At Amant, ‘Sentient Earth’ Redirects the Corporate Gaze to Climate Change

Editor’s note: This story is the first edition of Link Rot, a column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet. The column will appear every other Monday.

Recently, the news has been full of diagrams of the Earth, appearing with a wide, red gash across its side, and accompanied by graphs detailing the extreme situation: This year’s El Niño, the regular, climactic pattern in which Pacific Ocean winds shift and water temperatures rise, is breaking records before the peak of its cycle in November.

As meteorologists report, the ocean has heated by 3.08 degrees [Celsius] above its global average, promising consequences for precipitation patterns. Meaning, among else, an intense El Niño that will bring flooding, droughts, and heat related deaths. Yet, this is hardly news. We’ve come to expect a daily glut of catastrophic predictions that have come to grim fruition. In a context of helplessness—in the face of the reliably awful intensification of climate impacts—can art disrupt or reframe how we understand this crisis? “Sentient Earth,” a new show at Brooklyn’s Amant, attempts an answer.

“I think we all can feel it, we’re a bit over the Anthropocene discussion,” said Tobi Maier, head curator at Amant and lead on “Sentient Earth” .

“We didn’t want to simply document extraction or point a finger at the viewer and blame them for global warming or the Anthropocene,” he said.

The question for Maier was how to invite viewers into a dialogue about extraction that was grounded in posthumanist thought, machine intelligence, and algorithmic self-awareness. “Sentient Earth” on view at Amant until February 14th, is a deep investigation of the capitalist techniques of measurement and propaganda that facilitate planetary transformations.

Twenty-eight artists have contributed pieces to the show, including Eliza Evan’s All the Way to Hell (2020), which features core samples taken from a three-acre mineral property that Evan has fractionalized into 8,000 parcels, forcing mining companies to negotiate each parcel; and The Earth’s Tarry Dreams of Insurrection Against the Sun (2010), by the New York- and Paris-based art collective Bernadette Corporation, which appropriates a viral live feed from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The show also includes relevant artifacts, like a 1980s-era Portuguese board game called Petróleo. These works, and others, seek to expose the gaze of corporations as they measure the Earth in order to extract from it.

Ignacio Gatica’s series Sunsets (2024), for example, depicts colorful scenes of the sun setting and rising over a mountain range. These visual elements represent live financial data on the future prices of minerals extracted across Latin America—meaning the prices assigned based on how much the minerals are expected to be worth—such as copper from Chile or lithium from Bolivia, and traded on the commodities market.The position of the sun denotes the time zone, and the mountain range is a graph of price. Gatica borrowed the symbology from Lebanese poet and artist Etel Adnan, whose paintings employ the simple lines of a sun, the sea, and mountains but whose poetry is deeply engaged with political violence in the Middle East.

“Adnan’s work is a meditation on a landscape that is continuously disappearing,” Gatica said in a phone call. “The dichotomy of her images is something I wanted reflected in my own work, the code and its representative image, the material components it describes, like copper, and the materials the work is made out of.”

Gatica drew especially from Adnan’s work on Mount Tamalpais in the Bay Area, a landscape she loved, but one that would eventually host the technological industries that today manufacture the military technology deployed against Lebanon and across the Middle East.

Output 0971 (2025), from Simon Denny’s “Machine Painting” series, uses the visual language of contemporary artificial intelligence and weaponry companies to comment on data extraction—specifically how that data is leveraged to create these massively profitable companies.

“I’m interested in the stories that are woven by the people making the technology that we end up using,” Denny said. “It’s hard to parse what’s mythology and what’s truth when we’re confronting machine learning, it’s really unfamiliar even to those actors who are building it. This is why myth making is so important in the tech space. How does all of this become familiar and normalized?”

When Denny recognized that these companies were borrowing from the Italian Futurist movement that glorified technological triumph over nature, he began training a generative AI model on images of Italian Futurist paintings and the advertising imagery used by defense tech companies. He then used an inkjet printer and a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine, typically used in industrial settings, fitted with a paintbrush to create the work’s various layers. The result is a copy of a copy of a copy: the trace and distillation of a visual language that glorifies technology from its industrial roots to its advanced, data-driven form today.

The centerpiece of “Sentient Earth” is Yuyan Wang’s video installation Green Grey Black Brown (2024). Installed on a bed of astroturf, the video is composed of found footage: a tree releasing all of its pollen in one massive, snot-colored cloud; people spraying green paint over dried grass; a black river of tar flowing through a sand dune. The piece is the result of a trip Wang made to a region in southern China that produces synthetic nature: fake rocks, plastic flowers and trees, and rolls of green astroturf.

“Visually it was very uncanny, it was like nature was this mass produced commodity made out of plastic and other recycled synthetic chemicals,” said Wang. “This place gave me the idea to begin a visual investigation into this afterlife of nature, its synthetic life as a visual template.”

Like Gatica and Denny, Wang relied on appropriation to build her work. The footage is a spliced collection of promotional materials made by manufacturers of synthetic nature products, along with YouTube clips. The result is so bizarre that it’s easy to assume some or all of the footage was AI-generated, when in reality it is the product of Wang’s countless hours spent sifting through footage. In the process, Wang felt her own capacity for parsing data expand.

“It’s a therapeutic process to use my body to confront this infinite content. It comes from a really primitive desire to use your body like a filter, like you try to survive by developing a new kind of organ to help you to metabolize, Wang said. “The body becomes a sensor or instrument that allows me to be more attentive to a weaker signal which is neglected by the machine logic, something may have been overlooked or left over or left outside the dominant circulation of attention.”

As artists aim to understand the contemporary nature of extraction, they have developed their own forms of gathering and synthesizing data. “Sentient Earth” is a stunning portrait not of the Earth’s collapse, but of the entities driving it.