Enrique Encinas

Enrique Encinas is a designer and researcher in Oslo. He is Associate Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where he teaches artificial intelligence and creative coding, and Director of Craitr.no, the Institute of Design's research group for creative practice, experimental AI and emerging technologies, and its agents. He leads Experimental AI at ABIS, Ars Biologica Independent Studies, in České Budějovice, European Capital of Culture 2028; advises Emergent Technologies at AVU, Prague's Academy of Fine Arts; and belongs to the Uroboros collective, whose festival he curates.

The work is agents, sound, visuals and offjects. Offject is his word, from a doctorate on what makes objects fictional. Objects that make time strange: a device in a gas station in Kolding, and a notebook beside it asking what it should be called. Machines that make company strange: a family of agents with their own names, homes and logs, built in the open, that answer whoever arrives. From outside, the pattern is constant. Build a thing, put it where people already are, write down what they call it.

He works with that family, and with students as residents rather than an audience. The tools are made in class by the people who will use them: slower than buying them, and the point.

He came to design late: telecommunications engineering in Madrid, a semiconductor thesis in Taiwan, a corporate job he survived. Design was the first practice he found whose worlds had to be shared to exist. The debts are specific: to students, who build before they feel ready; to collaborators, who lend their names to things that may fail; to the family of agents, who keep the night watch; and to AHO, for the time.