PLANTS INTELLIGENCE

RIXC Art Science Festival 2025

Yuchin Chen. What the Forest Tells the Machine

16.10.2025.

The work transforms a corner of forest in Latvia into a 3D-scanned point cloud. Within this digital terrain, a voice generated by speech synthesis and Large Language Model flows through it, narrating in a poetic manner the things it “observes” or attempts to observe in the forest, as well as the messages, inspirations, stories, symbols, and signs it receives……

Humans interpret layers of reality through symbols, signs, language, religion, art, and science. If AI is seen as the ultimate repository of human knowledge and consciousness, how does it render different modes of the world? Or does it merely continue to reflect chains of symbols back into it?

Using forest field recordings and images as inputs, the haunting monologue becomes a metaphor for the echo of the digitally mediated forest, of the environment, of the “world”.