Ecovotive Chimeras

Ecovotive Chimeras (2025) is conceived as a contemplative, multi-sensory experience that unfolds gradually through physical interaction and augmented reality engagement. Attendees are invited to spend time with each of the fifteen (15) chimeric entities, arranged side by side on a tabletop, encouraged to observe their material details, hold them gently, and scan each piece with a mobile device to activate embedded AR animations. These generative AI sequences visualize the morphogenesis of carbonized bodies melting into one another, inviting reflection on ecological grief and entangled agency. The dramatic abstraction in generative outputs mirrors the devastation in ecologies like the Amazon biome, Brazil’s wetlands, Europe, California, the Republic of Congo, Australia, Mongolia, and beyond. Invited to hold these hybrid beings, feeling their fragility, the audience is welcome to enter—via AR—a liminal zone where emergence, agency, and entropy converge: an ephemeral retreat of continuous becoming.

The installation consists of fifteen small, 3D-printed chimeric beings (200mm width x 200mm length and 150mm height), created through generative AI processes using photographic documentation of carbonized wildlife victims from wildfire-prone biomes across five continents. Inspired by the votive function of animals in ancient cultures—where ecologies were lived as cosmologies—each PLA-printed form is augmented with AR layers that animate a continuous morphogenesis of bodies, melting one into another. The result is a series of spectral, post-natural entities that resist resolution—existing in a liminal zone between memory and matter.

An expanded version of a previous experimental endeavor, the core intention aligns deeply with the theme Generative Futures: Continuous Becoming, foregrounding the unpredictable aesthetics and ontological indeterminacy of generative systems. The project invites reflection on the ethics of using AI to process environmental disasters. The bizarre logic of generative AI aesthetics—marked by hallucinated forms, melted boundaries, blurred textures, and indeterminate shapes—becomes a critical dialogue with the visual and biological trauma of wildfire destruction. The dramatic abstraction in generative outputs mirrors the devastation driven by wildfires. Ecovotive Chimeras critically engages with the ethics of aestheticizing catastrophe through artificial intelligence while reclaiming it as a poetic medium for ritual remembrance. Rooted in expanded aesthetics, the work challenges fixed notions of authorship, intentionality, and authenticity while gesturing toward post-human ecologies and non-anthropocentric rituals of mourning.