Mapping Self Through Sound: An Interview with Ari Melenciano
Ari Melenciano, Cosmeage (2025). 3D rendered animation film, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
The phrase “working at the intersection of art and technology” has become memeified to a certain degree—so frequently repeated that it now signals more toward trendiness than substance. In a world increasingly steeped in technological solutionism, the art world has responded, in part, with a market appetite for art products that conflate the use of emerging tools with originality. Artist Ari Melenciano, however, has consistently kept people, histories, bodies, and lineages at the center of her practice while using nascent technologies such as 360 spatial sound, AI, interactive gameplay, and motion capture.
Melenciano and I first crossed paths working on Traveling the Interstitium with Octavia Butler, a WebXR experience that premiered at Sundance New Frontiers in 2021. Since then, I’ve come to know her as the artist, designer, and systems thinker she is—someone whose work “engages emerging technologies, public inquiry, and ritual.” She is also the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that builds community at the intersection of culture, art, design, and technology.
Ari Melenciano, Cosmeage (2025). 3D rendered animation film, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Melenciano’s multimedia work is organic and vibrant. Her films, XR experiences, and installations invite a way of relating to design where even the everyday becomes artful. It’s no surprise that her early references span from Salvador Dalí to Melina Matsoukas to Steve Jobs. Melenciano’s work exemplifies what becomes possible when artists resist the pressure to narrow their focus or aesthetic. The result is a practice that is both thematically and functionally expansive, sustained by a porous and iterative approach to research.
It's just staying open. Very, very open. It's not necessarily that I feel like I'm going to create a project on everything I read or watch—but it's something that I know is going to stay in the back of my mind. I think by staying present with everything from spirituality to philosophy to design to geography and politics, I find different ways that they are interconnected, and then it becomes a backbone to a larger project. It's about staying open and absorbing a lot, and eventually something pops up.
Ari Melenciano, Cosmeage (2025). 3D rendered animation film, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Melenciano’s latest work, now showing at the Bronx Museum as part of the Working Knowledge exhibition, explores knowledge as an evolving, embodied exchange. Cosmeage—a term she coined by combining “cosmos” and “lineage”—is a film nested within a mythic world she’s been developing for years. The piece features 3D renderings of dancers accompanied by a composite score blending diasporic musical traditions. When asked how she found the narrative thread for the piece, Melenciano says:
The idea is that memory lives in our body from the beginning of our existence as sentient beings. This understanding formed when I started dancing almost daily and developed [sic] a new relationship between my body and how it engages with sound. As I became more comfortable in my body, I began moving in ways I didn’t recognize. In my research, I discovered that neurobiologically, when your senses experience something connected to your lineage, it can trigger emotions and memories that you may not have lived yourself but that are part of your epigenetics and DNA.
Ari Melenciano, Cosmeage (2025). 3D rendered animation film, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Cosmeage proposes memory not as a fixed archive but as a living, embodied force—sensory, ancestral, and ever-present. Melenciano reframes memory as something that travels across generations and is reawakened through stimuli: a taste, a rhythm, a gesture. Within diasporic and psycho-spiritual frameworks, memory becomes a cellular and energetic inheritance—alive in the body and the nervous system. It emerges through touch, sound, and intuition.
In the world of Cosmeage, there are 12 different archetypes that all represent different aspects of the way that I exist as an artist. I was very invested in setting my art practice foundationally, giving myself an understanding of who I am and what I’m drawn to. These nodes are then given motifs in the form of archetypes I can tap into whenever I'm creating something. They become lenses for me to understand the world through psychoanalysis.
Ari Melenciano, Cosmeage (2025). 3D rendered animation film, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Melenciano’s archetype framework is both myth-making and self-mapping. Rather than anchoring her art in a singular identity, she disperses her interiority across twelve mythic figures—think trickster, healer, oracle, wanderer—each embodying a facet of her experience. By letting these characters speak and act in her work, she shows the audience many angles of herself at once, rather than collapsing everything into one fixed persona. They act as studio tools and narrative stand-ins that prevent unchecked projection and invite a layered authorship. In doing so, Melenciano transforms the philosophical problem of subjectivity into a pragmatic and poetic method. The archetypes multiply her perspective as a maker, while offering viewers a mirror through which to test their own projections.
This self-reflexive process offers not dissolution, but distinction—allowing subjectivity to become spacious, shared, and dynamically co-authored. In the community-centered context of the Bronx Museum, Melenciano’s work engages not just her own internal voices but the many selves of the institution and its publics. Through choreography, digital embodiment, and sound, she creates works that oscillate between self and other, presence and memory, personal and collective knowing.
I'm just really obsessed with psychology—I love studying the mind and people’s behaviors. I’m deeply invested in understanding who we are as people, and I’ve spent a lot of time studying myself. I think that by knowing myself so well, I’m able to be fully present in a conversation or in any experience, because I genuinely enjoy experiencing other people and getting to know them through what excites them.
That attention, grounded in self-study and open inquiry, forms the sensory logic of Melenciano’s work. It is both an introspective and social practice, continually tuned to what emerges when we let myth, memory, and movement speak through us.
Working Knowledge is on view at the Bronx Museum from April 11th to July 6th, 2025.
