Alejandro Medina, Class of 2023

Cloud Forest (Ways of Seeing) is a single channel video work that collides the latest advances in computer vision with video footage of a cloud forest in Guatemala (which is amongst the most bio-diverse environments in the world, with many different forms of intelligences cohabiting together) to think through the consistencies and inconsistencies between natural and artificial forms of intelligence. The slow panning footage of the forest is run through different filtering techniques and algorithms that are commonly used in machine learning to train new “intelligences” to see and understand the world around them. the video contemplates how both natural and artificial forms of intelligences might read the world (or learn to read the world) around them through the use of abstraction.

Untitled (Sombra) is a series of photographs that try to consider plant sensing. the images try to imagine the different forms of information/sensing that could potentially be captured by the medium of photography (the pixel) beyond the visual.

Figures is a series of drawings based on extracted pages from the the twenty research papers on climate change with the most citations. in theory these papers are the ones that have had the most influence within scientific discourse (each with more than 5,000 citations), and thus have gone on to influence and largely formulate our understanding of climate change. Once these pages are printed, all traces of legible language are erased from the drawings, only leaving behind the abstract line work of the “figures.” the graphs, diagrams, and visualizations that are used to explain data in these papers. the work tries to point towards the un-graspability of climate change, and the different ways in which data, facts and research from the sciences becomes an abstraction the moment it leaves the spheres of science and academia.

Alejandro Medina is a research-based artist and architect from Guatemala. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and is currently pursuing a Master of Science (MS) in Art, Culture, and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work explores the relationship between humans and nature, particularly through the lens of the architecture and technologies that we build and use; reflecting critically upon our exploitation and manipulation of living systems, non-human beings, and the biosphere at large.