Artist Mary Flanagan uses Artificial Intelligence to imagine the future and produce speculative possibilities in the rapidly changing Anthropocene. Interested in the distinction between the natural and the artificial, Flanagan envisions a future union between these binaries. Working with computer code as a form of speculative research, she documents trajectories, bizarre sequences, errors, and glitches, and renders these in time-based media.

For Urban Impressions: Experiencing the Global Contemporary Metropolis, Flanagan used VQGAN + CLIP (Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network and Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) to render unique images of landmarks sited in city centers. The Metropolis Project combines two significant markers of place: trees, the most visible natural landmarks in early human settlements, and human-made architecture, the landmarks of the modern era.

Flanagan draws from a language of patterns determined by word-to-image keyword associations culled from massive AI datasets. As a further step in the collaboration between artist and machine, Flanagan channels the digitally produced results and renders artificial images as oil paintings. Her work illustrates how, in the Anthropocene, the merging of natural and artificial constructions by humans and machines can reflect speculative, even utopian visions for sustainability. Engaging the voice of the next generation, the installation is complemented by a visual conversation between Flanagan’s video and paintings, and a second projection of images sourced by Rice Students.

Lavender Juma, Rice University ’25, assisted with the project and contributed to the first segment of the student video. Additional images were provided by Wendy Yao, Rice University, ’23, and Madison Zhao, Rice University. 

This installation is made possible by Rice University’s Arts Initiative Fund.

About the artist: Mary Flanagan (b. 1969, Milwaukee, WI) is a visual artist, educator, and designer who questions biases and stereotypes through her innovative and experimental work with digital and game-inspired art. Flanagan received a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, earned MFA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa, and obtained her doctorate from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UK.

Flanagan has exhibited internationally at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London; Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia, Lisbon; the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing; NeMe Arts Center, Cyprus; LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Spain; the Whitney Biennial of American Art, New York; and others. She won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in Interactive art+, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and is the recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, in addition to being a J. Paul Getty Museum Scholar; a Senior Scholar in Residence at Cornell University; and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Toronto. Flanagan has published 6 scholarly books including Critical Play (MIT Press), as well as art books and poetry. Flanagan is a professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. She lives and works in Hanover, NH; Houston, TX; and Ménerbes, France.