An Interview With Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Abelardo Gil-Fournier (Spain, 1979) is an artist and researcher, born in Rabat and based in Madrid. Originally trained in physics, he holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art (UK) and has been a researcher at FAMU (Prague). He is currently a Leonardo grantee of the BBVA Foundation.
His practice examines how media and matter intertwine—working across installation, image, sound and computational processes—where living and planetary temporalities meet human visual cultures, knowledge systems and politics. His work has been shown and discussed internationally, including at Transmediale (Berlin), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), LeBal (Paris), Tabakalera (Donostia–San Sebastián), Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia (León), IKKM (Weimar), the Design Museum (Shenzhen), and the Cultural Centers of Spain in Nicaragua and El Salvador. He is co-author (with Jussi Parikka) of Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (MIT Press, 2024).
A frequent collaborator with Parikka, Gil-Fournier co-created LUMI, the film used as the central provocation in this Lab. The interview that follows places LUMI inside the workshop method and reflects on treating an artwork as a live incident, mediation and “mission drift” in AI and archives, repurposing a war-room-style environment for research, and how speculative practice can surface concrete questions for policy and security.
Insights from the Artist Interview
Artist Abelardo Gil-Fournier reflected that treating LUMI as a live incident created “a new logic for art production” beyond aesthetic categories. He noted:
Scientists often first react by disputing art’s “truth claims,” but the Lab enabled them to move toward dialogue and imagination.
The immersive “war room” environment was repurposed from surveillance to collective speculation, reframing security as mediation.
The workshop succeeded because it demanded creative acts from experts: a risk that paid off in lively engagement.
Rather than predicting the future, LUMI and the Lab opened a space of “speculative expanded presence,” where future thinking emerges through understanding the implications of present day conditions.
Nathan Jones: In the Lab, we used LUMI as a catalyst for conversations that crossed multiple disciplines — climate science, AI, law. How did it feel to see your film being treated in that way, as perhaps a security incident or a research environment, rather than an artwork?
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: From the beginning, the feeling I had about your proposal was, on the one hand, excitement, and on the other, perhaps a sense of being overwhelmed. There was also a certain fear. But at the same time, there was agreement that these kinds of operations, these kinds of actions, need to be done.
Both Jussi [Parikka] and I felt it was the right thing to do with the piece. The topics that the artwork deals with always go beyond aesthetics, and in that sense, it made sense for LUMI to enter into dialogue with other domains.
I would say it was useful, but not logical. Normally there is a categorisation of content where things produced in the context of art are not meant to go beyond that category. The standard logics of content distribution would have reduced the discussion about LUMI to the frame of film, experimental video, or media art.
In this case, the step you proposed was not a direct logical one, but rather something that creates a new logic for art production. And I think that is what many of us working in these domains are demanding: that art should not be an isolated form of production, but a practice that establishes dialogues with other worlds, other kinds of insights and logics, and that brings everyone into those dialogues in the contemporary present.
Nathan Jones: One of the prominent themes in the Lab was the idea of “mission drift” in AI, and its relation to archives — the sense that archives are fragile and AI’s automation can drift away from its purpose. Was there anything in the interpretations that surprised you, or that revealed aspects of LUMI you hadn’t anticipated?
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: The main intention of LUMI is provocation, because it plays with ambiguity. It creates a kind of fake logical line: how from archives, landscape restoration can follow — in the same way that with large language models, from textual archives a conversational agent is able to engage in human conversation.
I was surprised by the reaction among participants, a big part of them, who disagreed from the start with the “truth status” of this line. They took LUMI as if it were depicting an actual truth, or a truth-like agent. This was the first reaction: taking the film literally. I would say this kind of reaction is typical of scientific backgrounds. If artworks are introduced into a scientific conversation, the first response is often to claim ownership of truth production — that this belongs to science, not to art.
But the workshop succeeded in going beyond that first reaction. It made clear that the work was not about presenting a statement of truth, but about opening a way of thinking. My second surprise was how participants were then able, and even eager, to enter into a long conversation. They stayed with it, working from the ingredients that came out of LUMI.
So I would summarise two surprises. First, the initial reaction that criticised the thesis of LUMI as if it were meant to state a truth about future relations of AI and environment. Second, the way the methodology allowed participants to move past that reaction, and enter a space closer to the topics, logics, and methodology that LUMI was intended to explore.
Nathan Jones: We showed LUMI in a new situation — the Data Immersion Suite. It was immersive in a way that it hasn’t been in other contexts where you’ve shown it. What was your experience of that room, and did you perceive the work differently there?
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: I would say this type of room comes from the idea of military war rooms. Thinking about the experience afterwards, I realised the interest of somehow hacking this context — going beyond the idea of immersion as embodying the invisible surveying eye, able to see everything from above, from every angle.
In this case, the war room architecture is not necessarily able to impose this kind of eye. That is very interesting, and I will look in your next iterations of the project at how artworks of different natures react differently in this environment.
For LUMI, there was an alignment. The film approaches the nineteenth-century topic of the sublime, the big mountains, the language of mountains, panoramas, and archives. The media set-up in the room was perfect for emphasising this line in the film.
LUMI actually has two versions: a standard single-channel video, and a three-parallel-screen multi-channel version. Working with you and David to rework its visuality in this immersive set-up produced an experience that emphasised something at the core of the piece: the relation between panoramas, even super-panoramas, and the research behind LUMI.
