Media Advisory | Save the Date
What: Art Exhibition: The Generative Tree: New Work by Jenn Karson
Please note the following dates:
Exhibition Opening Reception: Friday, Jan 10, 2025, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: January 10 – March 15, 2025
Where: The Phoenix, 5 Stowe Street
Waterbury Village Historic District, VT 05676
Contact: Joseph Pensak (802.355.5440, Joseph@thephoenixvt.com)
thephoenixvt.com | jennkarson.studio | theartscience.studio
Press images and image descriptions at: https://go.uvm.edu/gentree
December, 2024, Waterbury, VT – Artist Jenn Karson uses scientific processes and technologies as creative catalysts. The Generative Tree exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery in Waterbury, VT, will debut new work from Karson and her Plant Machine Design Group at the University of Vermont. The exhibition offers a local Vermont perspective on a global era shaped by rapid technological advancements and worsening climate crises.
The Generative Tree includes over 600 vibrant prints and captivating photographs that bridge the visual languages of art, science, and technology. Additionally, through a playful touchscreen display visitors will be able to interact with the custom AI built by Karson and her team. The Phoenix will also exhibit Karson’s engravings and drawings that were created using high-precision machining tools. The various elements of the exhibit are unified by a narrative conveyed through a series of handwritten labels.
“Considering the billions of dollars invested in AI and other advanced technologies, it’s reasonable to expect technological advancement to assist in solving humanity’s most challenging problems, like the climate crisis. I’m excited to share early designs for speculative technologies that respect the essence of life and invite visitors to imagine an artificial intelligence that is smart enough to recognize its interdependence with the soft bodies of people, animals, and plants,” said Karson.
“I have admired Jenn’s work for a while, and I’m thrilled to bring her interactive – and gorgeous–work to The Phoenix. We anticipate a lot of interest in this show statewide,” said Joseph Pensak, founding director and lead curator for The Phoenix in Waterbury, VT. “Our location in Waterbury, a crossroads in Vermont, will allow many people to experience it.”
The Generative Tree begins with the story of artist and scientist Étienne Trouvelot and his attempt to breed a new species of silk moth during the American Civil War, when the North’s fabric mills were idle and without a supply of the South’s cotton. His unsuccessful experiment led to the introduction of the insect Lymantria dispar to North America. Since then, the caterpillar has defoliated tens of millions of acres of North American forest and is one of the most aggressive invasive foliage-feeding insects in the continental United States. After a 20+ year lull that followed the introduction of the insect’s natural fungal predator, Lymnatria dispar outbreaks in Vermont have become more severe due to drought conditions correlated with climate change.
At the heart of the exhibition is a collection of over 7,000 Vermont leaves scarred by the invasive caterpillar during the Vermont outbreaks of 2021 and 2022. These outbreaks happened to occur just before the notable November 2022 launch of the generative AI, ChatGPT.
“Today, we live in the wake of Trouvelot’s failed 19th-century experiment while we also presently address new concerns about the 21st-century generative AI experiment,” said Karson. Considering both experiments, she and her team used their original datasets of damaged Vermont leaves (and healthy Vermont leaves) to train a generative AI model to “heal and repair” oak and maple leaves damaged by the spongy moth. “We called on AI, at least symbolically, to participate in ecological restoration,” she said. The exhibition also invites visitors to compare the generative powers of forest ecosystems with the patterned regenerative predictions – and unprecedented energy consumption – of generative AI.
Breaking from a history of technological advancements that rely on the mass extraction of natural resources and ill-fated attempts to control the natural world, the exhibition concludes with a bold debut of Karson and the team’s early musings and blueprints for Phytomechatronics. Through the introduction of this speculative technology, the exhibition invites visitors to imagine technological advancements that nourish biological systems and a future where intelligent machines are aware of their interdependence with biological systems – and behave accordingly. “Radical imagination can play an important role in solving the complex problems of today’s world, that’s where the arts come in,” Karson said.
The Phoenix Curator Joseph Pensak added, “What compels me about Jenn’s work is its combination of play and irony with a seriousness about drawing attention to technology’s potential to solve environmental problems, all while holding the flip-side of progress up to the viewer’s eye—we rarely hear about the massive server farms (and the vast amounts of energy and natural resources they require) to support our instant enjoyment of things like streaming music or AI. It also speaks to Jenn’s intuition and her tuned-in-ness as a visual artist that she doesn’t leave the gallery visitor lost in a fog of data. You’ll be able to walk into this show and enjoy it on a purely visual level even if you don’t have time to get into the weeds of her philosophical approach and its implications (which you should).”
Select works from the exhibition, including digital prints and ink-on-paper drawings, will be available for acquisition through the gallery. Additionally, The Phoenix is pleased to debut an extended series of 12” x 14” Phytomechatronic drawings, available to collectors.
The Generative Tree installation was designed in cooperation with Jon Bondy from Vermont Rapid Prototyping.
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Artist Jenn Karson uses scientific processes and technologies as creative catalysts. Her art practice weaves tactile techniques with generative algorithms, transmuting digital data into architectural forms and visual languages. These artifacts, with their porous boundaries, challenge conventional divides between the artificial and the natural, creating a space where technology and nature converge. Through her Plant Machine Design Group, she advocates for Phytomechatronics; a living advanced technology attentive to the vital futures of plant, animal, and human soft bodies.
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The Generative Tree exhibition is supported in part by the University of Vermont, The Vermont Advanced Computing Center, and the National Science Foundation. It is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award No. 2218063. Computations were performed on the Vermont Advanced Computing Core supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) award No. OAC-1827314.