Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive
What does it look like when machines dream of nature?
Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive marks artist Refik Anadol's (b.1985, Istanbul, Turkey) first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK.
The exhibition presents Anadol's latest commission, Living Archive: Large Nature Model (2024), which wraps the perimeter gallery walls in vibrant AI simulations of the world's rainforests. Also on view is Artificial Realities: Rainforest (2024), situated inside one of the gallery's historic powder rooms.
This sound and video experience transports viewers to an Al's imagination of rainforests. Anadol's immersive installation, Artificial Realities: Coral (2023, was created by training a custom-built Al model on approximately 135 million images of underwater landscapes openly accessible online.
Artificial Realities: Rainforest, Anadol's most recent project, is the longest continuous generative AI visualisation on nature to date. It is the first installation in a growing body of work that is created employing The Large Nature Model, the world's first open source generative AI model dedicated to nature. For this ongoing research, the artist worked with the open source data of major institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution and London's Natural History Museum, to collect archival images of fauna, flora and fungi.
Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive is the culmination of years-long research into data visualisation and machine learning, weaving together vast sets of images, as the artist says, to amplify the voice of nature through Al. Committed to investigating the collaboration between artificial, natural and human intelligence, Anadol gives us a glimpse into a future in which technology substantially alters our connection with the natural world.
Serpentine North Gallery
16 February - 7 April 2024
