Edition Two
Planetary Futures: AI, Arts and the Environment

Magazine Masthead

NEWREAL MAGAZINE | EDITION TWO | 2025

This second edition of The New Real Magazine features work from artists and researchers to better explore environmental, economic and digital sustainability on planetary scales.

Image credit: ‘How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' by Kasia Molga

Conversations
Discussions with our artists and The New Real community

Endnote
Closing thoughts

Video credit: ‘How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' by Kasia Molga

Contents

Editorial
The vision behind the magazine

Feature
The evolution of The New Real Observatory platform

Art
Art projects from 2023-2025

Spotlights
Summaries of recent publications, events and reports

Reflections
Insights, investigations and ideas from friends of The New Real

Interjections
Explainers and hot topics, to guide our intrepid explorations

Editorial

Through the works and insights presented in this edition, we glimpse possibilities for how AI might help us not just measure environmental change, but understand it in ways that move us to action.

Featured
Can AI and Art Help Shape Planetary Futures?
Can AI and Art Help Shape Planetary Futures?

This second edition of The New Real Magazine features work from artists and researchers to better explore environmental, economic and digital sustainability on planetary scales.

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Feature

Sharing the vision for and evolution of a new platform for genuine collaboration between human and machine intelligence, where artistic practice drives innovation in AI development.

Featured
The New Real Observatory: Art and AI in Conversation with the Environment
The New Real Observatory: Art and AI in Conversation with the Environment

An artist stares intently at a computer screen. She's not looking at environmental data in the usual way – charts, graphs or satellite imagery. Instead, she's using an AI system to explore how machines and humans might together make sense of our changing planet.

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Art

Here we present some of the artworks commissioned by The New Real that involve multisensory exploration of possible futures and investigate the entanglements of people, data, machines and environments using The New Real Observatory.

Featured
The Thames Path 2040
The Thames Path 2040

Fefegha's work responds to a growing crisis; according to the UK government’s analysis, around 5.2 million properties in England face flood risk, with that number expected to double over the next 50 years.

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The Overlay
The Overlay

'The Overlay' demonstrates how, unlike conventional AI image generators, The New Real Observatory allows the artist to directly probe and experiment with the AI's internal logic.

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Photographic Cues
Photographic Cues

MacNeill's generated images exist in a liminal space between photograph and algorithm, natural and artificial.

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How to Find the Soul of a Sailor
How to Find the Soul of a Sailor

'How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' emerges as both a memorial and a prophecy – a daughter's attempt to hear her father's voice echo across a century of environmental change.

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Spotlights

Featured special projects and events that explore how the New Real Observatory platform operates – bringing together artistic practice, artificial intelligence and environmental data in new ways – and how it has been used and shared by artists through innovative exhibition formats to help us develop more meaningful relationships with both the technology and our changing planet, creating meaning together.

Featured
AWEN: When Data Meets Nature
AWEN: When Data Meets Nature

Can a mobile phone app help us rediscover our connection to the natural world?

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The New Real Observatory Platform: Connecting Generative AI and the Environment
The New Real Observatory Platform: Connecting Generative AI and the Environment

The New Real Observatory enables accessible, legible and tangible cultural experiences of our changing climate and our role within it.

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Uncanny Machines: Five Artists Probe AI's Boundaries
Uncanny Machines: Five Artists Probe AI's Boundaries

'Uncanny Machines' moved beyond typical AI art production to examine fundamental questions about human-machine relationships.

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The New Real Pavilions and Salons: Creating Spaces for AI Futures
The New Real Pavilions and Salons: Creating Spaces for AI Futures

The New Real Pavilions and Salons explore how to share transformative ideas through art and AI to equip future generations to flourish on a thriving planet in the midst of surprising, joyful, and inclusive forms of intelligent life.

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Reflections

Broadening perspective beyond the Observatory platform to examine wider questions about AI's role in environmental understanding. From exploring the evolving landscape of data-driven art and questioning its capacity to respond to global challenges and create the kind of tactile experiences we need to truly connect with our environment; to questioning the hidden environmental costs of digital art creation; to critically examining whether AI can meaningfully contribute to net zero goals or whether it might exacerbate the problems it aims to solve.

Featured
Responding to Global Challenges Through Data-Driven Art 
Responding to Global Challenges Through Data-Driven Art 

Researcher and curator Martin Zeilinger discusses a landscape review of AI art and artists in the context of responding to global challenges through data-driven art.

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Connecting People, Place and Planet: Can Tactile Embodied Experiences be Created Through Digital Technologies? 
Connecting People, Place and Planet: Can Tactile Embodied Experiences be Created Through Digital Technologies? 

Marine Scientist and Geoscience Research Consultant Sophie Mackaness reflects on the opportunities and challenges of building connections between science, art, and people.

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Can AI Clear the Net(Zero)?
Can AI Clear the Net(Zero)?

Can AI be net negative from a climate perspective? University of Edinburgh Data Scientist Dr Daga Panas shares her thoughts on some of the paradoxes of working with big data and powerful algorithms for planetary good. 

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Circular Diffusion
Circular Diffusion

In his essay and collection of images, titled ‘Circular Diffusion’, artist Adam Harvey presents a reflection on the perils and possibilities of Generative AI technologies and their unavoidable relationship to energy and propaganda.

