AI in the Ancient Wisdom: Trees, Time, and Technology Exhibit
Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology
Art Exhibit by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg
Jan 22 2026 - April 11 2026:
di Rosa Contemporary Art Museum
Minnesota Street, San Francisco
Artificial Intelligence is a recurring theme in the Ancient Wisdom: Trees, Time, and Technology art exhibit. There are important questions about how corporations exploit copyrighted material to train AI systems; about the reliability of AI that is often prone to “hallucinations”; about AI’s ability to create misleading “deepfakes” for political and economic influence; about AI’s impact on jobs in fields such as illustration, graphic design, and filmmaking; and about potential existential threats to humanity itself if AI continues to advance and its goals diverge from those of human beings.
In Ancient Wisdom, Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain explore the creative potential of AI by using it to create an aerial video portrait of LA and to enable visitors to create a series of customized textual and visual “tree tributes.” In their historical tree ring timelines, Goldberg and Shlain acknowledge the darker potentials of AI by contextualizing it with Adam and Eve’s Faustian bargain to exchange blissful ignorance for the myriad of dangers and difficulties that arise with advances in Western knowledge, science, and technologies such as AI.
Artificial Intelligence and robotics (AI’s corporeal counterpart) have a long history going back to the ancient Egyptians. The modern era of AI was initiated with Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, Can Machines Think? Turing outlined the Turing Test, claiming that a machine should be considered intelligent if during a teletype conversation, it could consistently pass as a human. Most computer scientists agree that ChatGPT has clearly passed the Turing Test; yet profound questions remain about whether or not ChatGPT is truly intelligent. Shlain and Goldberg’s Tree of Knowledge references this ambiguity by including questions such as “What is Knowledge?”, “What is intelligence?”, and “Can Machines Think?” In addition to referencing the story of Adam and Eve, placing these questions into a broader array of questions about philosophy, faith, art, politics, and economics puts the quest for Artificial Intelligence into the larger context of human knowledge and its tradeoffs.
In Abstract Expressions, a historical timeline of significant scientific equations references the history of Artificial Intelligence in at least six places, from Bayes 1763 Theorem about statistical inference, to Shannon’s 1949 definition of Information Theory and Werbos’ 1974 Backpropagation algorithm, to Ken Goldberg’s own equation proving the completeness of robot polygon manipulation (1991), Google’s Pagerank internet search algorithm (1996), and the 2017 equation for the Transformer Network that underlies recent advances in Generative AI.
If We Lose Ourselves explores how for millennia, human knowledge has been stored on and transmitted by trees, which have supplied the paper that made it possible. This tree ring is a record of records, with some of the most important knowledge we’ve accumulated thus far. So if we ever needed to restart civilization, losing our way, these items and places would hold clues. This piece ends with references to ChatGPT.
To create Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum, Goldberg and Shlain’s video homage to Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood Boulevard, the artists worked with researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and GoogleDeepmind to develop new AI classification algorithms for identifying trees from multi-modal sources including aerial and Street View imagery from Google Maps and Google Earth, as well as Los Angeles tree census data and manually collected data. The artists and collaborators at these institutions analyzed this data with new AI techniques that use Graphical Neural Networks. The result was a geographically and biologically accurate depiction of treescapes along four major LA thoroughfares. A new version for the SF exhibit will be based on four major San Francisco streets.
Seeing the Forest is an online participatory installation that Generative AI system from OpenAI to create unique, personalized “Tree Tributes” that include text and video that are generated based on carefully customized AI prompts created by the artists with a student team that combine information about each tree’s unique genus, age, location, and history.
Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain have worked independently for decades as artists and as technologists. At UC Berkeley, Goldberg leads a robotics research lab and is chair of the Berkeley’s AI Research (BAIR) steering committee. He and his students have published over 400 papers on robotics and he is a popular speaker on AI. Shlain has worked with media technology since high school when she was a student ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late ’80s speaking about the potential of personal computers being linked together. When the web formed in the ’90s, she founded the Webby Awards, and she combines state-of-the-art technologies to create original films and events. Both are award-winning artists who use technology to critique and question the status quo as seen in their Emmy-nominated series The Future Starts Here, especially the episodes “Why We Love Robots,” and “Robots, Botox and Google Glass.” (See links to episodes here).
Abstract Expressions, 7’ diameter, 5” deep, Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain