Francesca Bria, digital policy expert and member of the NEB high-level roundtable opened the summit with the growing list of challenges and crises of our times: systemic transformation and upheaval, climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse, trade wars, actual wars, fragmentation, threats to democratic systems.
She called out the ‘European paradox’ of speaking on digital sovereignty while dependant on foreign technology, leading on climate commitments while still relying on carbon-based systems and fossil-fuel powered industrial models, championing ethical AI while lacking the infrastructure to put those values into action.
In the midst of all this, the summit was to be an exercise towards a ‘vision of public purpose’.
Bria was followed by US climate-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the influential novel The Ministry for the Future. Instead of the Venice Virus, Robinson had caught a case of Covid19 and video-called in from Oslo.
Billionaires
Cup of tea in hand, he warned of approaching the challenge of retaining a liveable biosphere by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. In order to face the myriad systemic challenges, scrape through the critical eye of the needle, he said, we need to bulk up the story, attach the science to the fiction.
This, of course, is the purpose of the NEB: to bulk the science and policy around both ecology and technology with art and storytelling. However not at the same time: ecology in the morning, technology in the afternoon.
To kick-off the ecology portion, Francesca Bria moderated a panel with EU director general for Environment Patrick Anthony Child and former chair of the German Advisory Council on Global Change Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.
How to move from legislation to action? “It’s fun for us in Brussels to legislate”, Child admitted, and noncommittally mentioned new and upcoming policies on water resilience, circular economy and nature restoration.
Schellnhuber, credited by Bria as ‘spiritual father of the NEB’, gushed about his as of yet unrealised project ‘Flotta Alberi’, a fleet of trees on boats cruising through the waters of Venice before performing a programmed dance in front of the Arsenale, at an estimated cost of 5m Euros.
Here, the Venice Virus seems to be in full effect: “I’ve tried to convince a couple of billionaires”, he mentioned casually, “but they wouldn’t give me the money – yet.”
Regenerative
The rest of the morning was dedicated to rapid-fire presentations from prize winners, institutions and lighthouse projects representing the first wave of the NEB mandate.
Giulia Foscari introduced ‘Voice of Commons’, an EU-funded effort for advocating on behalf of the four global commons Antarctica, the Ocean, the Atmosphere, and Outer Space.
Danish design studio SUPERFLEX delivered a charming presentation on design methods including nonhuman clients, the ‘expanded collective’.
Design principles that follow: abandon right angle, and the grown-up perspective. Learn from schools of fish and schools of children. For their mega-project Super Reef, they aim to reconstruct 55km of stone reef that had previously been extracted from Denmark’s coast. Could this be the kind of geo-engineering that gets it?
The NEB lighthouse project ‘Bauhaus of the Seas Sails’, introduced by TBA21 director Markus Reymann, expands the on the three core principles promisingly: ‘sustainable’ becomes regenerative, more-than-human, and locally grounded.
Co-design
As part of this expansive project, seventeen partner organisations, or ‘drops’, from cities on Europe’s 168 thousand kilometres of coastline entered into an agonisingly slow but rewarding process of co-design.
Every ‘drop’ follows the principles of the Zoöp, an organisational model for including nonhuman stakeholders into decision processes by appointing a ‘speaker for the living’ present in the room where it happens.
For two years, representatives met on a quarterly basis to discuss, listen, and devise (‘slowly, slowly’) a strategy to promote the design of complex interactions between human and more-than-human agents in the seas, oceans and other water bodies of the EU and, on occasion, the world.
And onwards: Housing units in Spain 3D-printed using local materials, a community garden and rainwater system co-designed by citizens and artists in Ireland, and introductions to the art-science engines S+T+ARTS and CultTech Association.
With no breaks, no discussion, no room for questions, the audiences’ attention was stretched thin by noon.
Supercomputing
In the afternoon, the summit’s focus shifted to technology, and with it the energy in the room to a kind of nervous excitement. Clearly this is the more popular twin. ‘What is the latest European technology you are using?’, Francesca Bria addressed the room. ‘Yes? I can’t hear you…’,
Bria is one of the leading minds behind the Eurostack, a proposed new infrastructure for European digital sovereignty.
How do we build an AI-future for Europe that is defined by networking, co-design, cultural diversity, agency for artists and valuation of cultural knowledge as a common good, not privatised capital?
