AI Art and the Foreclosure of Ecological Agency: A Critique of Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth

Johns, Deniz & Zeilinger, Martin (2025) “AI Art and the Foreclosure of Ecological Agency: A Critique of Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth”, in Vectoral Agents, Eds. Claudio Celis Buena and Jernej Markelj.Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam

Abstract: 

In this chapter we examine Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, Refik Anadol’s 2024 exhibition at Serpentine Galleries, and challenge Anadol’s claim that his work fosters ecological awareness and shared agency through AI-driven immersive aesthetics. While Anadol frames the Large Nature Model (LNM), the bespoke AI system underpinning the show, as an “open-source” and “more-than-human” tool capable of giving a voice to nature, we argue that the project ultimately reinforces the opacity, extractivism, and corporate dependencies characteristic of large-scale contemporary AI systems. By analysing the exhibition’s sensory spectacle, associated rhetoric of transparency and “radical clarity,” and misleading claims regarding the “open source” nature of the underlying technologies, we argue that Anadol’s work immobilises viewers instead of activating their ecological imagination – Echoes of the Earth produces a technologically saturated requiem for threatened ecosystems rather than a space for critical engagement. Our chapter situates this dynamic within longer histories of media art, and we contrast the non-reflexive immersion strategies of Anadol’s installations with experimental practices that sought to demystify their technological apparatuses. We also interrogate the LNM’s purported openness, and show how its proprietary infrastructure, selective data disclosure, and monetised platformisation contradict its public-interest framing. Ultimately, opportunities for collective agency or ecological intervention are foreclose, rather than enabled. In closing, we outline alternative trajectories emerging in contemporary AI art that more effectively support ecological imagination and redistributions of agency.