, Transparency, and Provenance 

rootoftwo_AW_AI Transparency Documentation.pdf

A primary objective of this exhibition was confronting the persistent challenges surrounding attribution, transparency, and creative provenance in tech-augmented artwork. To address this directly across all works—including The Rotunda—we implemented the Dubai Future Foundation’s Human-Machine Labels throughout the exhibition space.

These standardized labels were utilized to explicitly delineate the degree of human involvement versus machine autonomy in the creation, design, and execution of each piece. By detailing dataset lineage, algorithmic generation, and human editorial control directly on the wall placards, we sought to provide visitors with a clear baseline of provenance.

We recognize, however, that deploying the Dubai Future Foundation framework is not a perfect or definitive solution. The labels offer a pragmatic taxonomy for categorization, but they inevitably struggle to capture the fluid, highly iterative, and often ambiguous realities of human-machine collaboration. It is also a voluntary framework, without enforcement or verification. Despite these limitations, utilizing this framework was a critical step toward fostering public visual literacy, encouraging ethical accountability, and opening a necessary dialogue on how creative labor is credited in contemporary practice. More details are linked above.

Transparency

Models / Tools Used

yes

Dataset Sources

yes

Consent / Stewardship Plan

yes