RIXC Art Science Festival 2025
Marc LEE. Imagining a Future Where AI Balance Our Ecosystem
We are interested in the concept of what would happen if an AI could manage an ecosystem. If an AI has the power to have symbiotic relationships with an ecosystem, what kind of result would it produce? And what could this look and sound like?
For that we created the Mobile App “Speculative Evolution” (https://marclee.io/en/evo). Background: Due to the threatening predictions of species extinction and global warming, scientists and farmers are increasingly relying on technologies such as genetic engineering, synthetic biology and machine learning. Speculative Evolution imagines a speculative ecosystem 30 years from now, where artificial intelligence and biotechnologies work together to create and optimize species to withstand the increasingly hostile environment. From the perspective of an AI simulator, the audience is invited to create new variations of animals, fungi, plants, and robots, fly with these engineered and mutated species, and observe the changing ecosystem. Speculative Evolution responds to the trend of technology-assisted solution-making by constructing narratives of an uncomputable system under extreme control – what do we optimize, and what are we ignoring as a result? The project aims to inspect our tendency to simplify complex ecosystems by treating nature as a system that can be fixed.
Marc Lee is a Swiss artist. He focuses on real-time processed, computer programmed audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile apps. He critically reflects creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative aspects. His work has been shown in major Museums and new media art exhibitions including: New Museum New York, ZKM Karlsruhe, MMCA Seoul, ISEA Gwangju and Paris, Transmediale Berlin, Ars Electronica Linz https://marclee.io
Vertimus
Explores the shared perception of movement, gravity, and transformation between humans and plants. Created in collaboration with French tree ecophysiologist Éric Badel, the project question how living beings sense and adapt to their environment.
Inspired by philosopher Michael Marder and the Latin verb vertere — “to turn, to transform” — Vertimus (we turn, we transform) proposes an ongoing metamorphosis between species.
We will examine how plants perceive wind, light, and gravity, revealing forms of consciousness, especially proprioception — a bodily awareness once thought to belong only to animals.
In dialogue with scientific experiments on gravitropism and perception, a young poplar’s movement becomes a slow choreography mirrored by dancer Émilie Pouzet, creating a duet across different temporalities. Visitors are also invited to experience this shared equilibrium physically, through interactive structures that challenge their sense of balance and orientation.
Drawing on the thought of Emanuele Coccia, Vertimus invites us to experience coexistence with the vegetal world — to feel, in our own bodies, that to become with plants is to embrace transformation itself.
Karine Bonneval’s (born in 1970 in La Rochelle, France) transdisciplinary practice proposes alternative ecologies for breathing, moving, and listening with the plant world. Fascinated by the interactions between humans and their environment, she draws on botanical, animal and human forms as a repertoire of references that she reinterprets and hybridises through processes combining craftsmanship and new technologies.
By intertwining popular and scientific cultures in her works, she invites humans to embrace phytomorphism — to share time and experience with plants, engaging in a dialogue with air, soil, and gravity. Her exploration of vegetal life and its environments leads her to develop rhizomatic projects that bring together people from diverse fields: scientists, botanists, gardeners, cooks, and local inhabitants of the places where she is invited to create.
