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Lahn River Avatar
June 24, 2025 - Exhibition Opening "Lahn River Avatar" by Danilo Olivaz and Ingvild Syntropia
Towards SYMBIOCRACY Nature’s AI-Avatars: Lahn River
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD A RIVER SPEAK?
This project explored planetary agency by creating an AI-powered interactive sculpture that serves as a voice to the Lahn river in Germany.
Science and art duo Danilo Olivaz and Ingvild Syntropia traversed the technically and ethically complex landscape of using artificial intelligence to represent the possible interests of a living ecosystem.
The voice-activated sculpture, made from local, natural, and upcycled material, houses a large language model (LLM) which was fed real-time environmental data, scientific research, and cultural knowledge specific to the Lahn.
Installed at the Lahnfenster river observatory in Giessen, it stands as both a poetic and political gesture.
With the valued support of the team behind the online dialogue platform consider.it, the sculpture, alongside its online counterpart, also functions as a collective structured deliberation between people and the river avatar.
Rooted in the concept of symbiocracy, the project imagines rivers, forests, and other ecosystems as political beings, able to communicate their perceived needs.
Building on the success of the precursor Rio Sagrado AI-Avatar, the Lahn Avatar continues to merge art, science, and collective effort. These Avatars offer a blueprint for planetary democracy through meaningful, cross-species dialogue, remembering a future where rivers speak and we listen.
Danilo Olivaz and Ingvild Syntropia are current Fellows in the Planetary Scholars & Artists in Residence Program at the Panel on Planetary Thinking, Justus Liebig University.
Ingvild Syntropia is an artist-philosopher, treading the sensorial landscape of interspecies kinship and storytelling. She is part of Sympoiesis: interspecies synaesthesia through Art & Science, where she explores topics such as interspecies relations, deep time, acting techniques for empathy, the creative process, and what it means to embody the values of the future today. She has collaborated on various documentary films in the Netherlands, Kenya, Norway, and the UK. Her upcoming documentary on the donkey skin trade is her debut as a director. She is also a vocalist in Necessary Animals (UK), and sings Nordic Folk. She has a BA in Philosophy and the History of Ideas, Southampton & Bergen University, and an MA in Media for Development and Social Change, Sussex University. Originally from Norway, Ingvild has, over the past decade, lived as an expat in the UK, France, Switzerland, Brazil, and now the Netherlands.
