Where do AI, the natural world, and digital art meet? We explored this rich terrain through The Generative Tree exhibition and programming with Champlain College Professors Kristin Wolf, Ariel Burgess, and their students! The following photo essay tells the story.
- It was a cold day in March and one of the last days of classes before spring recess, yet these media-savvy Champlain College students were alert and curious on their tour of The Generative Tree exhibition.
- The exhibition included over 600 images, a sound installation, an interactive machine-learning installation, engravings, and sculptures. The show’s themes explored intersecting domains of art, technology, and the natural world. Read this review of the show in Vermont’s News and Arts Weekly, Seven Days.
- Students had great questions. Some expressed concerns about the new energy demands of AI and wondered about the energy demands of the project. We could share with them that our current model only uses 1 GPU, and we only need to run it about 4 hours per training. We could also share the successful sustainability efforts of Burlington Electric, the company that provides power to the cluster we work with at UVM, the Vermont Advanced Computing Center.
- The work in the exhibition is supported by the explorations of the Plant Machine Design research group at UVM, which has engaged numerous UVM undergraduate and graduate students since early 2020.
- Cam Wordarz, a UVM student researchers with the Plant Machine Design Group created an app that allowed gallery visitors to interact with our machine learning model that heals tree leaves damaged by invasive insects.
- A few weeks later, we met again on the Champlain College campus, this time with six different courses taught by Professors Wolf and Burgess. Students engaged directly with the Damaged Leaf Dataset, the heart of the exhibition’s work. (See images 4, 5 & 6)
- Together, we imagined AI that is restorative of the natural environment and explored creative and novel technological advancements that are (at least) in balance with, and not extractive of, the natural world. See images 7-12.
