Prosthetic Pixels: Worldbuilding with AI, Style & Self — Gray Area Festival 2025 Workshop
Ever wondered what a biotech relic from a post-climate collapse pleasure state might look like? Or what kind of chrome-skinned protagonist would wear it?
In this collaborative 2-hour workshop, participants will use Fuser, a creative AI tool for multimodal generation, to design speculative futures through style training (LoRA), image and video generation, and lore co-creation. Participants will form teams and receive a unique world constraint prompt (e.g. “a world where memory is traded as currency” or “where bodies must be upgraded weekly”). Each team will imagine and build a distinct future world by crafting:
- A textual description and visual environment representing their world
- A protagonist, trained using one team member’s own likeness
- A defining object or device that reveals something deeper about the world and character
Through guided instruction and generative play, participants will engage in speculative design across image, text, and video, using AI as a tool to prototype worlds weirder and wilder than our own.
BTW: Your face, your freak, your rules. We don’t store, sell, or mess with your likeness. What you make stays yours, unless you want to unleash it on the world.
This workshop is part of Gray Area Festival 2025.
Course Logistics
Dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025
Times: 4:00 – 6:00PM PT
Cost: $40
Format
In-Person Workshop at Gray Area
Address
2665 Mission St, San Francisco
Experience Level: No prior knowledge or experience needed!
Requirements:
- A laptop (Chrome or Firefox preferred)
- 5–15 selfies (if you’d like to be your team’s protagonist)
- Optional aesthetic references or inspiration images
Additional Information:
• No Refunds or Exchanges.
• View our FAQ here.
• Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Intro & Team Formation – Receive world prompt and choose roles
Worldbuilding & Research – Craft foundational lore: define tone, setting, character, and object.
LoRA Training – Train a style model on one team member’s likeness
Image/Video/Audio Generation – Create visuals of place, character, and objects for this world using Fuser and Flux
Show & Tell – Present your world, protagonist, and object to the group
About the Technologies
The workshop will leverage Fuser’s no-code visual editor to connect various AI models through a node-based framework, including text models like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and OpenRouter; image models such as Flux, Recraft, and Ideogram; video capabilities through Kling, Runway, Veo, Luma, and Pika; audio generation via MiniMax, MMaudio, and Eleven Labs; and 3D model creation using Rodin, Hunyuan, and Trellis. Participants will use these integrations to build speculative futures and develop character designs across multiple modalities, bringing their worldbuilding concepts to life through Fuser’s flexible, collaborative AI workbench.
Gray Area Festival 2025 Workshops
How To Become An Octopus (And Sometimes Squid)
with Miriam Simun
Sunday, September 14 | 12:00 – 1:30 PM
What might we learn by thinking, sensing, and moving like an cephalopod? In this embodied, experimental workshop, artist Miriam Simun invites participants to leave behind the habits of upright human life and explore the world from the perspective of the soft-bodied, many-armed cephalopod. A guided session in collective transformation, adaptation, and sensory experimentation. We train cephalopod sensitivities and capacities through psycho-physical exercises that help us to enact new ways of being with ourselves, with each other, and with and in the world.
Queer & Trans Ecopoetics in Crip Dimensions
with micha cárdenas, Cynthia Ling Lee, and M. Ty
Sunday, September 14 | 12:00 – 3:00 PM
How do we make art during multiple polycrises? This workshop invites participants to think through the intersections of gender, sexuality, ability, and ecology through play and creative interdisciplinary inquiry. Participants will be guided through embodied movement, writing exercises, and will work together to make a one-minute video.
MicroMovement: Interacting with Hardware
with Leia Chang
Sunday, September 14 | 4:00 – 7:00 PM
This workshop will introduce you to the basics of microcontrollers and have you building tools to translate your movement into electronic expression. Have you ever wanted to make something that reacts to you? Want to learn the building blocks for wearable hardware? Students will be introduced to the basics of CircuitPython and learn to program an Adafruit Qt Py, accelerometer, and Neopixel LEDs. We’ll explore hardware in an accessible and approachable way, using these boards to build out a basic interactive piece that you can visualize your movement with.
