Ebrahim Poustinchi
Rubber Dream: Akro-Duck, 2025
Interactive digital installation
ABOUT THE exhibition
Rubber Dream: Akro-Duck is an interactive installation using real-time AI/Video-Art to observe Akron through the lens of a custom-made 3D-printed rubber toy/sculpture and its rubber visual memories of Akron. It is an animated visual/spatial experience, an interactive sculpture, and an installation in a world designed for and by humans and non-humans where machines, rubber toys, cyborgs, and humans—among others—cohabit. Using the video stream from the camera embedded in the interactive sculpture, the Rubber Dream installation aims to visually reinterpret Akron’s physical space and the people/audience through a real-time AI video/model trained on Akron’s “memories” and its rubber industry/history—including rubber toys.
ABOUT THE artist
Ebrahim Poustinchi, an award-winning designer, artist, curator, and inventor, is a tenured Associate Professor of Architecture and founder/director of the Robotically Augmented Design (RAD) Lab at Kent State University and the principal of the STUDIO EP. Poustinchi’s research focuses on the intersection of design, worldbuilding, space, media, and robotics, with an alternative reading of human/non-human relationships through AI, UI/UX design, and human-machine interaction (HMI).
Poustinchi is the inventor of two international patents in the creative robotics field. He has widely lectured and taught workshops, and his work has been disseminated worldwide in various books, journals, conference proceedings, galleries, and museums nationally and internationally. Poustinchi’s recent book, A Purple Architecture (2024) by Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press, explores architecture/design in the hyper-mediated era of AI.
