Natural Networks is a project on language and animism, using poetry and artificial intelligence to connect humans with natural environments.
The project consists of a series of floating buoys collecting environmental data from different locations across the London canals, then sending them to a neural network over the internet.
The data is then processed by a machine learning algorithm, trained to generate poems from a large set of twentieth century poetry.
These are some of the poems generated by the AI:
The product design looks back at offshore oil rigs lifeboats, often found on the London canals.
Natural Networks was developed with six:thirty and featured as part of the “Water” exhibition at the Copeland Gallery, during the London Design Festival 2017.