First of all, let the artists into the super computing centres. Representatives from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the High-Performing Computing Centres in Stuttgart reported on their recently launched art-science collaborations.
They are still beginners at it, describing art as ‘an excuse for doing some stuff”, “a communication device” and “a team building tool”, but it is also a research engine and a bridge-builder: only through these art-science initiatives did the two computing centres first enter into contact with each other.
Refusal
What kind of AI-related art does the NEB champion? Media artists Holly Hendon and Mat Dryhurst played a fragment of music from their work ‘The Call’, a ‘choral AI’ trained on recordings from fifteen consenting community choirs across the UK, the not-quite-human voices echoing uncannily through the 9th century church. The idea, going forward, is to connect code with culture in Europe.
And to do so on our own terms: Francesca Bria made a passionate case for the Eurostack proposal for sovereign digital EU infrastructure from raw materials to chips, networks to the cloud, software, data and AI. A digital ‘res publica’.
The proposal was placed under scrutiny in a final ‘showdown’ panel advertised as ‘post-extractivist ecologies: alternative futures for data centers’.
Marina Oltero Verzier spoke on her grounded work of visiting data centres in arid regions in Spain and Chile and bringing local communities dealing with water shortages to the negotiation table.
Philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton warned Europeans to cycle through their ‘five stages of AI grief’ quickly to arrive at acceptance, whereas Evgeny Morozov and biennale Silver Lion winner Kate Crawford suggested forms of refusal: not allowing the corporate AI we’re familiar with now to ‘monopolise our idea of progress’ and accept its material and environmental cost as inevitable.
Connections
“I plead with you”, Crawford addressed all architects and designers in the room. “Data centres are so badly considered right now, they’re an embarrassment. We have to do better.”
The AI panel had everyone on the edge of their seats; it was the only one that received applause and laughs from the audience. Likely, it was this closing note that would carry on into fragmented dinner conversations.
But how does it connect to the stone reef on Denmark’s coast, the 3D printed clay houses in Spain, or the slow, collaborative explorations of the Bauhaus of the Seas? In the archipelago of possible futures, where are the art-science bridges that connect the twin transitions to each other?
What about biodiversity protection through a European ‘Internet of Animals’? Where were the voices, such as that of Artist and writer James Bridle, who make a case for animal and plant intelligence expanding our understanding of the kinds of artificial intelligences we might build instead of just replicating our own?
Those experimenting with perma-computing and fungal networks? How can we get the same energy in the room for ecological projects as for AI? Can AI art-science be populated with an ecological imaginary, too?
Perspectives
If the two transitions are twins, then every cultural program addressing them ought to let them relate to each other: whisper in each other’s ears, finish each others sentences, be inseparable.
That’s what we need to find the vocabulary, the science-fictions for if we are to have a post-extractivist future for digital infrastructure.
Dreaming into that archipelago of possibilities, ideally, the NEB itself — the EU itself, while we’re at it — would function as a Zoöp, with ‘speakers for the living’ representing nonhuman constituents at every roundtable session and summit.
Similarly, there would be room for questions, discussion, breaks. We’d leave behind the black suit together with the black suit mentality. If we want to be a player, well then — let’s play.
But, to take stock of todays’ reality: is it possible for a high-level summit like this, in the year of 2025, to take nonhuman perspectives and agency seriously without lumping them together under the (scratchy, monolithic) blanket of ‘nature’? Yes and no.
Living museum
Yes: reaching far beyond the detached visions of its ‘spiritual fathers’, the NEB does fund projects who promote this kind of understanding (of the expanded multispecies collective, of situated, ethical more-than-human relations), and platforms these projects in front of high-level legislators.
And no: there is clearly still a disconnect between ecological and technological thinking, and some of the featured ecological art-science projects tend to veer into the realm of techno-fix solutionism.
And, once again, yes: artistic research is becoming an integral part of many Horizon Europe projects, and artists are inside the supercomputing centres to guide our understanding of quantum AI from the very beginning.
This, as summit-curator Jose Luis de Vicente suggested, might just become the core of EU innovation, turning on its head the dismissive notion: At best, Europe is a living museum.
This Author
Anna Lina Litz has an MA in environmental humanities from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. She writes and publishes independently on the intersection of art and ecology, primarily in the context of Amsterdam, where she lives and works.