About the project ·

This project is an invitation to overcome the dichotomy between nature and technology, highlighting how AI inhabits and creates a hybrid ecology, constituted by interdependent relationships between human and non-human agencies.

If AI is usually represented as an immaterial and deterritorialised entity, separated from any relationship with the tangible world, Hybrid Ecology seeks to refute this narrative by re-materialising the processes behind the production of Artificial Intelligence and its connection with the Earth.

To the extent that the imaginaries of AI follow discourses that make the exploitation of nature invisible, installing a perception of the environment as a set of elastic and exploitable resources, it seems fundamental to us to discuss the interdependencies between technology and the environment.

“Hybrid Ecologies” is a call to recognise the terrestrial ecologies that enable the development of AI. It is an interpellation to set aside the convenient but naïve belief that we inhabit a planet with infinite resources (water, lithium, copper, silicon, cobalt, among others) to explore new forms of cohabitation between AI and Earth.

Recognising that AI is situated in a situation of planetary limit implies exploring forms of cohabitation between the technological, the human and the earth, making visible the hybrid alliances and entanglements that lie behind all forms of intelligence, whether organic, inorganic or machinic.

The challenge is not only to make visible the multiplicity of actors involved in the use of AI, but above all to begin to explore new forms of awareness-raising that encourage a conversation about how we want to cohabit the planet, integrating technological innovation within the terrestrial limits opened up by the Anthropocene. While a necessary step is to be accountable and begin to explicitly quantify the energy consumption of developing AI systems and to force large technology companies to declare such impacts, this problem must also be addressed through the language of the humanities and other modes of engagement.

The Hybrid Ecologies project is precisely a collaborative effort to explore, from the tools of research-creation, the conditions for addressing the impacts of AI on the terrestrial ecosystem.

If the innovation narrative around AI seeks to position the notion of an immaterialisation of technological modernisation, the Hybrid Ecologies project constitutes the opposite effort: to make visible and tangible the material and physical cost of using AI.

The concept of “Hybrid Ecology” that gives the title to this research creation is an invitation to think from the more-than-human entanglements that underpin AI, assuming the state of vulnerability and fragility in which we are immersed.

Rather than thinking about AI from the traditional dichotomy between nature and technology, we seek to insist that AI is constituted of 'naturocultures' (Haraway 2005) shaped by co-evolving relationships between multiple agencies, species and entities.

Hybrid Ecologies is an invitation to think of AI as the result and effect of these assemblages, where human and terrestrial agencies co-construct each other in a constantly evolving fabric. But it is also a challenge to deploy forms of speculative resistance to the complex web of extractivist relations and power around the AI industry.

The challenge is not only to make visible the multiplicity of agents involved in the use of AI, but above all to begin to explore new forms of awareness-raising that encourage a conversation about how we want to co-inhabit the planet, integrating technological innovation within the terrestrial limits opened up by the anthropocene. While a necessary step is to be accountable and begin to explicitly quantify the energy consumption of developing AI systems and to force large technology companies to declare such impacts, this problem must also be addressed through the language of the humanities and other modes of engagement.

The Hybrid Ecologies project is precisely a collaborative effort to explore, from the tools of research-creation, the conditions for addressing the impacts of AI on the terrestrial ecosystem.