Since 2017, we (artist duo Di Pisa Stasinski) have been leading the transdisciplinary art project Being Unthinkable … … … (the last three words in the title are randomly artificial intelligence [AI] generated) in close collaboration with IBM Sweden. Being Unthinkable … … … is a permanent, interactive robotic sculpture, with an AI system core, trained with philosophical data sets with the purpose of generating new and unique questions, a sort of synthetic philosophy. The robot sculpture will interact with the audience via a smartphone app and using spatiotemporal choreographies in the form of colour and movement.

The chapter is a self-reflexive case study of the process of equilibristic balancing of artistic integrity in a large-scale engineering development, with IBM as the main partner. We point to the connecting epistemologies of innovation and project management in a process without a clear-cut ending and how they can be construed in this case. The various undertakings of the project – software and hardware development, information and training, networking, project management, leadership, development and promotion – can all be viewed through the lenses of the management epistemologies, of which we try to pinpoint the key concepts.

As artists, we usually work outside the scope of hierarchical ideation and creation processes, but here, we injected ourselves among employees, students, and researchers to rather build holarchical teams and structures, in contrast to hierarchical ones. Holarchies, or collections of simultaneously integrated and autonomous individuals working together, often seem hard to manage or control, but our version of holarchy entails less of managing people, but rather navigating processes, in which people could take on interchangeable or multiple roles.