Artist Showcase: (Artificial) Migrant Intelligence

Migrant Intelligence is an art project that explores the similarities between how migrants adapt to new environments and how machines learn. Artists Sasha Portyannikova and the Volna media art group use their creative work to observe and reflect on the world around them. As migrants, they’ve discovered that this habit comes from both curiosity and the wish to belong.

When they looked at how AI tries to imitate dance, they saw clear parallels with their own experiences of integration: both rely on imitation, practice, and adaptation. AI-generated dance images often look distorted—they miss the essence of real human movement but reveal ideals of perfection that can never be reached. These distortions symbolically mirror the artists’ own attempts to navigate societal norms, often getting lost in small details while overlooking what truly matters.

About the artists:

Sasha Portyannikova, a white-abled dance artist born in the Soviet Union and raised in Moscow,…