AGRIDISTOPIA

Part of the second chapter of the trilogy REWILD: PROTO HUMANS SEEDING THE A.I., this AI-generated video represents the Dystopian vision of agriculture as we know it. 

In the spirit of REWILD, the cycle of installations conceived by THE CURATORS MILAN, and taking inspiration from a series of projects that use A.I. to monitor the state of soils and coral reefs, we have reasoned on the importance of the role of native seeds within the processes related to regenerative and organic agriculture. We turn seeds into pixels to create a series of images and 3D flows by accessing data from the databases provided by Svalbard Global Seed Vault and Genesys among others. Then collaborating with artificial intelligence, we create an interactive path of two visual sub-paths. The first will narrate the utopian story of a relationship of peaceful and functional coexistence between humanity and the A.I., particularly of a land cultivated according to the principles of regenerative and organic agriculture. The second path is a dystopian view of one grown with pesticides, fertilizers, and genetically modified seeds, evoking in both cases the consequences on the surrounding ecosystems, including human beings. We use the colonial terms “utopia and dystopia” just as a frame of understanding, but we intend our actions to be part of the protopia, improving, protecting or restoring what we have.

The vision of natural and balanced beauty, made of harmonious shapes and sounds, is contrasted with the dissonant and unbalanced one of an ecosystem exploited by the industrial techniques of heavy agriculture, a soil depleted of minerals to remind us how the intensive agricultural model destroy not only the soil that undergoes it but the entire surrounding ecosystem.

Created with the support of Polaris Enginnering and exhibited during Performia Festival, Florence and We Make Future, Rimini