In their latest exhibition, Rasa Šmite and Raits Šmits use artificial intelligence to imagine how plants might evolve under conditions of rapid climate change.
The exhibition focuses on wild Andean lupines, which grow in extreme mountain conditions and represent one of the relatively most recent examples of rapid plant species diversification. In collaboration with Colin Edward Hughes, a plant evolution scientist at the University of Zurich, the artists digitized 100 herbarium specimens and trained a generative AI model that transforms them into speculative forms. In a three-dimensional digital environment, the plants regain the forms they once lost as herbarium specimens, and become interactive virtual organisms that respond to visitors’ hand movements and environmental data - light, temperature, and humidity.