THE OVERLAY by Inés Cámara Leret

The Overlay by Inés Cámara Leret

One of five artistic experiments forming part of The New Real Observatory platform – a creative AI platform combining raw satellite data and climate modelling with AI processing engines.

The Overlay explores the construction and artificiality of localised representations of nature. The work references Disney's "go away green”: a colour engineered to hide unsightly yet necessary objects in theme parks. Cámara Leret has collaborated with an AI processing engine fine-tuned on images of greenery and built environments to reveal hues of green for local neighbourhoods. The multi-component artwork features a digital interface that allows anyone to find their localised green for anywhere on Earth, recoloured objects from a traditional fairground ride, and a multi-channel film in which a local hue is fabricated by Spain’s last living colourist and assimilated by the local community in its material form.

Inés Cámara Leret is interested in the impact of technology in both enabling and hindering our understanding of, and therefore our relationship with, the environment. In The Overlay, she explores the entanglements that arise when translating global narratives to local environments through colour.

The artist uses The New Real Observatory platform to generate the colour through the interplay of the location, a future value for the vegetation index and an image dataset. She is interested in how the data stream of vegetation decide the deviation from ‘abstract’ hue. A colour is calculated by an AI that has been trained to identify the hue that lies in-between greenery and built environments. The work follows attempts at making this hue tangible locally and the entanglements that arise in doing so.

A first iteration of The Overlay was a physical and in-person installation at the Edinburgh Science Festival in April 2022.

The second iteration launched The Overlay as a multi-component artwork featuring a digital interface that allowed anyone to find their localised green for anywhere on Earth at ARS Electronica 2022 and as a digital experience.

The Overlay Digital Experience

The New Real invites you to both experience and be part of The Overlay digital experience and research by contributing your answers and session data (through a wee cookie). Choose the link on the right to go straight to digital experience or choose the link on the left to take part in our research. If you select the latter you will still be able to opt out.

Part of The New Real Observatory

How can AI be made more easily usable in tools and systems for the creative sector, to connect science and data to applications and impacts in the real world? In New Real Observatory, artists, scientists and festivals together explore the potential for creativity and cutting edge AI to build better futures for people and the planet, and answer the urgent challenges of COVID-19 and the climate emergency. Five artistic prototypes informed the development of a prototype climate AI platform combining raw satellite data and climate modelling with AI processing engines.

Inés Cámara Leret was instrumental to developing the concept for The New Real Observatory platform, following her participation as lead artist in the previous project, AWEN.

An artistic encounter with AI and climate futures

Cámara Leret envisions an experience that will be visually gripping, immersive, poetic and sprinkled with hints of humour/playfulness. Her hope is that the work is able to help further understanding of AI, and its digital literacy for the general public. This better understanding may allow some to see how AI is already part of their daily lives and may encourage some to engage with AI more actively.

The artist is interested in ways colour has been engineered in the culture industries, and the new possibilities opened up by artificial intelligence. The Overlay reflects on the ‘data driven’ nature of our relationship with the environment within our current ecological crisis and the implications of such. The work draws inspiration from how the colour is employed to influence perception as well as the impact this has on our cultural and environmental imaginaries. Enabled by an AI that has calculated a neighbourhood’s local green, the work juxtaposes this form of intelligence and learning with that of local craftsperson Antonio Sánchez referred to as ‘Spain’s last colourist’, who is asked to recreate this colour using traditional colour making methods.

A creative journey

“(…)not feelings against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.”

I came across Raymond William’s text “Structures of feeling” where William’s reflects upon how meanings and values are felt stating that these structures are “elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships.” This led me to explore the existing tensions between the global interpretations of the environment, often mediated by technologies like AI, and practical experience, where material and sensorial ways of knowing predominate.

I was drawn to explore these ideas chromatically through green due to its intimate relationship with promethean environmental myths as well as it’s versatile symbolism: often used to depict the environment, as well as environmental movements (ie. Greenpeace, Save the planet, Green Fridays) but also highly volatile, poisonous and destructive used regularly in warfare (ie. camouflage, chlorine or uranium).

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Inés Cámara Leret (b.1990, Madrid) lives and works in London and Madrid. Cámara Leret is inspired by the transformative nature of materials, the methodologies used to understand these and the relations that arise. Exploring life through that which is unseen, portrayed as static or seemingly ephemeral, Cámara Leret works across disciplines. In doing so, Cámara Leret nurtures long-term collaborations that create expanded networks and bridge traditional and academic ways of knowing. Cámara Leret has developed works in a variety of environments, from labs to museums, and produced work across multiple scales, from micro-sculptures to experiential installations and walks.

Recent exhibitions include: Photosphere at Somerset House London, (2019), Theretofor at Copperfield Gallery (2020); Weather the Weather as part of Being Human Festival (2020). Cámara Leret has been an artist in residence at Somerset House Studios (2015-2018); MUSAC (2017) and at King’s College London (2019-2020).

THE OVERLAY by Inés Cámara Leret