As the art world comes to terms with new practices that cross-fertilize analog and digital media, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is training algorithms to support other species. As a former student of critical design, Ginsberg is accustomed to using emerging technologies to enrich rather than extract natural ecosystems. A case in point is her ongoing project, Pollinator Pathmaker, which generates planting designs that support the maximum number of pollinator species. Originally commissioned by the Eden Project in 2021, it has since been adapted for public gardens and galleries around Europe together with a number of local “DIY” variations. 

At a time when the environmental cost of generative AI is coming into sharp focus, Ginsberg’s work proves that digital art need not be limited to purely visual, indeed digital, outputs. In this conversation with Alex Estorick, the artist discusses how she approaches new technologies as tools to redesign reality.

‍Alex Estorick: Dr Ginsberg, your work connects art with computer science and ecology. Do hybrid practices of this kind have an outsized capacity to impact the world?‍

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Bringing together disparate fields brings different perspectives on the world and helps to peel back how each discipline frames the world to make sense of it. I find that it’s a powerful way to be generative in my practice, and it can also be generative for the experts I work with in their fields. 

Working with a string theory physicist or a horticulturist or a historian lets us each see our own work in new ways, reminding us of knowledge that we take for granted as we get siloed and then breaking these spaces open. 

As an outsider to disciplines such as computer science, I can naively propose something that isn’t yet possible, then we figure out how to make this new thing. I love conversations that lead into deeper collaborations, spreading in a tentacular way. You suggest that this kind of work can impact the world; I think it can be especially powerful in the face of huge complexity. Wicked problems like the climate crisis are a tangle of every aspect of human activity, and they need empathy, critical debate, and collaborative work if they are to be addressed.

‍AE: Pollinator Pathmaker (2021-ongoing) is an algorithmic tool to develop planting designs for “living artworks” that support the maximum number of pollinator species, allowing audiences to better empathize with their surrounding environments. Are you optimistic that creative approaches to new digital technologies can help to protect, or even regenerate, vulnerable ecosystems? What positive outgrowths have you witnessed since you began developing the project?

‍ADG: The work is not a solution to the crisis facing pollinators — insects are in terrifying decline around the world (one 2017 study found a 76% decrease in volume in Germany over a near 30-year period). 

I’m not offering a technofix. It’s a problem so vast, caused by human destruction of habitats, pollution of ecosystems, and creation of climate change. Pollinator Pathmaker is about transforming our perception of the natural world and giving participants the agency to care for it, rather than consume it. 

My ambition is to make the world’s largest climate-positive artwork. That’s hard to define, which says a lot about what we value in contemporary art and our culture beyond. Pollinator Pathmaker is rooted in my ongoing question about whether it’s even possible to make truly altruistic technologies. 

Can we create an altruistic algorithm or is everything humans make intrinsically for our benefit? Crafting an “empathy” algorithm forced me to define a human emotion or value with cold rationality. I chose to make the algorithm create planting designs that “optimize” (i.e. maximize) pollinator diversity, but it could have [followed] any other definition. For this experimental artwork, it was imperative that the value system I embedded in the technology was not the norm. 

I’m trying to background humans in the creation of a technology and foreground other species instead. I’m using the algorithm as a buffer against my desires rather than designing a technology that sates them, as most algorithms we encounter are intended to do.  

So far, we’ve planted large commissioned public gardens at the Eden Project in Cornwall, for the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens in London, and in front of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin with LAS Art Foundation. LAS has also supported 15 more local “DIY Edition” gardens in Berlin; I helped to plant one with kindergarteners this year, which was very emotional for me as it was the purest expression of the artwork. Only yesterday, I discovered that there’s one at a city farm down the road from me in London! 

We invite anyone to generate a unique planting plan via the artwork’s website, pollinator.art, and then plant a DIY Edition at home or in a community space such as a school. They get planting plans and instructions and an edition number for the work. 

