While Entwined at Bitforms gallery makes Earth look pretty, the sources of the artists’ AI imagery are being burned, razed and flooded
Anyone who’s ever left a Windows 98 OS unattended in the family computer room can remember the trippy, shapeshifting graphics that used to pop up on the black screen. The three-man artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, based in London and active since 2011, revives the easy hypnotism of these images in the exhibition Entwined at bitforms gallery. Eight looping videos – presented via an array of wall-length projections, bespoke mounted screens and modest TVs – depict pulsing twilit forests against a droning soundscape meant to imitate nature sounds – humming bugs and crackling leaves occasionally punctuated by a crack of thunder.
With a press release full of quasi-academic statements like, ‘In the age of climate change, reveling in the simple act of breathing can be a thought engagement with the Anthropocene’, Entwined sets out to underscore the neglected connection between humans and our fellow Earth dwellers – a relationship that technology has sullied but can, the exhibition suggests, help repair – at the most basic level. In the video Breath Cycles (2018), hyperreal, animated tree branches are arranged like lungs; in Lupuna: Becoming (2024), we see a timelapse of a glossy flower – its dew impressively rendered – that only blooms at night. Gimmicky metaphors aside, the artists also propose new ways of seeing – for instance, through a dragonfly’s UV-sensitive, 360-degree compound eyes or through an owl’s binocular vision – in a series of videos titled In the Eyes of the Animal (2015–2023), which rest on the hope that the literal representation of nonhuman perspectives will unlock viewers’ empathy towards these creatures.
The gallery’s dark rooms are cocoon-like, creating a space that manages to be immersive without requiring a clunk VR headset. Still, the exhibition feels nothing like being in nature. While the artists based their videos on mappings of physical locations, taking drones, bespoke 360-degree cameras, Lidar scanners and field-recording equipment to places like the Grizedale Forest in northern England and Sequoia National Park in California, the resulting work that they dub ‘generative compositions’ feel firmly grounded in the digital. ‘Generative’ here refers to generative artificial intelligence, in which datasets – pertaining, for example, to the real dimensions of a sequoia tree – are analysed and manipulated according to certain rules, eventually producing entirely new outputs. In We Live in an Ocean of Air, Horizontal Edition (2016), this manifests as a stream of pixels spewing from the trunk of a sequoia until the pixels produce a bubbly double of the tree. Visible behind the trunks and branches is a nondescript flatness evocative of a computer interface’s infinite plane.
But there’s another layer of unease present in the artwork: the unspoken irony of the energy-intensive labour of making Marshmallow Laser Feast’s serviceable animations. While the artists do not disclose the details of what the exhibition checklist simply calls their ‘custom software’, research shows that the carbon footprint of training a single large AI model can be five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car. AI models and augmented-reality applications are hosted by data centres that need massive amounts of electricity and water to stay cool; digital image processing relies on hard-to-source materials that require yet more energy to engineer. The clarion call of climate change awareness falls apart as soon as you consider the proven environmental impact of generative AI.
While Entwined makes Earth look pretty, in a flattened and abstracted way, the sources of Marshmallow Laser Feast’s imagery are being burned, razed and flooded. The exhibition’s refusal to acknowledge this inherent contradiction inadvertently makes clear that, in the artists’ vision of the future, tech does not so much repair the environment as it supplants nature entirely.
Entwined at Bitforms, New York through 8 March
