Chance, Prediction, Repetition

Seattle artist Susan Robb has long explored how people form relationships with place, asking where wilderness survives as wild places vanish. Her 2013 artwork Wild Times took that question on foot, from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail, where her focus shifted inward to imagination, memory, and the parts of us that cannot be mapped.

Chance, Prediction, Repetition is a participatory artwork that explores human imagination through collaborative play among people, materials, and artificial intelligence. It began during Robb's residency in the ART (Artists, Researchers, and Technologists) and Expansive Thinking program at Meta Reality Labs Research, where she asked: What does social practice with AI look like? Across a series of workshops involving dozens of participants, groups draw cards that define a possible world—a year, a condition such as flourishing or collapse, and a domain like atmospheres, mindware, or power—before building speculative prototypes from fragments of the present: discarded materials, organic matter, and technological remnants. The prototypes are later described to a generative AI, whose interpretations become animated video works.

Rather than testing the capabilities of AI, C.P.R. reveals the extraordinary capacity of people to imagine together. As human ideas are translated into objects, language, images, and moving pictures, each interpretation opens new possibilities while exposing the limits of prediction. Again and again, participants imagine futures rooted not in technological triumph but in empathy, care, compassion, and collective flourishing.

Borrowing its title from cardiopulmonary resuscitation, C.P.R. asks what kinds of futures are being revived, sustained, or repeatedly brought back to life and by whom.