I would emphasise that you are working in a very interesting line: how media environments can go beyond their origins in war environments or military uses — war rooms, situation rooms, etcetera. In media art, there is always a link to the repurposing of military techniques, to the tactical element of media. What interests me is how these dimensions of media can be repurposed in order to trigger other kinds of reasoning, dialogues, and mobilisations of power.
Nathan Jones: One of the features of LUMI is that it is set in the future. I’m interested in the presence of the future in the workshop itself, and how you see the role of art in relation to the future.
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: This is interesting. I would say that the extra dimension that LUMI as an artwork introduced into the idea of discussing the future is that it clearly proposed, after our conversation preparing the workshop, a framework beyond standard visualizations or standard dialogues around the topic of the future.
In particular, LUMI centered the problem of discussing the future by tracing the agency of an agent, or agents in plural. We proposed a methodology to discuss or to enter into the future in that way. The workshop was able to digest LUMI in order to create this framework: how can we think about the future, but not in standard cultural terms, rather by following what some agents—abstract agencies—in their context do.
In this way, it allowed different visions, different discussions around the future. As a matter of fact, at least for me, the future was not clearly a topic. It was naturally displaced by “speculative expanded presence.”
This other category is much more fertile. The future is perhaps dominated by facts, by ideas of prediction and prospection. Speculative expanded presence is characterized by broader speculative, imaginative, and fictional tools that belong to every discipline.
Nathan Jones: In the second part of the workshop, we almost flipped the premise of the film — thinking about self-managing environments — and asked participants to imagine futures, or what you’ve called “speculative expanded presence,” for the Bay. You and I co-designed that session together. What was your sense of its premise and what came out of it?
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: It was somehow a risky workshop — not risky in a bad sense, but we had long conversations about how some of the questions linked to LUMI could be applied in a participatory dynamic. In the end, we came up with a set of steps, a set of questions to pose to the participants in groups.
My feeling was that they were risky questions because they demanded acts of imagination from their expertise. They did not demand knowledge transfer, but imagination. They demanded acts of creation. We made that explicit in our conversations beforehand, and we were concerned about it.
My feeling was that perhaps participants would need us to be more present — clarifying, helping them understand how to proceed. But in fact, we weren’t asked. The questions were clear enough. The intentions were clear from the beginning and were well understood. I was surprised by that.
As a personal perception, at one point I felt I had nothing to do during the second part. The dynamic went on its own. You made the introductions, and then participants just went with the flow. There were no moments of silence or pause, none of the difficulties we feared. They engaged very lively in the discussions.
So, my feelings were linked to a notion of risk — because we were demanding creativity from this set of experts, and I wasn’t sure how they would respond. But the surprise was that they responded with clarity, energy, and imagination.
Nathan Jones: We didn’t have to intervene in that second part, did we? One of the main things that came through was the tension between what repair is, and what stability might mean. How do those debates speak to you as an artist? Are these important questions in your practice? In a way, the Unsecurities Lab is all about that — it’s about security, but also “unsecurity.” What is a secure thing? What is a stable thing? What is repairing or protecting that thing?
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: Yes, that’s an interesting question. In my practice, the problems I consider attached to it — such as repair, restoration, and so on — do not belong only to the objects themselves, but to what the practice represents or deals with.
The workshop, I don’t know if it succeeded, but it brought to the foreground the idea that repair is not only linked to the objects being repaired, but also to the methodologies, the operations, the media we use when we deal with the objects. There are always processes of mediation. Objects enter into tables of discussion, where verbs like repair or restore are introduced, and in those tables the objects are not present — only their mediation.
For me, mediation is the big question. The production of secure futures involves awareness of our own operations of mediation. Producing futures also means being aware of the agency of each operation in the present — including selecting, distinguishing certain agencies, creating conceptualisations, categories, or media representations.
I think the workshop succeeded in presenting the idea that agencies are not only physical or living entities in the Bay, but also processes of signalling presences, creating cultural categories, and producing a wider notion of ecology — one that includes human cultural productions, intellectual categories, and media operations.
Nathan Jones: Yes, I think that links really well to what you raised earlier. One of the unintended but really interesting things in the workshop was the dialogue between the two different media environments in the room: the war room or situation room set-up, and the media art piece placed into that context. They were in a kind of productive dialogue.
What you’re saying resonates with the idea of security as a function of mediation, with multiple mediations going on between things. It also points towards the cultural aspect of security: how security is cultural because culture is working with, and critiquing, mediation. Security depends on the different ways things are mediated. There’s a kind of circularity in that.
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: Yes, yes, yes. What does security mean when what is being secured is also produced by the very same operations of securing? By the operations before securing, or the operations that securing relies on? These media operations of representation, of distinguishing agents, of distinguishing populations.
The environment is constantly being made on its own, but also on our categories that make and transform it. So what does securing mean, if what we want to secure is constantly being transformed by our own perceptions? And not in a phenomenological sense, but in an operational sense — every perception involves mediations, and mediations involve landscape transformations at large.
Securing comes as an intellectual category involved in the very transformation of the landscape itself. It is not an operation that comes from outside, seeing from outside what needs to be secured. What we dealt with in the workshop was this impossibility. Every operation in the end becomes an agent — an agent in this expanded ecology, this media ecology, of environments.