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Interjections

Featured
AI and the Global North/South Divide
AI and the Global North/South Divide

AI can bring benefits globally, but it is energy intensive and, combined with existing inequalities in infrastructure, could reinforce power imbalances. Here, researcher in people environment studies and behavioural modelling, Antonio Ballesteros-Figueroa, reflects on this and on the need for increased participation of local communities in how AI is produced.

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Beyond Human-Centered AI: An Indigenous Framework for Planetary Futures
Beyond Human-Centered AI: An Indigenous Framework for Planetary Futures

Technology entrepreneur and creative leader, Suhair Khan, explores the concept of Indigenous knowledge in relation to AI and planetary futures, and outlines why she agrees with National Geographic Explorer Keolu Fox that the key to harnessing the technology of tomorrow is centering traditions of the past and that 'We should all ask, what would our planet look like in Indigenous hands?'

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Why Does a Responsible Climate Action AI need the Arts and Humanities?
Why Does a Responsible Climate Action AI need the Arts and Humanities?

Cambridge University’s Ramit Debnath explores the potential of Responsible AI (RAI) in addressing global challenges, and explains why social sciences, philosophy, the arts and humanities have a critical role to play in shaping AI system design and presenting us with the best chance of securing a sustainable planetary future.

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Artificial Intelligence, No Longer Sci-Fi
Artificial Intelligence, No Longer Sci-Fi

Now that AI is no longer science fiction, how might embracing it, while recognising its limitations and ethical implications, enable new kinds of creative expression by artists and designers concerned with ethics, justice and sustainability? Futurist artist/designer/engineer Sophia Brueckner shares her thoughts on why artists and designers are necessary to critique and shape the future of AI, and why the reasons to question its use are the very same reasons why artists and designers should engage with it.

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Could AI Destroy the Planet, or Might AI Art and Gaming Save it?
Could AI Destroy the Planet, or Might AI Art and Gaming Save it?

There are reasons to hope that AI can power data-driven insights that can help produce innovative solutions to the climate emergency, touching areas such as energy and water efficiency, biodiversity monitoring, and self-driving vehicles in hard to reach places. There are also real concerns about the climate cost of producing AI models in the first place and about issues such as environmental justice and the exacerbation of power balances. MeshMinds Founder Kay Poh Gek Vasey asks will AI turn out to be a net negative or a net positive for the sustainability of life on the planet – and might AI art and gaming play a part in helping to save the world?

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Vital counterpoints to dominant narratives about AI and environmental futures to guide us in our intrepid explorations and advance the global conversation around the role of AI and the arts in guiding planetary futures.

Conversations

Featured
Video: AWEN – Encountering Climate Emergency (panel discussion)
Video: AWEN – Encountering Climate Emergency (panel discussion)

As part of the New Real’s ‘AWEN’ project in 2021, key members of the multidisciplinary creative team got together online to share their thoughts on why and how the project was conceived and created and on its potential to inspire users to look at their surroundings in a new light and think differently about their environment and their place within it.

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Video: A Journey to Find the Soul of a Sailor
Video: A Journey to Find the Soul of a Sailor

In this video, we explore the journey of the art commission from start to finish.

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Video: Uncanny Machines
Video: Uncanny Machines

Designed to provide transformative AI-fuelled experiences for audiences, and to present works that address key challenges in AI, The New Real’s ‘Uncanny Machines’ project/commission explores how artists can push creative boundaries, how AI can be enriched or challenged by the Arts and the social implications of recent developments in AI.

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Discussions with artists and The New Real community on the space where AI meets art and sustainability.

Endnote

Some thoughts in closing, from The New Real Deputy Director, Matjaz Vidmar.

Featured
Endnote: New Ways of Seeing, New Ways of Acting
Endnote: New Ways of Seeing, New Ways of Acting

…we might use AI not just to measure environmental change, but to help us create more equitable and sustainable futures.


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Magazine Edition Two Editors

Matjaz Vidmar, Amanda Tyndall, Drew Hemment

Design, Production and Project Management

Courtney Bates

Open Journal Systems Management

Rebecca Wojturska, Edinburgh Diamond

Contributors

Antonio Ballesteros-Figueroa, Sophia Brueckner, Inés Cámara Leret, Ramit Debnath, Lex Fefegha, Adam Harvey, Suhair Khan, Sophie Mackaness, Keziah MacNeill, Kay Poh Gek Vasey, Martin Zeilinger, Kasia Molga

Thanks to The New Real Community. The New Real is a partnership between The University of Edinburgh, and The Alan Turing Institute, supported by funding from the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Towards Turing 2.0/EPSRC, Creative Scotland, Scottish AI Alliance, and the Data-Driven Innovation Programme.

Produced by

The New Real

Published by

The University of Edinburgh, 2025

ISSN: 3029-0139 (Online)

Cite as: Matjaz Vidmar, Amanda Tyndall and Drew Hemment, eds. (2025). ‘The New Real Magazine, Edition Two, Planetary Futures: AI, Arts and the Environment’ www.newreal.cc/magazineeditiontwo