Luisa produces projects that amplify the beauty of the biodiversity in urban areas. Her work incorporates patterns and principles observed in natural ecologies into the designs of everyday work, life, and environments. She works in partnership with multidisciplinary collaborators to investigate what it means to be connected to a place and what it means to care for a place. A place can be digital, in real life, and somewhere in-between.
About Luisa Ji
Luisa Ji (M.ARCH) is a multi-disciplinary creative, designer, and strategist. She develops participatory works that enable collective sense-making with people on issues surrounding the technologies interwoven into the living environment and ecology. She is also a gardener and practitioner of permaculture in urban environments.
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 leverages ecological systems as useful metaphors when designing conditions for collaboration, cooperation, and the mending of relationships.
Luisa is the studio lead at UKAI Projects, where she stewards arts programs and projects that investigate the aesthetics of infrastructure and the entanglement of technology with how humans and non-humans craft and inhabit the world.
Areas of Focus
Digital Ecologies
Strategies for brands, digital products, organizational cultures, and other places where the digital meets the real.
The digital is the real. The real has always been plural. Interactions at the edges and margins of the digital and the real can be designed and lived as curious, inspired, and perhaps a little whimsical.
Intelligent Terrain
Long-term research into ecological, cultural, and material layers of “Intelligent Machines” centred on land, body, and migration in response to broader questions of algorithmic culture, automated systems, and the underlying technologies of abstraction and extraction.
From stone tablets to silicon chips, intelligent machines are not further away from the land than an engraved piece of stone. To varying degrees, we are organized by our landscapes.
Residencies: Land, Body, Movements 2022 | Field Notes 2024
Research Groups: Feral Inquiries 2024
Writings & Experiments (tba)