Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

The recipient of the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize 2023 for Artistic Exploration, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, and evolution, she explores the human impulse to “better” the world. She experiments with simulation, representation, and the nonhuman perspective to question the contemporary fixation on innovation over conservation, despite the environmental crisis. Her work is in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and ZKM Karlsruhe. In 2021, she launched Pollinator Pathmaker, a series of living artworks for pollinators, planted and cared for by humans with the long-term desire to create the world’s largest climate-positive artwork. Her stained glass commission for Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana was just unveiled at The Three Chimneys power station and in October 2024, she will open her first Swedish solo exhibition, “Machine Auguries” at Bildmuseet, Umeå.

Artworks

Pollinator Pathmaker

2023

Serpentine and LAS Editions

Looped video dimensions variable

3’45”

Pollinator Pathmaker is an artwork for pollinators, planted and cared for by humans. Created by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg in response to human-made ecological damage, the work is a one-of-a-kind experiment in interspecies art. This video artwork shows the Pollinator Pathmaker Serpentine and LAS Editions that were planted in London (UK) and Berlin (DE). The artist’s bespoke software composites her digital paintings of each plant species in these Editions, and the individual images are automatically assembled into a virtual garden, based on the algorithmic planting designs. We experience this otherworldly space shot from the perspective of a foraging insect, rather than from the top-down view of a human. The scenes flip between human view and the artist’s “pollinator vision” simulation. But capturing an insect’s worldview is impossible, so we can only experience the digital distortion of a virtual environment.

Pollinator Pathmaker was originally commissioned by the Eden Project and funded by Garfield Weston Foundation.
Founding supporters Gaia Art Foundation, Google Arts & Culture.
International Edition Founding supporter LAS Art Foundation.