Speculative Species Evolution

research project, series of images and videos, AI, series of workshops, 2025

Speculative Species Evolution is an ongoing art and research project that explores how life might evolve in the near or distant future under the influence of artificial intelligence, human intervention, and the ecological pressures of the Anthropocene. At the core of the project is an inquiry into how emerging technologies—particularly generative AI and computer vision—can be used not to classify or understand existing life, but to imagine entirely new forms of it.

Through a combination of AI-generated imagery, evolutionary theory, and collaborative speculation, the project investigates both controlled evolution (such as synthetic biology, selective breeding, and bioengineering) and alternative evolution—hypothetical biological trajectories shaped by climate change, pollution, extraterrestrial environments, or post-natural ecosystems. One line of inquiry engages with xenobiology, imagining non-carbon-based life forms such as silicon- or glass-based organisms, while another considers hybrid entities, fusing organic life with machines, robotics, or data systems.

The project is informed by ongoing conversations with biologists and evolutionary scientists, drawing inspiration from contemporary research into species development, adaptation, and extinction. While grounded in scientific understanding, the work unfolds as speculative fiction—blurring the boundaries between the real and the artificial, the possible and the impossible.
Speculative Species Evolution exists as a growing body of AI-generated images and animations, presenting a synthetic natural history of fictional organisms that challenge our definitions of life, agency, and evolution. It is also realized through a series of public workshops, where participants are invited to become co-authors of future evolutionary narratives. In these sessions, we collectively imagine evolutionary scenarios in the context of climate crisis, mass extinction, and techno-cultural acceleration, and use AI tools to visualize the speculative species that could inhabit these worlds.