Synthaesthetic Art: Human-Machine Creative Collaboration

Synthaesthetic Art is a human-machine collaborative framework combining live perception, generative AI, and robotic execution. Presented as a live installation at the Super AI Conference 2025, the system captured portraits of attendees, transformed them into stylised caricatures using a diffusion model that was fine-tuned on artist-in-residence Ivy Chen's works, and rendered them on canvas with acrylic paint via a robotic arm. Unlike conventional AI-driven art systems, our Synthaesthetic Art system was designed to preserve and amplify artist authorship Artist authorship is preserved through stylistic training, selective curation, and real-time control. This work introduces the conceptual foundations of Synthaesthetic Art and explores how hybrid creativity can expand agency, re-frame authorship, and deepen emotional expression through machine augmentation.