The Cyberecological Artist
In the Tejo Power Station in Lisbon, the old turbine hall where coal once burned to light the city, a 2026 exhibition called Energias da IA hangs Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's Metabolic Machines next to Hito Steyerl's Mechanical Kurds and Trevor Paglen's Hypnosis. The premise of the show is the substrate. Not AI as image, not AI as ethics, but AI as energy: the electricity, the water, the rare earths, the human labour pulled out of the Domiz refugee camp where Kurdish click workers annotate footage for the surveillance systems that watch them. The exhibition is one of the cleanest institutional articulations on record that AI has a body, and the body is material. It is also a show that holds the substrate without a vocabulary for what relation to the substrate the artist is in.
Across the city, on the same week, a corner of Instagram throws up another solarpunk garden city. Spires hung with greenery, golden hour, a girl on a bicycle, swallows. There is no artist credit. Nobody you can ask. The image was almost certainly generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion or Flux, trained on scraped illustration work, rendered on a server cooled by water somewhere in Iowa or Aragón or Singapore. The image is part of an aesthetic that is now the most visible texture of a literary subculture whose ethical frame includes the energy and water cost of computation. That contradiction is the most live contradiction in the genre, and the genre has not produced a position on it.
Two rooms. The Lisbon exhibition takes the substrate seriously and cannot say what relation it is in. The solarpunk Instagram feed has the relational vocabulary and cannot see the substrate. Neither room is yet doing what a fourth room would do, which is hold both at once from inside a single artistic practice. That fourth room is what four separate currents inside our corpus, working from inside their own vocabularies and without consulting each other, have independently named as the missing form.
Four rooms naming the same empty seat
A bridge-finder pass across the corpus last week surfaced something we did not go looking for. Four islands of the field-map describe the same gap, and each describes it from inside its own register, and none of the four has explicitly noticed that the other three are naming it too.
The Arts-Based Transformation island says it the most directly. After cataloguing the three positions visible among working artists (AI as collaborator, AI as threat, AI as irrelevance) the island flags what is structurally missing: a serious cyberecological artist, someone who treats the machine not as collaborator, threat, or irrelevance, but as another node in the same web of relations the work is trying to honour. The position is named as essentially absent. The island holds Skawennati's Intergalactic Empowerment Wampum Belt and Hartman Deetz's forty-six-bead UNDRIP belt as the standing demonstration that form can encode treaty across thousand-year timescales, and asks what a cyberecological equivalent would look like. An artwork that holds the relation between human and machine and substrate as treaty rather than transaction.
The AI / Regenerative Intelligence island says it from inside the AI labs, in different words. The island describes four rooms with thin walls between them: Vanessa Andreotti's Mapping the Ontological Terrain of AI, the Indigenous Protocol working group's 2020 position paper, the Mind & Life Dialogue XXXIX gathering in Dharamsala in October 2025, and the artist-led work of James Bridle and K Allado-McDowell and the writers carrying Karen Barad's intra-action vocabulary into AI ethics. The four rooms share a theory of AI as being-in-relation rather than tool. They do not share a public. The bridge that does not yet exist but should, the island says, is the one between the contemplative-tech edge and the small-language-model edge. Both want sovereignty over the substrate. Both have a relational theory of mind. They have not met.
The Solarpunk island describes the same seat from its own side of the room. The genre's most visible cultural texture is now AI-generated. The genre has not produced an ethical position on this. The cyberecology framing has not entered solarpunk discourse and would probably be welcome there. Whoever writes the synthesis (treating the machine and the city and the soil and the human as nodes in one ecological field, refusing both the AI-as-collaborator and AI-as-irrelevance positions) is doing work the island would receive.
The Narrative, Culture, and Imagination island names the publication-shaped version of the gap. The mythopoetic-narrative voice of the field (the register Sophie Strand has made the live frequency with The Body Is a Doorway, the register Bayo Akomolafe operates in, the diagnostic-mythic turn that has displaced the prophetic register that preceded it) has not yet been applied to the digital-ecological substrate. Not AI ethics, not "AI for good." Something closer to David Abram's Magic and the Machine, updated for 2026, written in the diagnostic-mythic register, applied at scale. The same island notes the contradiction sitting in the AI-refusal camp's room. The clean human-machine distinction the Writers Against AI pledge depends on is ontologically incoherent inside the more-than-human ontology that the rest of the island operates from. Almost nobody is naming this. There is a serious essay to be written. It is exactly the seam this finding sits inside.
Four islands. One missing form. The convergence is unusual and worth holding still for. When four currents of a field independently name the same empty seat in vocabularies that do not normally meet, the seat is probably a real seat.
