CHORALE : a speculative interactive installation for more-than-human consent in reef ecologies

As the Great Barrier Reef faces widespread bleaching, corals are increasingly subject to AI-driven monitoring systems that reduce complex ecological conditions to quantified global datasets, often displacing the agency of the non-human entities they aim to restore. This paper presents Chorale, an interactive fabulation and research-based exploration of an alternative mode of interaction that critiques this logic by reimagining AI as a plural and decentralized mediator of interspecies communication. Recognizing non-human entities as participants instead of passive data providers requires systems to materially and interactively account for their capacity to respond, resist, or refuse participation. The installation is a distributed system of AI nodes exploring how AI might recognize more-than-human agency beyond extractive models of sensing and control. Participants embody reef organisms, communicating through sound, light, and bodily interaction. Through practices of slowing down and attunement, the system positions consent as an embodied, ongoing, and revocable process within interspecies relations, rendering communication a lived condition. Chorale advances two considerations for future more-than-human design in HCI: an ethics of consent as embodied, continuous, and revocable negotiation; and multispecies interfacing as relational attunement, where AI mediates between non-human entities.