‘Decenter the human’ – shifting perspectives on nature11 Images
The names of approximately 200,000 extinct species are featured in K Allado-McDowell’s new exhibition at Swiss Institute in New York. To the human brain, it’s almost impossible to comprehend such a vast collection of living things, much less their erasure from the Earth and its oceans. “I wanted to just understand what extinction is at a very basic level,” says the artist and writer, who compiled the list alongside their research assistant. Then came the task of condensing all that into something tangible, to create something that humans can wrap their head around.
The result is The Known Lost, a participatory exhibition-slash-opera where visitors can speak or sing the names of lost species, against a visual backdrop that doubles as a prototype for a physical monument, designed to honour all species that have ever lived and died on our home planet. At its heart, says Allado-McDowell: “It’s about making deep time more accessible in the past and in the future, and putting ourselves into a longer continuum.”
By now, it’s no secret that we need to radically rethink our place in nature if we’re to reverse our disastrous impact on Earth’s ecosystems, via anthropogenic global warming, the pollution of rivers and seas, deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, omnipresent microplastics… the list goes on. As Björk and her collaborator Aleph Molinari told Dazed in December last year, human civilisation – particularly in the late-capitalist West – has become dangerously disconnected from these conversations, even as we increasingly feel their effects. “The modern concept of nature itself is problematic,” Molinari says. “Nature came to define what was outside, the savage Other… But nature is everything that we’re part of.”
Like The Known Lost, Björk and Molinari’s Nature Manifesto (2024) honed in on Earth’s extinct species, conjuring their long-lost voices using AI technologies (in collaboration with IRCAM) to fill a mechanical escalator at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. On the surface, it was a poignant reminder of biodiversity loss, but there was a deeper existential thread. Again, the project was about getting us outside our narrow understanding of history, to see ourselves as part of a continuum that goes back millions of years and could stretch millions more years into the future (fingers crossed). In other words, it was about undermining the myth that humans are “at the centre of everything”.
This is not an easy thing to come to terms with. “There’s a trauma involved in decentering the human,” says Allado-McDowell, comparable to the Copernican Revolution (the proof and gradual acceptance of the idea that Earth isn’t specially situated at the centre of the heavens). “But the question is, what comes next? What does it mean to not be the centre?” This, they suggest is where it’s helpful to view things from an ecological perspective, considering the interconnected relationships of organisms and their environment at every scale of life. “It’s helpful to acknowledge that we’re already living in ecological relationships… so it’s not hard to make that leap.”
There’s a trauma involved in decentering the human
Counterintuitively, one of the driving factors in our shifting outlook on humanity’s ancient, evolutionary past is a hyper-modern technology: AI. “People see a chatbot, for example, and they say, ‘This thing is using language. It’s reasoning. That’s something that’s supposed to be distinct to humans,’” says Allado-McDowell. This raises a slew of scary questions: “‘Does that mean I’m just the same as a machine? Does the machine have a soul? Is [the machine] alive? Or does that mean I’m just a material process?’” On the other hand, machines that can ‘think’ might prompt us to question what other kinds of intelligence we can see outside our previously-blinkered view, from bee colonies and octopi, to coral reefs and talking trees.
The Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila has been thinking about ways to view the world from a non-human (or more-than-human) perspective for some time. Her 2011 moving image work Horizontal–Vaakasuora consists of six screens, each containing a section of a towering, 30-foot spruce in Finland’s boreal forest. To treat the tree as a “protagonist” – or simply as a subject worthy of a portrait – required breaking some cinematic rules and conventions, Ahtila tells me at Kew Gardens’ Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, where Horizontal is currently on display. “If you move back, it’s a landscape,” she explains. “If you go close, it’s [just] a part of the tree. And if you use a wide-angle lens, the tree will be distorted.” To get around these limitations in the finished work, the tree is presented on its side, its trunk swaying at an impossible 90-degree angle. At first, this is slightly disorienting, at least for the human viewer; after a while, it becomes a deeply soothing experience.
It’s important to move away from a purely human-centric view of the world, Ahtila agrees, “because of the situation [in which] we are living now, because we have to maintain the planet, we have to see that it’s not only us here, that being is happening in different spaces, between different creatures, that breath is not only coming from us but from the trees and everything around [us]”. From the artist’s point of view, she adds: “That’s why we have to think about what kind of image of this planet we’re making, and what [is] worthy of being presented.”
A new exhibition by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast also aims to open up the inner life of trees via Kew Gardens’ Lucombe oak. Titled Of the Oak, the installation consists of a six-metre “digital double” of the famed tree, encouraging visitors to synchronise their breathing with its rhythms as part of a “living monument of vital ecological relationships and species interdependence” (besides living for hundreds of years and growing between 20 and 40 metres tall, oaks can play host to sprawling ecosystems, supporting some 2,300 different species). The imagery itself draws on a vast collection of real-world data, which lights up the branches and roots like something out of Avatar.
We have to think about what kind of image of this planet we’re making, and what [is] worthy of being presented
Given their role in “decentering the human”, it might come as little surprise that cutting-edge technologies – and particularly AI – play a large part in contemporary ecological art. The Known Lost and Nature Manifesto both make use of artificial intelligence alongside contributions by human artists, designers, and composers. In April 2025, the Scottish, Finland-based artist Charles Sandison also unveiled a permanent code-based installation at PCAI’s ‘pi’ pavilion in Delphi, Greece, which lit up the landscape with images and words produced by a generative algorithm. Both nature and the computer might be considered collaborators on this artwork, as Sandison explained to me at the opening of The Garden of Pythia – which is true on several levels, and across several different timescales. In the immediate present we watched the wind blow through the leaves and scatter his digital projections, but we can also think about it in terms of our broader biological history: “Nature created intelligence… made us. A lot of what we do as artists [is] connected back to that, trying to uncover some sort of primary code.”
Of course, the use of artificial intelligence in art is itself a complex topic – especially, in this case, when it comes to its environmental impact. Take the comments under Björk’s posts about Nature Manifesto on Instagram, for example. “Please stop using AI”, one reads, and another: “Google ‘AI water usage’.’” Yet another calls artistic AI “a new level of oxymoron”. Allado-McDowell is well aware of the controversy, having “collaborated” with models like GPT-3 on previous projects such as Pharmako-AI. “I’m as much a critic as anybody, because I’m very close to it,” they say, and it’s no exaggeration – they frequently frame the technology as a dangerous toxin. “But I’m also trying to figure out […] what is needed from us to transform that toxin into something that could potentially be healing.”
This nuanced approach echoes Allado-McDowell’s take on mainstream attitudes toward AI at large: “Our kind of flat, binaristic response is insufficient.” Technology, like humans and the rest of the natural world, has to be viewed as part of a bigger, complex ecosystem if we’re to understand the full extent of its pitfalls and potential – how it might change and even help save our rapidly evolving planet. And yes, it’s hard to hold these messy systems, massively distributed across space and time, in our heads, especially when it involves setting our egos aside. But that’s where the imaginative power of art comes in. “I think it’s easy to be pessimistic, especially right now,” says Allado-McDowell. “The way I see it, is that we need freedom to imagine, to imagine new possibilities, [and] to explore the shadow as well. Also, just the psychic freedom to be with what is happening, and to observe it. To the extent that we’re able to maintain that within ourselves, as artists, we will find value in art.”