I describe it as the “anti-NFT”: it’s a digital artwork but it only exists when it’s planted. The investment is in finding a space, buying plants, and taking the time to plant and care for the artwork.‍

Pollinator Pathmaker is constantly expanding. The algorithm draws on curated regional plant lists where we research various parameters such as which pollinators each plant serves, the seasons they flower in, and the garden conditions they thrive in. We have a plant palette that covers Atlantic and Continental Europe, and now we’re working on the first US plant list, starting with the Northeastern US. We need networked landscapes for plants and their pollinators; as more editions get planted, the more the work becomes an interconnected whole.

I’m not an ecologist or horticulturist, but it turns out that creating unnatural gardens for nature may be truly effective for supporting biodiversity. We’ve got two pilot research projects underway studying the impact of my algorithmic planting design on insect populations, which have so far shown that we are creating rich ecosystems. Now, we’re kicking off a large research project funded by UK Research and Innovation with the universities of Exeter and Edinburgh to study the work from ecological, social science, and philosophical perspectives. We’re studying the work’s human participants as well as its insect and plant audiences to reveal how art can drive innovative — and joyful — participatory conservation practices. While it’s perhaps risky to instrumentalize an artwork by quantifying it, it’s also potent to demonstrate that we can use alternative value systems when creating art or technologies.

‍AE: Can transdisciplinary practices that take art out of the gallery better inform policymaking? ‍

ADG: I hope so, but I think that’s also utopian. Despite all we know about the climate and biodiversity emergency, most of the planet is still running business as usual. Policy is where change can happen. Artists can tell stories and transform how we see the world, but the real power for change sits with those writing the rules and our role as citizens to demand they make change. ‍

AE: Last year, Charlotte Kent observed that some of the most interesting art right now looks more like speculative design. A number of practicing artists, including Xin Liu, Marguerite Humeau, and Sputniko! have been influenced by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who established the discipline at the Royal College of Art (RCA). As a former student of theirs, how did Dunne and Raby influence your artistic practice?‍

ADG: Artists, writers, and poets have always imagined alternative worlds; that’s the practice of imagination. I learned so much from Dunne & Raby during my MA and PhD but it’s the critical perspective of their vision for “critical design” that resonated so strongly for me during my time at the RCA. Speculation was just one thread of this approach to artistic practice. 

Critical design — and speculative work within that framing — invites imagining alternative worlds through designed artifacts, a device that artists can use to respond to consumer society.  ‍

AE: Where does design end and art begin?‍

ADG: I hate labels and silos. We need to think differently!

‍AE: Your new project for Manifesta 15, Every Thing Eats Light (2024), does not involve a digital component. What drives your decision to engage with a particular technology? How do your audiences respond to your different approaches?‍

ADG: Light is embedded within a technology: the concrete skeleton of a monstrously huge power station. The choice of stained glass as the medium for the work was a response to the ecological, social, and political ramifications of this building. It’s a time-based work — the billion-year-old fossil that the window depicts grows, spreads, and shrinks as the sun tracks across the sky. [Proterocladus antiquus] is the oldest fossil yet found of a plant that contained chloroplasts: the cells that convert sunlight into energy. In the words of Shuhai Xiao, one of the scientists who discovered it, the fossil is “the sister of the evolutionary great, great grandmother of all green plants alive today.” 

‍I’m constantly experimenting with new media to think about our strange relationships with nature and technology: tapestry and stained-glass windows are technologies infused with histories and politics of their own. New doesn’t mean more interesting!

‍AE: What is the future of site-specific installations in a world of hybrid physical and digital ecologies?‍

ADG: I hope it’s a future that transforms how we want to see the world and the values that we decide to fight for. Everything flows from protecting the natural world that supports us.‍

AE: We’d love to hear about your plans for the next year. What forthcoming projects are you especially excited about? ‍

ADG: My work, Machine Auguries, has just opened as a solo exhibition at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, running until April next year. It’s an immersive installation where we hear an AI-generated dawn chorus emerging under an artificial dawn sky. The work, which I started in 2019, is a growing archive of false dawns and the Bildmuseet show is the first time I’m bringing together three iterations of the dawn in London (2019), Toledo, Ohio (2023), and, from January 2025, we’ll be adding a new site-specific Umeå version. I’m also working on many exciting things that I can’t tell you about yet, but it includes some new commissions for group exhibitions in London.