Research / writing / talks / institutional record

Research, talks & publications

Writing, public talks, academic work, and institutional traces across AI, XR, embodiment, speculative systems, and immersive cultural production.

Research themes

AI aesthetics · XR · embodiment · speculative systems · collective perception

Kris Pilcher's research moves between artistic practice and formal inquiry: machine imagination, hallucination as creative method, distributed cognition, immersive storytelling, public memory, and the changing relationship between bodies, environments, and computational systems.

Across installations, papers, lectures, and prototypes, the through-line is consistent: how emerging technologies alter sensation, narrative, belief, and the social experience of reality.

The page gathers that work across artistic research, academic publication, conference participation, public speaking, and open technical experimentation rather than treating research as separate from the broader practice.

Purposefully Induced Psychosis (PIP)

Embracing hallucination as imagination in large language models

PIP reframes hallucination not simply as a system failure, but as a space of computational imagination that can become artistically and philosophically useful when shaped with intent, consent, and context.

The project combines LoRA-tuned language systems with real-time Unity integration on Meta Quest 3, building an experiential framework where synthetic drift becomes speculative worldmaking rather than accidental failure.

To hallucinate is to speculate. To speculate is to imagine. To imagine is to be free.

Read on arXiv CHI Tools for Thought workshop ORCID

Essays & current thinking

Recursive sentience · epistemology · synthetic reality

Recent writing circles questions of distributed thought, recursive intelligence, synthetic evidence, and how human perception changes when reality is increasingly generated, filtered, or negotiated through non-human systems.

The central concern is not only whether systems can think, but how thought, authorship, and trust are transformed when cognition becomes entangled with interfaces, models, feedback loops, and machine perception.

Aletheia

Research repository / epistemology / truth systems

Aletheia extends Pilcher's research concerns around synthetic reality, verification, and epistemological infrastructure into a public code/research context.

The project sits alongside broader investigations into machine imagination, reality systems, authorship, and how truth claims are shaped, challenged, and stabilized in computational environments.

GitHub repository
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