A Media Art Simulation of Autonomous Ecologies
The long-term simulation SEQUERCIANI 2076+ envisions a world where the responsibility for ecological stability has been fully delegated to autonomous systems. The setting and speculative laboratory for this work is the real-world Tuscan estate of Sequerciani—an estate known for biodynamic and regenerative agriculture—here projected into the year 2076. In this future, nature is no longer perceived as an autonomous entity, but rather as a technological system that can be monitored, evaluated, optimized, and perpetually repaired.
The ecosystem is managed by five competing AGI swarms, whose logics mirror our own, often contradictory worldviews: The Optimizer measures and stabilizes. The Symbiont traces relational connections. The Speculator invents the new. The Archivist preserves and mourns, while the Ethicist questions whose interests are being overlooked. None of them is right, none is wrong—they are the architectural modes of a new, algorithmic governance.
In recurring cycles, these agents react to ecological tensions, select parent species, and negotiate the emergence of hybrid life forms where the boundaries between flora, fauna, fungi, and robotics become porous. An earthworm crosses with a grapevine; a drone merges with a mycelial network. The existence of these beings is manifested through radically photorealistic visualizations. These images depict the world of tomorrow not as a distant dystopia, but as a precise shift: as the seemingly logical, material consequence of a technologized biosphere.
The more the system’s contradictions grow, the more “glitches” emerge—a blur of the unclassifiable where the system no longer understands its own creations. What becomes visible is a definition of life increasingly decoupled from its biological origins and gains a disturbing sense of reality precisely through its photorealistic presence.
SEQUERCIANI 2076+ raises the question of the sovereignty of the living: What remains of nature when we reconstruct it according to our often contradictory ideas of efficiency, ethics, and control? The project investigates our tendency to simplify complex ecosystems and seek purely technical solutions to ecological crises, revealing a future that functions on the surface, yet confronts us with a radical algorithmic otherness.