"It seems to capture the beauty and majesty of nature" – this is how a language model describes an analogue photograph of a mountain landscape from the 19th century. The word "seems" encapsulates the whole question of the evening: the AI has the image in front of it, yet it can only guess at what it depicts – based on the probabilities derived from its training data.

Ornella Fieres' video work „It seems to capture the beauty and majesty of nature" emerges from a chain of AI-generated translations: one language model describes analogue family and nature photographs, and a second AI transforms these descriptions into moving images. In her talk, she explores this process – the question of how something purely artificial perceives something natural, and what landscapes emerge in the process.

In this machine, operating behind the scenes, an old longing unexpectedly resonates: the magic of landscape painting, as cultivated by Romanticism in its celebration of the sublime. Ornella Fieres draws an arc from this tradition to contemporary approaches that bring AI and nature together.

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Ornella Fieres is a media artist and media scholar based in Berlin. In her work, she explores how artificial intelligence is changing our perception of the natural world. Her works examine how algorithms „see" the human past by reinterpreting historical photographs, films and archive materials using machine learning, computer vision and experimental computational processes.

Her multimedia installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Goethe-Institut Toronto, the Literaturhaus Berlin, the NurtureArt Gallery in New York, the Kunstverein Speyer and the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt. In 2017, she held a research residency at New Lab in New York.

Alongside her artistic practice, she is pursuing a PhD in Media Studies at the HfG Offenbach, specialising in AI. She teaches digital theory, including at the Berlin University of the Arts, and is regularly invited as a speaker and panellist on the cultural and social implications of artificial intelligence.