Art and technology create empathy for Vombsjön
Can art and technology change how we perceive nature? In the Vattenjagen project, funded by Vinnova, HDK-Valand’s Samantha Hookway and others explore how Vombsjön (Lake Vomb) can be portrayed as a living being.
The aim of the project is to create sustainable solutions for water access in the future. The project is led by, among others, Samantha Hookway, designer and researcher at HDK-Valand, and Fredrik Garneij, artist and engineer.
– The project is about creating empathy for nature, in this case, Vombsjön, by evoking a feeling of the landscape as a living being, says Samantha Hookway.
The AI functions as a conversation partner
One inspiration for this is the Whanganui River in New Zealand, which in 2017 was recognized as a living entity with its own legal rights. To create a similar feeling for Vombsjön, the team has gathered extensive data, including pH levels, wildlife, plants, microorganisms, minerals, and other facts. Alongside various human descriptions of nature, such as poetry and stories, this data has been input into an AI tool that the researchers are working with.
Collaborating?
– Yes, you could say that the AI functions as a conversation partner, helping us to fantasize much faster than if we had just discussed it among ourselves, explains Fredrik Garneij.
– Thoughts that used to require a hard-to-achieve state of flow have now come to us more quickly, says Samantha Hookway.
As a communication medium, the team has created a box filled with sand and water, equipped with sensors. The box is angled slightly upward so that the water collects at the bottom. Using a spring, one can write or draw in the wet sand, and then tilt the box upward so that the water washes over the sand, erasing what was written. Soon, a response emerges in the sand.
– During the Biosphere Festival, an event held from September 7-15 in Lund, Eslöv, and Sjöbo, we tested the prototype for an audience. It was really exciting to see visitors write in the box and then be fascinated by how the lake responded, says Samantha Hookway.
Around the prototype, Studio Alight AB has also created a whole story in which a fictional researcher eventually learns to communicate with Vombsjön. In a podcast, one can follow the researcher’s thoughts over several decades, says Fredrik Garneij.
– If we hadn’t collaborated with the AI tool, we would have needed a studio, a voice actor, a scriptwriter, and much more, which would have cost both time and money. Now, the AI has helped us with all of this, and not least, it has supported me as the narrator so that my English voice clone has become more expressive than my voice usually is.
This isn’t the first time the artists have worked with an AI tool to create art. “Lagrymden,” shown in an exhibition in 2019, is an example of a project based on the Swedish Penal Code, says Samantha Hookway.
– It’s a kind of visualization of the relationships between different paragraphs, where the laws are expressed as points in a space. You can enter the paragraph you’re interested in, perhaps the Environmental Code chapter 17, and then click on nearby points and maybe end up on a regulation about waste disposal or geological storage of carbon dioxide.
Still the artists who do the actual work
Another project, which the team showed at the Venice Biennale in 2018, is called Prior Art Automaton. It involves an installation where a printer placed on a tall stand continuously spits out new patent applications generated with the help of AI.
Used as a conversation partner or assistant, an AI tool can deepen the creative process, says Samantha Hookway.
– The AI can help us begin to sense areas that, with our limited brains, we would hardly have thought of ourselves, she explains.
However, the idea that AI could replace humans is a misconception, points out Fredrik Garneij.
– The AI has helped us reason and find the right words. Sometimes it even invents words, like “artware” for the art we create in collaboration with the software. AI is a new and very interesting tool but it’s still the artists who do the actual work. Only with new tools.
About:
Vattenjagen is a project funded by Vinnova, which began in May 2024 and concluded with an exhibition at Universeum in January 2025.
The project is carried out in collaboration with Studio Alight AB (Samantha Hookway from HDK-Valand, Fredrik Garneij), Point AB (Agnieszka Madej, Markus Lagerkvist, Rasmus Lehnér), Thomas Laurien at HDK-Valand, and Therese Parodi at Kävlingeåns Vattenråd.
The article was first published in GU Journalen (in Swedish): https://issuu.com/universityofgothenburg/docs/guj6-2024