A Harmony of AI, Environmentalism, & Art with Léa Collet

CHERE NATURE. Photo: Lea Collet

By KENDALL KRANTZ December 1, 2024

*Technonaturalism: The belief that technological development can and should progress in harmony with environmental preservation.

“AI is like gardening in the sense that you must nurture and feed it, but what comes out is a surprise,” explains Léa Collet, “What is a glitch? What is a mistake?”

In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, Léa Collet’s technonaturalist* vision offers a rare harmony between technology, art, and ecological stewardship. Known for her large-scale installations that merge collective intelligence, technological glitches, and nature’s persistence, the French artist’s work prompts us to rethink the relationship between humanity, technology, and the environment.

A keystone piece of Collet’s body of work is Chère Nature (2024), an 8-minute documentary produced during a two-year residency with LE BAL/La Fabrique du Regard et La Source. Chère Nature (2024) depicts environmentalism as told through the eyes of elementary school students and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Created with elementary school students and artificial intelligence, the project captures a childlike perspective on environmentalism. The result was a collaboratively produced science fiction film created with photogrammétrie, video editing, and AI.

“They are amazing. They have references I don’t have,” she shares, referring to the students rather than the AI, which was trained on her own work and open-source datasets like Google Colab. Collet recalls how the children brought her the manga Fool Night, while she introduced them to Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Anna Tsing to help them develop a deeper sense of humanity within nature.

“They started to figure out how to place themselves in the world,” she says with delight.

Portrait of Lea Collet.

While Chère Nature is an example of Collet’s practice so far, her recent work with the Sigg Art Foundation signals a new phase of her career. Shortlisted for the Sigg Art Prize, Collet proposed a project that tells “the journey of an AI-created plant seed traveling from the King Abdullah International Gardens in Saudi Arabia to the Desert of Retz in France, encountering new plant species along the Bedouin Trail.”

This win marks her debut in private production, supported by a technologically focused nonprofit led by a mysterious Swiss businessman, Pierre Sigg. Collet will join her cohort of inaugural Sig Art Prize honorees for a three-week residency in Le Castellet, where she plans to focus on digital formalism.

For me, the competition itself raises questions. Among the panelists was an AI judge developed by Grégory Chatonsky, trained with machine vision and large language models (LLMs) to assess “the originality of the proposals.” Details of the AI’s training data remain undisclosed, but its inclusion invites scrutiny.

LLMs are notorious for their outsized environmental footprint. According to Golestan (Sally) Radwan, Chief Digital Officer of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), “The lack of environmental guardrails is no less dangerous than the lack of other AI-related safeguards.”

CHERE NATURE. Photo: Marianne Dorell.

This tension lies at the heart of Collet’s work. Her technonaturalist ethos emphasizes low-impact, intentional technology use, burning far less computing power for a year of projects than the average college student using ChatGPT for one paper. Her projects also emphasize material recycling: she sources flowers for sculptures locally, works on a decade-old laptop, and reuses elements across installations. She explains, “The way I work, everything feeds into another component.”

The Sigg Art Foundation, by contrast, utilizes AI judges reliant on computationally heavy resources. I wonder how the Foundation plans to incorporate Collet’s expertise in environmentally-conscious art practices on an institutional scale. Their website declares an intention to “commit to promoting eco-conscious art practices and creating sustainable experiences,” but how is the foundation upholding those commitments in action?

In working with a new host of public and private institutions, Collet will continue to facilitate vital conversations about human stewardship towards our shared planet, using technology as a catalyst for discussion. I am excited to see how the Sigg Art Foundation, among her other collaborators, will take inspiration from her work.

Upcoming opportunities to view Collet’s work in the next year will include an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon and a yearlong residency in Monaco. WM