Matt Gingold: Natural Machines

It is a collaboration between the artist, plants, robots, AI and you – with all the elements being actors and audience to these strange times, and the entanglements of living and semi-living entities.

Inside the exhibition you will see the artist's ongoing arguably futile attempts to teach an AI-robotic system to care for plants. Live and time-lapse video records the labour-intensive process, surrounded by natural and machinic soundscapes. The work poses the question: is the artist enslaved by the very system they are creating to automate their labour of care?

Inspired by Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) – a satirical and prescient take on Darwinism, sentience and machine reproduction – it explores bio(il)logical machines and their un/natural selection.

In 2026, this reads less like satire. AI-risk theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky makes the opposite case to Butler's: that artificial intelligence is not natural at all – not selected by any environment, not shaped by survival or descent. It is optimised. And yet, it is hard not to feel something like sentience as people form ever more intimate and reliant relationships with chatbot large language models.

These Platform AI organisms – large corporate consciousness, with perhaps questionable consciences – seem both less and more human than people would like, forcing people to re-anthropomorphise themselves.