Suspended in The Vestibule gallery in Seattle, a cube pulses with light, its interior animated by shifting projections. Beneath layers of optical filters, reflective materials, and projectors,  the echoes of a rainforest come to life. Custom software collects real-time temperature data from the Pacific Northwest, comparing it to twenty years of historical averages. Whenever the current temperature surpasses the historical average, it glows red, sounding the alarm about the impact of climate change. This is Specimens of Time, Burn (2024), part of an ongoing series by Maja Petrić, under the collective title Specimens of Time.

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Petrić is a contemporary artist who harnesses light and advanced technologies to examine the intricate connections between humans, nature, and technology. With a Master's in Interactive Telecommunications and a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media, she has forged a distinctive artistic path beyond the conventional art school route. Since 2001, her transformative installations, lenticular prints, and sculptures have invited us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world and reflect on our intertwined existence.

Interconnectedness in an atomised world

All living beings—human and nonhuman—are nodes in a vast interconnected network, yet in the era of algorithmic personalisation, our experiences grow increasingly fragmented. Petrić seeks to uncover the invisible ties that bind us. In We Are All Made of Light (2018), Petrić immerses visitors in a starscape where light traces their presence, reflecting the evolving history of the space. The installation records the silhouettes of its visitors and transforms them into stars using custom artificial intelligence, creating a growing visual web of connections. 

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This invites reflection: What traces do we leave behind? How does participating in this shared network deepen our understanding of how we relate to one another? ‘Ultimately, the objective is to illuminate how shared experiences foster a collective memory’, Petrić explains over email. By capturing the textures of untouched landscapes, from the earthly to the cosmic, her work cultivates, in her words, ‘a sense of aliveness through the experience of interconnectedness’. 

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This principle lies at the heart of Petrić’s synergistic approach, which hinges on close collaborations with sound designers and computer scientists. It also extends to the thematic and aesthetic clusters which thread through her body of work. Petrić revisits landscapes, reinterpreting them through different media, as she does in Vespers: Burn (2024), where she revisits the Pacific Northwest rainforests of Specimens of Time, which she visualises through lenticular prints that capture their sensory essence in dynamic, layered motion. 

Problematising beauty and rewilding the aesthetic experience

Like Petrić’s entire œuvre, Specimens of Time irradiates viewers in nature’s untamed beauty while warning: the fragile landscapes depicted in Speciments of Time—pristine rainforests, remote polar regions, crystalline waters, and wildflower blooms—are on the precipice of irreversible change. ‘My work addresses the sublime aspects of nature while critically examining the tensions arising from technological progress’, she says. 

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We do indeed live in a paradoxical age; rapid technological advances coexist with a deep longing for a “natural”, pristine past. This desire aligns with the biophilia hypothesis, an important concept driving Petrić’s work, suggesting an inherent affinity for living systems. Introduced by psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm to describe “the connections humans subconsciously seek with the rest of life”, the concept was later popularised by biologist Edward O. Wilson in Biophilia. Biophilia is predicated on a deep, genetic appreciation for the beauty of the natural environment, a premise that is more speculative than grounded in scientific evidence.

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What is it about beauty that draws us in, and why does it hold such power? And why does it sometimes feel uncomfortable to appreciate something beautiful? Through her work, Petrić problematises the aesthetic experience of nature. Here, the natural sublime and its beauty become a conduit for confronting uncomfortable truths.

A poignant example is the light and generative algorithm sculpture Specimens of Time, Albedo (2024), which captures the eponymous phenomenon (called “albedo”) in which a fraction of light is reflected by a surface, in this case, the ice of polar landscapes. While visually captivating, this phenomenon also serves as an indicator of climate change. As ice melts and water appears, the albedo of the surface decreases. The darker parts of Albedo mimic the darker surface of open water, which absorbs more sunlight and heat, further accelerating warming. 

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In her ongoing Lost Skies series (2016-), the public’s contradictory views on climate change are visualised through impressionistic composites, blending, through the use of a custom AI algorithm, the essence of images found on the internet into visuals that are both reassuringly familiar and disorientingly alien. The work visually encapsulates the public's conflicting perspectives on the state of the environment, presenting it through the dual lenses of climate change believers and sceptics (both extracted through the gathered pictures). The same image might simultaneously evoke beauty and devastation, reconfiguring a moment of aesthetic appreciation into one of critical reflection. 

Feeling the data

Data-gathering is an essential practice in the artist's work. Lost Skies, among other works, was even built from her own AI tool, AIEye, which she created in collaboration with computer scientist Mihai Jalobeanu. The algorithm sifts through vast amounts of images and analyses their salient properties. Through ​​the unconventional applications of deep learning strategies and extensive experimentation, the output is akin to an impressionist painting.

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Algorithmic processes are often regarded as devoid of feeling or positive meaning. Petrić disrupts this assumption by using data as a means to generate affective, participatory experiences. The use of live data brings immediacy and relevance to her installations, grounding them in the present moment and inviting viewers to feel the reverberations of our collective impact on the planet.

Nevertheless, commenting on climate change using AI and data-gathering technologies, themselves powered by energy-intensive infrastructures, is fraught. Petrić is acutely cognisant of this tension and seeks to transform it into a productive force. ‘I try to be aware of the potential harm that AI and data-gathering technologies can cause, particularly their extractivist nature and environmental consequences’, she says.

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She stands firm behind the idea that these do not always have to be extractivist tools. When used cautiously and intentionally, they can provoke inquiry and encourage viewers to interrogate their own complicity and potential for action. In an effort to avoid contributing to environmental degradation or resource exploitation, she ‘prioritise[s] the use of non-invasive, ethically sourced data’, steering away from generative artificial intelligence programmes like Midjourney or DALL-E.

Does the use of AI to depict climate change exacerbate the problem, by legitimating the use of extractive digital infrastructures? Or does it open up new possibilities for visualising urgency? These contradictions are woven into the fabric of Petrić’s work. Her expansive output encourages us to grapple with them—can that compel us to (re)act?