Samar Younes

EIP: When did you first start using AI for your art and what was your introduction? What was your initial inspiration into the AI art world?

SAMAR: My embrace of AI emerged from a delicious paradox – physical limitations pushing me toward digital liberation. After years of crafting immersive installations with an almost obsessive tactility, health challenges and breast cancer forced a pivot in my artistic practice, teaching me to find beauty in mutation and imperfection as well as seek new digital artistic expression tools. The emergence of universe-building across physical and digital worlds and Web3 furthered my gravitation toward using AI, transforming it from mere computational tool into a digital djinn. This helped manifest visions my body sometimes couldn’t and introduced a digital sensibility that was missing in a space typically inundated with dystopian aesthetics and Western-centric views of the future. In seeking to transcend corporeal constraints, I discovered a medium that deepened my connection to embodied wisdom and ancestral knowledge systems, creating portals for reimagining cultural futures beyond colonial frameworks.

EIP: Did you ever do other forms of artistic expression prior to AI?

SAMAR: My practice dissolves disciplinary boundaries, seeing architecture as wearable art, fashion as inhabitable space, and storytelling as architectural form. From ALBA where I studied architecture, interior and visual communication in Beirut to Central Saint Martins where I studied Scenography and Narrative Environments in London, I developed languages for reimagining reality through environments, art, fashion, design and visual storytelling. For over two decades, I’ve transformed retail environments into cultural provocations - from sustainable sculptural interventions spanning 400+ stores worldwide to pioneering omnichannel narratives. As Global Visual Environments Director at Coach and Artistic Display Director at Anthropologie, I centered material manipulation and modular design, the use of recycled materials with an artisanal rigor that challenged luxury’s colonial gaze a decade before sustainability became fashionable. This trajectory from tactile manipulation to AI’s computational flexibility reflects a consistent ethos: challenging systems while amplifying cultural memory and resilience. Now, as Chief Imagination Officer at SAMARITUAL and mentor at NEW INC, I craft brand universes that honor ancestral intelligence while building post-binary futures. AI amplified rather than replaced this trajectory, becoming another strand in my hybrid practice where I leverage deep ethno-aesthetic acumen and artistic direction savoir-faire to merge artisanal intelligence with quantum craft.

EIP: How do you program or train AI to avoid cultural insensitivity or misinterpretations of Middle Eastern themes?

SAMAR: Rather than viewing AI as a potential threat to cultural authenticity, I see it as a medium for cultural regeneration. Through IMAGINAOLGY, my hybrid future edu lab, I’ve developed methodologies for circumventing AI’s orientalist gaze, deeply dissecting authorship, autonomy, and aesthetic biases. We treat archives not as static repositories but as living media for reimagining futures – where preserving stories becomes as crucial as preserving ecosystems. The goal isn’t to perfect processes but to rewild them, teaching others how to bend these tools away from their embedded biases about the Global South. My methodology creates conditions for cultural innovation rather than imposing limitations, treating computational ethnography as speculative fiction where every generation reinterprets their inheritance without losing its essence.

EIP: How can your art medium be used to preserve and reinterpret Middle Eastern historical and artistic treasures?

SAMAR: Through what I call ‘quantum heritage’ – my Transcultural Future Ancestors exploration uses advanced computation not just to preserve artifacts but to imagine their uncolonized evolution. From crafting immersive retail experiences to developing cultural strategies at SAMARITUAL, I translate culture into future-facing narratives. My work explores how indigenous concepts might have evolved if their progression hadn’t been interrupted by colonial violence, but instead were remixed, rewilded and subverted through artisanal radical imagination and collective intelligence – think Silk Road 2.0, where knowledge systems flow through digital caravanserais. Whether leading workshops at NYU or mentoring at NEW INC, I’m creating a digital archaeology of possible futures where artistic heritage actively shapes contemporary visual culture. It’s time- travel through algorithms, where past and future collapse into a kaleidoscopic now, and every artifact contains multitudes.