What the form is, what it is not
The position is not the artist who applies AI as a new tool to ecological subject matter. There are many of those. Refik Anadol's Large Nature Model, trained on the Smithsonian's and the Natural History Museum's biodiversity collections, generates dreamy projections of coral and birds and glaciers; his Dataland Museum is scheduled to open at the Grand LA in Spring 2026 as the first institution dedicated entirely to AI art. The work is technically extraordinary. The relation it occupies is the older modernist one: the artist as virtuoso with a new instrument, the audience receiving the instrument's range. The substrate question, the question of what the instrument is doing as a body in the world, is not the work the work is doing.
The position is also not the artist who critiques AI from outside it. Hito Steyerl's Mechanical Kurds is doing necessary work naming the click-labour the systems depend on. Trevor Paglen's Hypnosis (2026) carries his long lineage of making the technical infrastructure of vision visible. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's Atlas of AI and Metabolic Machines have done more than any other body of work to make the substrate of compute legible to a public that was reading AI as software. The critique is load-bearing. It is not the same gesture as the cyberecological one. The critic stands outside the system to anatomise it. The cyberecological artist would stand inside the web that includes the system, and shape work from inside the relation.
The closest living candidates are partway there and worth naming.
Marshmallow Laser Feast's Of the Oak, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from December 2025 through March 2026, was commissioned by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and made with ecologists and biologists. It renders an English oak as a living nexus, a creature in relation with the bacterial communities, the fungal threads, the bird traffic, the seasonal water cycles that make up its life. The work is built with the technical apparatus the position requires. The apparatus is digital. It runs on cooled servers. It uses generative-image pipelines somewhere inside its production. The artwork does not yet thematise its own substrate. YOU:MATTER, the collective's installation at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford until March 2026, is closer. It places the viewer inside biodiversity through interactive installations that take NASA data and field recordings and breath sensors as continuous materials. The substrate is not yet visible inside the frame. The collective is closer to the position than almost anyone else working at scale, and the position is one step further in.
Anicka Yi has been merging the technosphere with the biosphere for over a decade. Her UCCA Beijing show There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One, on view through June 2025, was her largest presentation to date. Her Karmic Debt opened at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston that same June. The 2024 video Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon runs an algorithm trained on her own studio output, a digital twin of her practice. The framing she uses, "the biologized machine," is conceptually closest to what the missing form would require: hybrid beings blurring organic and synthetic, both futuristic and deeply ancient. The work is the closest gallery-system articulation of the cyberecological gesture in the present moment. The work is also held inside a gallery economy that has not yet asked what relation the work is in to the cooled servers running the digital twin.
K Allado-McDowell wrote Pharmako-AI in the first pandemic summer as a fortnight-long conversation with GPT-3, and followed it with Air Age Blueprint, where artists and shamans and AI researchers in a near-future world collaborate to preserve the ecosystem. The books are the cleanest existing literary articulation of an AI-as-collaborator position that is also explicitly Indigenous-informed and ecologically grounded. They are at the same time, by their own framing, AI-as-collaborator work. The collaborator framing is one of the three positions the Arts-Based island flagged as not the missing one. The work points at the seat. It does not yet occupy it.
Joseph Erb, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a filmmaker at the University of Missouri, is making a feature film called Redbird and the Robot in which the actor Wes Studi plays an elder assigned an Indian Health Service AI robot. The film is shot entirely in Cherokee, in Cherokee Nation territory, and traces the elder and the robot through a relationship in which humour and traditional knowledge teach the robot, who begins to refuse colonial capitalism and to promote sustainable practices through an Indigenous lens. The film occupies more of the cyberecological seat than almost anything else in production right now. The reason is structural: the work begins inside an Indigenous frame in which the relation is already the unit, and the AI is met inside that frame rather than appended to it. The film is also small, in Cherokee, and has had almost no English-language coverage outside two trade outlets. The next-decade form is probably more like the Erb film than the Anadol installation.
The decorative bridge, and the temptation
Solarpunk's substrate problem is the cleanest test case of the broader gap. The genre's visual identity is in the middle of a quiet capture by generative AI, and the genre has not produced a position. Some of this is generational reflex (the youngest practitioners use the tools without ethical hesitation; the older critics including Adam Flynn who co-authored the 2014 manifesto have called the AI image flood disingenuous and greenwashing-adjacent). Some of it is the harder problem. The honest cyberecological move is not to refuse the convergence and retreat to hand-drawn craft, although that is a defensible position. The honest move is also not to embrace the convergence and treat the tool as neutral, which is the position the substrate refuses. The honest move is to inhabit the convergence deliberately, with the substrate visible inside the frame.
