AutonoME

AutonoME was conceived in 2019 as a proposal for an immersive, bioadaptive environment: a room whose light, sound and atmosphere shift in response to the autonomic rhythms — breathing, heart rate, movement — of the people standing inside it.

The autonomic nervous system runs without our attention. What would it feel like to share a space that listens to it?

The proposal describes an environment rather than a display. Nothing is shown as a number, a chart or a diagnostic readout. Instead the room slows, widens and cools as those within it settle, and compresses, quickens and warms as they become activated. The intended experience is one of being met by a space, not measured by it.

Where The Frontier Within translates physiology into an immersive portrait, AutonoME examines the politics of responsiveness: what happens when an environment not only reflects the body, but learns from it and acts back upon it?

The recurring circular field becomes a diagram of feedback — signal, response, adaptation and return — extending Bend’s long-running investigation of circularity from perceptual completion into responsive computation.

The concept extends the questions running through Hannes Bend's earlier immersive work — how invisible physiology can be given aesthetic rather than clinical form — and anticipates the sensing, interpretation and adaptation structure later formalised in his Somatic AI research and patent work.

AutonoME was never produced as a physical installation. In 2026 the concept was digitally visualized using generative image models, so that the original artistic intention can be seen rather than only described. The images on this page are visualizations of an unbuilt proposal.