Machine Seeing Nature

2023 - present

How does a machine see nature? Are they opposites, or intimates?

Human vision evolved over millions of years in relationship with the natural world. Machines, built to approximate aspects of human perception and trained on images made by us, develop their own visual lexicon—one that sometimes strangely echoes this connection to nature.

Machine Seeing Nature returns these machine-learned patterns to the landscapes they resemble, layering artificial and biological ways of seeing.

At a moment when AI’s expanding data centers place growing demands on energy and water, the work asks what it means for machine vision to look back at the natural world it increasingly depends upon.