Biennale Venezia 2025

Hybrid Ecologies: the planetary metabolism of AI

Generative exploration of water’s intelligences

Can we imagine an artificial intelligence that, instead of merely extracting resources from the planet, forges bonds of reciprocity with the ecosystems that sustain it? Is it possible to conceive of an AI that does not forget its material and terrestrial origins, and responds to them through acts of care, recognition, and repair? Could artificial intelligence become a tool for interspecies diplomacy, mediating between human and non-human lifeforms to open spaces for listening, care, and cohabitation on a shared planet?

These questions lie at the heart of Hybrid Ecologies: The Planetary Metabolism of AI, an installation that investigates the vital role of water in the operation and expansion of artificial intelligence. Present in vast quantities to cool data centers, water silently sustains the metabolism of AI.

However, water's relevance is not confined to its technical dimension: it is also a living entity, capable of carrying memories, interweaving territories, and shaping landscapes. Rethinking our relationship with it requires moving beyond a purely instrumental view and opening ourselves to more respectful and collaborative forms of coexistence. Within this framework, the digital infrastructures that underpin contemporary society generate a debt to water—a debt that cannot be repaid through efficiency improvements or technological innovations alone. What is required is to reimagine practices of repair, both material and symbolic, that acknowledge its environmental intelligence and its irreplaceable role in the planet's habitability.

Hence, the urgency to deploy and design forms of artificial intelligence that not only optimize water usage but also help make visible water's vitality and its regenerative capacity.

Towards a Terrestrial AI

This installation's core proposition is to imagine a Terrestrial AI: an intelligence anchored in planetary materiality that, from this standpoint, can become a mediator for new relationships with territories and the multiple lifeforms inhabiting them, fostering dynamics of care, reciprocity, and water justice.

We start from the premise that water embodies a form of planetary intelligence—with its circulation patterns, its climatic memory, and its capacity for adaptation. From this perspective, artificial intelligence can be conceived not merely as an optimization technology, but as a tool to make this intelligence visible and amplify it.

In this installation, we have tasked AI with working as a speculative ally, capable of immersing us in the multiple ways water inhabits, remembers, and acts. The goal is not to speak for water, nor to translate it into a human language, but to explore ways of attuning ourselves to its signs, rhythms, and memories. AI thus becomes a mediation device that, beyond mere representation, invites us to refine our sensitivity to recognize water as an interlocutor, unfolding a pedagogy of attention and care towards its terrestrial intelligence.

Hybrid Ecologies seeks to acknowledge all that water does for—and with—us: it shapes landscapes, connects territories, transmits memories, hydrates species, and sustains the very life of the planet.

Visualizing Water Intelligence with AI

To make these concepts visible, we followed a generative and speculative process using Stable Diffusion XL. We curated a set of textual and visual inputs that guided the model in producing images reflecting the multiple intelligences of water. These representations fuse conceptual rigor and poetic speculation, inviting us to reimagine our relationship with the living world through care, reciprocity, and interdependence.