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How artists are using generative AI to celebrate the natural world

Writer's picture: UK CreativeUK Creative

Calypso Newman - Founder of Rock Badger

Tuesday 14th January 2025


 

Artists are using generative AI as a new medium in their work, creating ethical and unique creative applications. They are going beyond prompt generation and pushing the boundaries of neural networks creating beautiful ways of engaging with the natural world. This article will explore the new generation of artists crafting accessible ways of multi-sensory storytelling by using generative AI to communicate and elevate data sets.


When most people picture AI art they think sci-fi colours, wax doll-like figures with distorted hands and garish surrealist angles. Or in other terms, ugly and cartoonish work with no apparent meaning. This is often the result when generative AI is used to create art just for the sake of using AI - a prompt is quickly typed and an image is immediately generated - using the tool without any thought or innovation. Just like any creative tool used in this way, it will fall flat. But, there is a whole other side to AI driven artwork, where AI is being used beautifully and thoughtfully transforming how we communicate real-world global issues.  

 

Artists are using generative AI as a new medium and form in their work, creating ethical and unique creative applications. They are going beyond prompt generation and pushing the boundaries of neural networks. This new generation of artists are crafting accessible ways of multi-sensory storytelling by using generative AI to communicate and elevate data sets. This mode of art is at its best when it is engaging with real global issues. This is particularly the case when it comes to the natural world and the data-sets within it. Over the last year at Rock Badger we have had the privilege of speaking to some of the best artistic innovators in the field. Here is a list of some of the artists leading in AI who are ones to watch for their work impactfully engaging with sustainability and nature.


 


Laura Cinti is a UK research-based artist working within the intersections of art, science and technology. Her most recent project is using AI and drone technologies to search for one of the rarest plants on Earth. The project is called ‘AI in the Sky’ and is with her studio C-LAB. To do this C-Lab trained a machine learning model using both real and synthetic images of the plant species, enabling it to detect the plants in diverse environments. The beautiful artwork that accompanies the search acts as a narrative device, making visible and clear the layers of data and technology that underpin the search. Here, art plays a critical role in enabling a deeper understanding of complex ecological systems. 


“AI is not just a tool for making art; it’s another lens through which we can reconsider our place in the world, how we relate to non-human systems, and the future we’re shaping.”  


AI in the Sky - Laura Cinti C-LAB 


 


Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg is using AI and art to create a truly powerful and emotive way to engage with animal extinction. Daisy is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. In 2018 the headlines announced the death of Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros. In ‘The Substitute’ Daisy uses AI to bring back to life the extinct white rhino, collaborating with AI lab DeepMind she creates a rhino - which performs as an artificial agent - an autonomous entity that learns from its environment. The virtual rhino,  powered by AI to replicate its actual movement, is a powerful visual and reminder of what has been lost. The work consummately demonstrates the experimental and sensory ways of addressing climate change and catastrophe by optimizing art and AI to inspire impact. 

 

 

Ronen Tanchum is an artist and technologist, who is the founder of Phenomena Labs, in his work he is using AI to re-examine our environment. Ronen’s artwork ranges from visualising the live energy consumption of a building (‘Moments in Time’) to using AI to recreate the natural world (‘Rococo’). Artificial Wild Dream is an AI-generated audio-visual journey, exploring a machine's vivid memories of nature. It showcases extinct species and decaying reefs through innovative AI techniques, offering an immersive, dream-like perspective on our natural world. It reveals the collaboration between artists and the machine’s interpretation of reality, nature, and living beings. 

 

"I find it really interesting the connection between using new technologies, like neural networks, algorithms and blockchain to engage with nature. They are very similar, it's something that is organically growing, you get all these connections in the blockchain, almost like a city that is slowly getting built, and how the digital database of everything is shaping up, like a plant or a root of a plant."


Ronen Tanchum -Nature Streams

 

 

 


Chilean generative artistic duo Hypereikon, María Constanza Lobos and Sebastián Roja, are also using AI to create mesmeric digital landscapes that visualise the unseen. In this case the depths of the sea. Their work imagines how our understanding of nature might evolve in our increasingly digital world, referring to this as 'speculative nature'. Their work ‘Speculative Marine Beings' uses AI to explore the depths of the sea in its densities, colours and movements. Another beautiful example of how AI elevates how we visualise and interact with the natural world. 

 

"AI art has the potential to expand our perceptual capabilities, allowing us to visualise and engage with complex systems and ideas in new ways." - Hypereikon  

 

Speculative Marine Beings - Hypereikon 


 

Rock Badger is translating the innovation of how artists are working with AI into commercial concepts. Our communication tool VisuAIise Sustainability brings clients’ green initiatives to life. Using the real data points from environmental initiatives, we partner with artists to transform them into mesmeric art, creating accessible, transparent and beautiful stories. 

 

Still from a version of VisuAIise Sustainability, where data from this organisation's green initiatives creates trees.  


If you missed the brilliant ‘ When Art meets AI: friend or foe? ’ discussion at the UK Creative Festival check it out here now.


 

Calypso Newman - Founder of Rock Badger

Tuesday 14th January 2025


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