Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change
The technological capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) offer new touchstones for understanding and acting on climate change. OBVIOUS, a collective of three artist friends in Paris, create art using AI. For the Human/Nature exhibition, they collaborated with aerial nature photographer Stas Bartnikas, who has taken many thousands of aerial photographs of landscapes around the world, including of sensitive ecosystems, to create The DoomsdAI Clock.
Adapting the imagery of the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock to convey “criticism and a message of hope” in addressing climate change, the piece is an evolving, evocative artwork displaying an AI-generated video within a frame of aluminum and wood. The time displayed on the clock coordinates with the official time announced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
For The DoomsdAI Clock, OBVIOUS created an algorithm primarily using the landscapes of Iceland, along with photos of other remote places on Earth, to project a composite of landscape images in a process of rapid transformation. Just over 5,000 photos were required to produce an algorithm with high-definition results in 24 hours—a significant advance over what was possible a few years ago.
Today, AI research, or machine learning with the universal Python programming language, is used to predict changes to the earth’s ecosystems as a consequence of climate change; and to devise ways to repair ecological damage, for example, to the barrier reefs, and to preserve the habitats of endangered species. Morphing images of landscapes in The DoomsdAI Clock, not representative of a particular place, but deeply evocative of Earth’s magical beauty, suggest unknown possibilities for imminent changes to the earth’s surface; and remind us that AI may reflect back to us something different, something more than human awareness is currently capable of perceiving or imagining.
As Misho Ceko, Harris COO who oversees art installations at the Keller Center, notes, “AI promises seemingly limitless potential for predicting environmental conditions and testing solutions to the climate crisis in ways that are safe and efficient, accurate and cost effective—they’re not invasive or dangerous, nor constrained by time and physical resources. The AI work being done by OBVIOUS exemplifies the power and potential of art to convey complex scientific data to diverse public audiences—communities who urgently need to be educated and engaged in new ways about climate change.”