New Earth

“What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home 

The future we once imagined is already unfolding in the present. The reshaping of our world is now reshaping us. Climates shift, species vanish, microplastics permeate our cells — what were once bizarre, distant narratives have seeped into the texture of our daily lives. We stand at the threshold of the Anthropocene, where nature and technology, human and non-human, memory and imagination fuse into what might be called a New Earth.

Perhaps we have never truly inhabited this world alone. We are learning, like children learning to walk, to reacquaint ourselves to this home that is both familiar and strange. As Bruno Latour’s “actor-network” suggests there are no fixed social rules — a forest, an algorithm, and a monsoon wind are all active participants in the fabrication of the world around us. Everything we share is here, now. In an age where artificial intelligence and virtual existence are inseparable from “reality”, the definition of the “non-human” expands. Donna Haraway’s ethics of “companion species” points toward a cybernetic future for this New Earth, in which the subject/master paradigm is foiled and interspecies kinships create new dynamics between culture and nature.

Artists respond to this fluid, catastrophe-prone present with keen sensitivity, elemental materials and cutting‑edge technologies. Michael Najjar merges photography, climate data and natural scenery into visual allegories. Examining new climate technologies and the changing planet his work digitally recomposes glacial textures, rising sea levels, and urban greenery into post-natural tableaus. Wendi Yan’s Visions of Phosphine Earth explores the reverie, visually and metaphysically, of a research-based fictional planet harboring life in its sulphuric clouds. Shi Zheng nests AI‑generated climate imagery within melting ice, letting the machine layer prophecy onto traces of time. Joey Xia renders solar energy visible through locally‑patterned fabric; Zhifan draws poetic clues between primordial landforms, human architecture and cosmic imagination. Matthew Brandt uses water of lakes he photographs to develop his images- an unusual alchemic process whereby haunting results allude to degradation and contamination; Wang Yuyan’s perceptive edits translate the melancholic nostalgia of artificial nature into a fluid visual syntax. Amy Yao subjects fresh flowers to 3D scanning to expose the rift between technological perception and the elusive qualities of nature; Maik Wolf cross circuits nature and the computational space with painterly strokes that reveal digital signifiers emergent in a snow covered forest; Lebbeus Woods and Lore Vanelslande use both chaos theory and sacred geometry to interrogate cosmic energies in nature and highlight mankind’s architectural domination over it; Nik Kosmas harnesses a pencil drawing of an AI generated “flower” in a streamlined industrial frame showing that, in the future, nature just might exist in fabricated contexts.

Like the roots of an ancient tree, these artists offer conduits into the many dimensions of our New Earth. This exhibition carries the spirit of Ursula Le Guin’s ideal — that even as we journey into the wider world, we are always coming home. As the initiation song in her book invites:

Please bring strange things.

Please come bringing new things.

Let very old things come into your hands.

Let what you do not know come into your eyes.