CIL
faculty of design
visual communication designuniversity
of macau

creativeintelligencelab

New design processes
built with applied AIEST.
2025

We build systems that make things — and study what they do to art and design.

The Creative Intelligence Lab is a practice-based research lab in the Department of Visual Communication Design, Faculty of Design, University of Macau. We investigate new design processes and methods built with applied AI — from image and video generation to agentic coding — and put the results into the world as artworks, exhibitions and publications.

Projects

Celestial Impressions

AI-enhanced panorama of Tycho crater on the Moon, rebuilt from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data
Tycho crater, rebuilt from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data

In collaboration with Studio Pollen — the art–science collective of Atticus Sims and Dr. Michael Whittle — and Hong Kong ink painter Hung Hoi (熊海).

Hung Hoi paints landscapes no person has stood in. We build those places first, from real mission data, so he can walk through them in virtual reality before he picks up a brush.

What does a landscape tradition built on direct encounter with nature do when the nature is 225 million kilometres away?

  1. Mars2024

    Hung Hoi drew inside a VR scene built from a Curiosity rover panorama of Paraitepuy Pass, then painted 火星印象 Mars Impression — ink and colour on paper, 98.5 × 218 cm.

  2. Moon2025

    Apollo landing-site panoramas completed with generative fill; far-side sites such as Tycho crater rebuilt from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data and upscaled with AI into seamless 360° views.

  3. Comet 67P2026 –

    ESA Rosetta imagery and 3D reconstructions turned into a navigable VR scene in Unreal Engine, built with AI agents driving Blender and Unreal.

The Model is the Massage

Spread from The Model is the Massage: towers under construction beneath a grey sky, with a Terence McKenna quotation
Spread
Spread from The Model is the Massage: 'AI circuitry, an extension of cognition itself' beside a pixel-art pointing hand, ending 'thinking is shared'
Spread

A successor to Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's The Medium is the Massage (1967), written for the age of AI. It follows the original page for page — the same arc, the same black-and-white collage of image and text — but every word and image is new, and its subject is artificial intelligence rather than electric media.

When a machine drafts the text and proposes the layouts, who feels like the author?

  1. AnalyseAn agentic system reads every spread of the 1967 book: its text, images, layout, and how they play off each other.
  2. PlanIt proposes contemporary themes, thinkers and events; the lab decides the structure.
  3. AuthorFor each spread it drafts texts and layout sketches; a human editor chooses.
  4. MakeImages are sourced or generated, and the final layout is set by hand in InDesign.

People

Atticus Sims

Founder & Director

Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Design. Artist and researcher working on how AI is changing the way art and design are made. Co-founder of Studio Pollen; founder of KYOTO VR.

Doctor of Design

Yan Junying 燕俊英

DDes · Joanna

Generative art systems for urban narratives: AI-driven morphological poetics, environmental data translation and dynamic visuals.

Song Kangqi 宋康琪

DDes · Lawrence

AI-supported processes for designing advanced interactivity in electronic games.

Zhai Jiayu 翟佳羽

DDes

Redesigning the photographic act.

Master of Design

Wang Xiaoyu 王筱钰

MDes · Sheryn

From motion to form: a generative visual language for craftsmanship using AI motion tracking.

Zhang Jinhua 張晉華

MDes · Zelda

Emotion-driven human–computer interaction design and its psychological mechanisms.

Tan Shiyu 譚詩宇

MDes

Urban memory of Macao.

Make something
with us.

atticussims@um.edu.mo
Creative Intelligence Lab
Department of Visual Communication Design
Faculty of Design, University of Macau
Macau SAR, China