The symposium “Botanical/Artificial Intelligence—Thinking about Intelligence through Plants and AI” is a related event to 2025 CCBT artist fellow Kishi Yuma’s Parallel Botanical Garden project.
As part of 2025 artist fellow Kishi Yuma’s project Parallel Botanical Garden, this symposium considers the forms of intelligence that emerge at the intersection of generative AI and plants. Against a backdrop of the language and images that generative AI is now continually producing, questioning the very nature of human creativity, Kishi has focused on the intelligence of plants, which have responded to their environments for millions of years despite not having a brain.
This symposium redefines the contours of intelligence in the modern era, cutting across the three fields of art, technology, and botany. It features specialists in technology and botany, including curator Hasegawa Yuko, who has organized numerous exhibitions related to ecology and art, and provides a forum for a wide-ranging discussion about two different types of intelligence: plant and AI.
For his project in the Art Incubation program, Kishi is developing a platform of botanical intelligence (BI), where art and R&D intersect, interfacing with the behavior of plants to experiment with creative collaboration and dialogue with unknown intelligence. It hypothesizes an image of plant-like intelligence that frees AI from human-centered frameworks and constitutes a form of knowledge that encompasses a whole environment. This symposium explores what intelligence not limited to humans looks like, as well as forms of society, cities, and expression based on that premise.
Access
LIFORK HARAJUKU（1-14-30 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, WITH HARAJUKU 3F）
1 minute walk from Harajuku Station East Exit, 1 minute walk from Meiji-jingumae (Harajuku) Station Exit 2
Parallel Botanical Garden
This project develops “botanical intelligence” (BI), a way of looking at AI from the perspective of botany. Through precise sensing of pluralistic environmental data on light, wind, soil, and more, and adopting a generative BI approach that outputs text and speech, it aims to develop a commons where humans and nonhumans alike can prosper. In addition to showcasing the completed system as an installation in the form of a botanical garden, the project collaborates with experts and holds public lectures and workshops as part of the research and development process. While based at CCBT, the project explores its themes in terms of nature as a resource shared by all beings, and strives to discover a new co-prosperity zone.
CCBT Art Incubation Program
One of CCBT’s core programs, the Art Incubation Program provides opportunities for creative talent to undertake new projects and makes those processes accessible to the public, facilitating forms of artistic expression, exploration, and action that change our city for the better. Selected through an open call, five artist fellows will act as CCBT partners, developing their projects, making the creative process public, exhibiting the results, and holding workshops and talks.
