Synaesthetic Metrics: Multi-Agent Displacement
Nunilo Rumbutis
Yidi Wang
Trained as an architect, Yidi Wang is a future infrastructural strategist and founder of Eternal Terra Ear, committed to developing alternative models of cultural and ecological infrastructure, advocating for participatory governance, and fostering civic imagination in the face of accelerating platform economies, alternative cultural institutions.
Yidi delivered speeches at IRCAM Centre Pompidou, UN Ocean Nice Ecop, International Conference on Computational Creativity Brazil, TTT Slovenia, The 5th European Culture and Technology Lab+ Annual Conference, European Citizen Science Association, etc. She is a research fellow 2025 at Transmedia Research Institute, Italy, and a research participant at Sciences Po’s Open Institute for Digital Transformation EU DSA Sprint, detecting greenwashing misinformation on Meta.
Key Team Members:
Carolin Melia Brendel: Artist Researcher in Deep Sea Mining, Financial Sociologist
Nunilo Rumbutis: Planetary Organ(on/oid)s Curator
Synaesthetic Metrics proposes a cooperative AI and spatial design methodology to support displaced creatives, grassroots practitioners, and informal civic infrastructures across Europe. It introduces a multi-agent system that senses, archives, and coordinates cultural memory, spatial trauma, and policy alternatives, embedding ancestral material intelligence into the digital layer of urban transformation initiated through long-term work with displaced artists, urbanists, and post-extractivist communities. We respond to the failure of centralized aid systems and the aesthetic violence of technocratic solutions of nation-state planning.
The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Palestine, while geopolitically framed as border conflicts, are deeply embedded in the European civic psyche. Their displaced populations, cultural workers, and spatial devastation call for non-militarized infrastructural response, a civic morphology of repair grounded in solidarity. The proposal reframes these crises as European urban and ethical questions, tied to housing, cultural memory, civic participation, and the grassroots governance of emerging technologies.
At the heart of this work is the Synaesthetic Solidarity Index, a participatory tool that rethinks humanitarian metrics through aesthetic, material, and organizational dimensions. Developed through research gatherings, fieldwork, and peer collaboration across European cities, the index supports decentralized cultural architectures as forms of resilient policy infrastructure. Each node becomes a "synaesthetic ear", attuned to invisible trauma, soft data, and situated decision-making.
Inspired by the layered structure of shells and inner-ear anatomy, the project offers a new model of planetary governance based not on extraction or competition, but on attunement, resonance, and compositional care.