These 7000 Oaks Don’t Exist
A critical AI project reflecting on Joseph Beuys, environmentalism, NFTs and the carbon cost of synthetic images.
These 7000 Oaks Don’t Exist began as a response to Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks and to the environmental costs of machine learning, cryptocurrency and NFT culture. I generated 7000 synthetic oak images from a database of real oak trees, creating a forest of images that does not physically exist.
The work has several forms: document boxes containing print editions, a multi-volume book set, InfiniteObjects-style video objects and NFT-related critical gestures. The point is not simply to make AI trees. It is to ask what kind of ecological imagination is produced when the image of nature consumes energy while replacing the tree with a dataset.
The project belongs to my broader interest in mediated evidence. These oaks are plausible, numbered and archived, but they do not exist as living trees. They are records of a contradiction.