In collaboration with research teams, her projects seek new ways of interacting with the living world. These include partnerships with: Institut Diversité, Écologie et Évolution du Vivant, NeuroPsi, Université Paris-Saclay / INRAe PIAF, Clermont-Ferrand / LASIRE, Université de Lille / LadHyX, CNRS–École Polytechnique / Rillig Lab, Freie Universität Berlin / Soil and Crops Science Section, Cornell University, USA. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Angoulême and the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, Karine Bonneval has exhibited her work in France (Nuit Blanche / Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire / Micro-Onde / La Maréchalerie / La Graineterie / Le Transpalette…), Germany (Perspektive Grant / Botanical Museum Berlin), Latvia (Latvian Museum of Art), Denmark (ARoS Contemporary Art Museum), the United States (Cornell Experimental Gallery), Argentina (Centro Cultural Recoleta), and Sri Lanka (Cinnamon Colomboscope). Together with scientist Éric Badel (INRAe PIAF) and Studio Décalé, she received the Fondation Carasso “Composer les savoirs” grant in 2019. She was awarded the Grantham
Nicholas KAHN and Richard SELESNICK. The Green-Man Mind: Folklore, Vegetal Cognition, and Ecological Imagination
Plants have long been relegated to the background of human culture, viewed as passive matter rather than active agents. Yet recent research in plant science and philosophy suggests otherwise: plants sense, communicate, adapt, and remember, exhibiting forms of intelligence that challenge anthropocentric definitions of thought. In parallel, folklore and art have carried a more enduring recognition of vegetal agency through the figure of the Green-Man—the leaf-faced hybrid carved into medieval cathedrals, symbol of regeneration, and reminder of the porous boundary between human and plant.
This talk brings these two threads together, examining how the collaborative art practice of Kahn & Selesnick reanimates the Green-Man as a figure for contemporary ecological imagination. Through staged photographs, masquerades, and mythic narratives, the duo situate the Green-Man in post-industrial and climate-stricken landscapes, where his leafy visage becomes both elegiac witness and comic survivalist. In doing so, their work makes visible a form of vegetal cognition not in the laboratory but in cultural imagination: intelligence understood as slow, distributed, and ecological. By reading the Green-Man through both science and folklore, this presentation asks how art can help us think with plants—and what it means to recognize a more-than-human mind.
Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist duo who, for over three decades, have built an expansive body of work blending photography, sculpture, drawing, and fiction. Working together since meeting at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1980s, they create elaborate mythologies and parallel worlds populated by enigmatic characters, hybrid beings, and invented rituals. Their projects often unfold as pseudo-historical archives or environmental fables, using allegory and masquerade to address contemporary ecological concerns. Kahn currently lives and gardens in Morlaix, Brittany, France and Selesnick in Kingston, New York.
Kahn & Selesnick’s imagery has been exhibited internationally, with works held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum. Their practice draws deeply on art history, folklore, and literature, while reimagining photography as a stage for narrative speculation. Recent projects have explored climate change, post-industrial landscapes, and the figure of the green-man as a mediator between human and vegetal life. Through humor, beauty, and uncanny invention, their art invites viewers to inhabit worlds both haunting and strangely hopeful.
Ursula BIEMANN. Forest as a Field of Mind
Forest Mind is an artistic research project that investigates the intelligence and metaphysics of plants through a dialogue between Indigenous cosmologies and Western science. The video work emerges from my long-term collaboration with the Inga people of Colombia’s Amazon on the creation of an Indigenous University — a multispecies, biocultural project where knowledge is rooted in territory itself. Drawing on insights from shamanic practices around the master plant Yagé (Ayahuasca) and on collaborations with ETH Zurich in the field of DNA research, Forest Mind explores how vegetal intelligence manifests through chemical, cognitive, and visual forms. The project connects visionary knowledge with biotechnological image-making, encoding sound, image, and seed into DNA as a meditation on life as information. By tracing these intersections, Forest Mind highlights the importance of epistemic diversity in our engagement with knowledge, nature, and ways of knowing.
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist and author based in Zurich whose practice centres on fieldwork, often in Indigenous territories, and the creation of networks between different fields of knowledge. Her work explores the political ecologies of forests, oil, and water, reflecting on extraction while proposing ecocentric and epistemically diverse approaches to knowledge and relationality. In projects such as Forest Mind, she investigates plant intelligence and the interconnection of all life, bridging Indigenous cosmologies, shamanic practices, and scientific research to rethink communication, cognition, and the ethics of knowing. Biemann recently had solo exhibitions at MAMAC in Nice, MUAC in Mexico City, and MQ Freiraum in Vienna. She published the online monograph Becoming Earth, reflecting on ten years of ecological video works, and the book Forest Mind – On the Interconnection of All Life with Spector Books.