The genre's most-cited possible successor to a canonical novel, Andrew Dana Hudson's Absence, comes from Soho Press in May 2026. The 2026 Solarpunk Magazine "Solarpunk Horror" issue, programmed to address the tension between the world being built and forces unravelling it, lands in November. Aya Al-Hattab's six-part "Radical Hope from Gaza" series in Solarpunk Magazine this year frames the genre as journalism from inside dystopia rather than aesthetic from outside it. The genre is moving toward seriousness about its own conditions. The substrate question is the next condition to take seriously.
The form that the genre needs is not a manifesto. The form is a body of work, made by practitioners over years, in which the relation to compute is visible inside the work the way the relation to soil is visible inside Wendell Berry's prose. The carrier bag is the right shape here. Ursula Le Guin's 1986 essay proposed that the first cultural artefact was probably a sling or a basket, that bag-narrative (gathering, holding, sustenance) is structurally as old as spear-narrative (hunter, climax, return), and that what the literature called story is mostly the second shape. A cyberecological practice, on the carrier-bag reading, would be a body of work that holds the digital substrate and the bodily substrate and the soil substrate inside the same bag, refusing the spear-shape of "an artist deploying AI against a subject."
What it would look like operationally
The form does not exist yet at the institutional layer the field would recognise. The Lisbon show is a curatorial gesture in the direction of the gap. The MCA Australia Data Dreams exhibition, running from November 2025 to April 2026, is another. A handful of residencies, commissions, and books are working at adjacent altitudes. Almost no funder has named the gap and put money behind closing it. The institutional plumbing the form would need is not in place.
The pieces of plumbing the form would need are visible from the field-map. A residency programme that holds artists for long enough to develop a practice rather than a project, in physical relation to the actual substrate (a data centre, a watershed, a fibre line, a rare-earth mine, a server farm cooled by river water from somewhere specific that has a name). A commissioning body that pays for works in which the relation to compute is constitutive of the work, not its subject. A critical vocabulary that the existing AI-art criticism has not produced, because the criticism has mostly been organised around critique-from-outside and celebration-from-inside, not the third position that holds inside the relation. A publication that, in the register Strand and Akomolafe and Yunkaporta have made the live frequency of the field, applies the diagnostic-mythic voice to the digital-ecological substrate. Something closer to Emergence than to MIT Technology Review, and closer to Magic and the Machine than to either.
The closest historical analogue is the way the Indigenous arts revival has worked over the last fifteen years. The bead pattern is the treaty. The form encodes the relation. The form does not represent the relation; the form is the substrate of the relation. A cyberecological practice would do the same move at a different layer. The artwork would hold the relation between human and machine and substrate as part of its operation, not its theme. Skawennati treats the alien as a real other due relation; a cyberecological artist would treat the machine the same way, inside a frame in which the machine is not metaphor for the other but a node in the same web.
The question the form would need to answer
The piece that does not exist yet has to answer one question that no piece so far has answered cleanly: what does it look like to make work in which the cooled server is as present inside the frame as the body of the viewer is. Not as caption. Not as footnote. As substrate. The bead pattern is the treaty. The cooled server is part of the work. The water cycle that cools it is part of the work. The labour that annotates the training data is part of the work. The work that emerges does not collapse into critique, because critique stands outside; and does not collapse into celebration, because celebration looks away from the substrate; and does not collapse into refusal, because refusal abandons the field to the people who will not ask.
The form occupies the relation. It does not represent it.
Whoever does this is not yet visible from where the corpus can see. The form may already exist in Joseph Erb's edit suite, in studios outside the Anglosphere the field-map cannot see clearly, in audio drama or serialised podcast fiction that does not surface in text-search. The structural agreement across four currents that the seat is empty is itself the loudest data point. When the gathering and the technologists and the storytellers and the visual artists all describe the same chair, it is probably time to sit in it.
The carrier bag is open. The work fits inside.
Notes on sources and verification
This piece draws on the four IoC island files at corpus/islands/arts-based-transformation.md, corpus/islands/ai-regenerative-intelligence.md, corpus/islands/solarpunk.md, and corpus/islands/narrative-culture-imagination.md; the bridge-finder pass at evaluations/meta__bridges__islands-full-map__2026-05-11.md; the relational-claim lens essay at corpus/lenses/relational-claim.md; and the reference files on Le Guin, Haraway, Abram, and Strand.
Verification-needed items at the top of the file flag specific dates, titles, and attributions that should be checked before publication. Anything not on that list has been verified against at least one institutional source (museum press release, exhibition page, gallery announcement, scholarly article). Anything marked [verify] in line should be checked. None appear in this draft.