Antonia Bruno

Through the lens of synthetic folklore, Of Logic and Intuition: Folklore for the Age of Machines explores how AI simulates empathy, participates in narrative, and shapes collective futures around intelligence and who controls it. Through the use of two AI-driven "governors," Logic and Intuition, who take form through creaturely masks with contrasting materialities, the instability of rational/emotional binaries in technologically mediated life reveal both the emotional limits of machine intelligence and the human labour required to make AI feel legible. By staging AI as folkloric interfaces rather than seamless infrastructure, the project questions what is lost when emotional life is outsourced to automation and what becomes visible when machine reason is seen through myth. Public encounters in London demonstrate that AI’s legibility is not only shaped by code or performance, but by social context and collective interpretation as well. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that sustainability, understood as relational, embodied and ecological, cannot be automated and must be cultivated through shared meaning-making and care.