RhizomeMind
A Lab for Mapping Digital Environmentalism(s)
What do we do?
Mapping Digital Environmentalism through AI-Based Arts is an interdisciplinary initiative that explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging digital technologies are reshaping our understanding of environmental sustainability, storytelling, and perception. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in creative and research fields, this project responds to urgent questions around the ethical use, environmental impact, and evolving relationship between human creativity and machine-generated articulations.
This unprecedented level of interactivity—enabled by the continuous development of digital technologies such as AI—prompts us to reimagine how sustainability may be communicated, understood, and practiced. While AI holds transformative potential, it is essential to remain vigilant against runaway resource use, and to balance the benefits of digital innovation with ecological responsibility.
Through the integration of creative experimentation, critical theory, and public engagement, this project seeks to leverage digital capabilities to explore and promote ethical AI uses that blend human insight with technological potential. At its core, the initiative fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between the arts, engineering, and sciences to develop new vocabularies and frameworks for addressing ecological challenges in an increasingly digitalized world.
What Guides Our Approach?
This project begins with the premise that the digital technologies increasingly woven into everyday life—particularly artificial intelligence and immersive media—are reshaping how we perceive, relate to, and act upon environmental realities. By mapping digital environmentalism, we seek to critically examine how digital tools both mediate and transform our understanding of ecological conditions, climate data, and planetary interdependence.
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In this context, mapping is not merely technical or cartographic. It refers to a range of cultural, technological, and representational practices:
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How environmental data is collected, classified, and interpreted
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How ecological narratives are presented, distributed, and reproduced through algorithmic logics
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And how these processes influence the way environments are rendered, sensed, and experienced—both as systems in themselves and in relation to human subjects
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This project is grounded in an interdisciplinary engagement with the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence, environmental knowledge, and creative inquiry. It seeks to foster both conversation and creation around how AI can be integrated with artistic and humanistic methods to generate immersive, affective, and critical representations of ecological crises and climate entanglements. While artistic practice is often enlisted as a communicative tool for translating scientific findings or enhancing public engagement, this project engages art beyond the merely instrumental, and rather as a valid and generative form of research in its own right—capable of posing questions, reorienting perspectives, and opening experiential and affective dimensions that other modes of inquiry may miss or underdevelop.
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Driven by an exploratory and experimental ethos, environment and ecology are approached as contested, relational fields that shift across cultural, geographic, and technological contexts. While our contributors may draw from local, national, or planetary concerns—from urban ecologies to environmental displacement—we remain committed to foregrounding diverse ecological imaginaries shaped by specific place-based, embodied, and sociopolitical conditions. Rather than prescribing a scope, we see part of our work as tracing how these scales emerge through creative practice.
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The emphasis on AI-based art is intentional. As our environmental realities become increasingly shaped and mediated through algorithmic systems, data infrastructures, and digital platforms, it is vital to engage critically and creatively with the very tools that are reconfiguring how we sense, understand, and respond to the world. In this sense, while AI broadly encompasses everything from predictive algorithms to generative neural networks and machine learning systems, this project focuses primarily on creative and generative AI tools (e.g., large language models, generative image/video tools, and immersive interfaces), as they are increasingly implicated in environmental storytelling, perception, and public engagement. This focus reflects our interest in artistic experimentation with AI and offers not only new aesthetic forms but also an opportunity to examine and intervene in the epistemological and affective frameworks shaping environmental imagination. Here, AI’s value lies not in computation alone, but in the relationships it fosters and the questions it helps us explore.
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Through this process of mapping, we also aim to uncover the limits and lacunae of technical representation—especially in relation to tacit, embodied, or place-based knowledge that may be flattened, displaced, or reshaped in digital translation. What kinds of new bodies are being imagined or operationalized in relation to environmental experience? What forms of intimacy, agency, or vulnerability become possible—or foreclosed—within AI-mediated perception? By exploring these questions through creative practice, the project foregrounds art’s capacity to question, not just illustrate, the technological conditions of ecological thought and action.
Key Activities
Present a series of talks—including podcasts, interviews, and other formats—that explore the cultural, ecological, and creative implications of AI and emerging technologies.
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Establish a research team to produce and publish insights on AI, digital media, and environmental issues—sharing findings, collaborative works, and project progress with both academic and public audiences.
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Engage students, scholars, artists, and technologists in AI-art collaborations, empowering them to explore the ethical implications of emerging technologies while developing new forms of environmental storytelling.
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Host a film & digital art festival that invites artistic experimentation with AI and immersive technologies, exploring their possibilities and constraints in environmental storytelling while fostering public engagement and creative partnership.
Why does this work matter now?
We live in a moment shaped by powerful shifts in how we learn, create, and respond to the world—where digital technologies such as AI are increasingly woven into the fabric of everyday life. For students and emerging researchers, this presents both exciting opportunities and urgent questions: these are questions not only about what we can make with these tools, but about what they are making of us, who benefits from such making, and who is left out.
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This project grows out of that tension. It opens up space for creative exploration, critical reflection, and collaborative learning—where students, artists, researchers, technologists and practitioners can think together about how technologies intersect with environmental realities, social responsibility, and cultural imagination.
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As a site of creative and critical collaboration, the project reflects what universities can be at their best: incubators of thoughtful, interdisciplinary, and future-facing practices. Through catalyzing storytelling and dialogue, the project offers one way to reimagine how we engage with climate action, sustainability, and digital innovation—not as separate concerns, but as deeply entangled futures emerging from our pressing present.