Art Incubation Program
Kishi Yuma Symposium: Botanical／Artificial Intelligence
Overview
As part of 2025 artist fellow Kishi Yuma’s project Parallel Botanical Garden, this symposium considers the forms of intelligence that emerge at the intersection of generative AI and plants. Against a backdrop of the language and images that generative AI is now continually producing, questioning the very nature of human creativity, Kishi has focused on the intelligence of plants, which have responded to their environments for millions of years despite not having a brain.
This symposium redefines the contours of intelligence in the modern era, cutting across the three fields of art, technology, and botany. It features specialists in technology and botany, including curator Hasegawa Yuko, who has organized numerous exhibitions related to ecology and art, and provides a forum for a wide-ranging discussion about two different types of intelligence: plant and AI.
For his project in the Art Incubation program, Kishi is developing a platform of botanical intelligence (BI), where art and R&D intersect, interfacing with the behavior of plants to experiment with creative collaboration and dialogue with unknown intelligence. It hypothesizes an image of plant-like intelligence that frees AI from human-centered frameworks and constitutes a form of knowledge that encompasses a whole environment. This symposium explores what intelligence not limited to humans looks like, as well as forms of society, cities, and expression based on that premise.
Parallel Botanical Garden
This project develops “botanical intelligence” (BI), a way of looking at AI from the perspective of botany. Through precise sensing of pluralistic environmental data on light, wind, soil, and more, and adopting a generative BI approach that outputs text and speech, it aims to develop a commons where humans and nonhumans alike can prosper. In addition to showcasing the completed system as an installation in the form of a botanical garden, the project collaborates with experts and holds public lectures and workshops as part of the research and development process. While based at CCBT, the project explores its themes in terms of nature as a resource shared by all beings, and strives to discover a new co-prosperity zone.
CCBT Art Incubation Program
One of CCBT’s core programs, the Art Incubation Program provides opportunities for creative talent to undertake new projects and makes those processes accessible to the public, facilitating forms of artistic expression, exploration, and action that change our city for the better. Selected through an open call, five artist fellows will act as CCBT partners, developing their projects, making the creative process public, exhibiting the results, and holding workshops and talks.
Players
岸裕真
Kishi Yuma
Artist
Kishi Yuma reinterprets AI as alien intelligence and proposes the emergent relationship between humans and AI as an alien subjectivity, which he explores through paintings, sculptures, and installations created in collaboration with an AI that he developed himself. Since 2023, the AI model MaryGPT has curated almost all of his work. Kishi’s exhibitions include the solo show Oracle Womb (2025, √K Contemporary, Tokyo) and the group show DXP2 (2024, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa). His awards include the short list for the CAF Award 2024. He is the author of Creating with the Unknown: On the Alien Encounter between Humans and AI (2025, Seibundo Shinkosha).
