Can AI spawn new ecosystems?
Maddy Minnis - Hallucinated Worlds - Rapresented by MoAa
The Museum of Artificial Art, Exploring how human and synthetic visions intertwine in the collective memory of our time.
Hallucinated worlds — AI visions that evolve into new species, ecosystems, and realities.
Originally from the American Southwest and now living in Central America, Maddy Minnis draws on the amphibious compulsions that drive her to long-term immersions in nature and an iterative process that loops between analog and digital: scanning her photographs, printing, rescanning, and reworking them through AI.
The work is deeply infused with Minnis’s devotion to the natural world, creating a dialogue between lived experience and synthetic imagination — where the pastoral returns not as nostalgia, but as a site where ecological curiosity and reimagination converge, somewhere between valleys uncanny and not.
As climate change erodes the natural world, Minnis uses AI as a collaborator to imagine new species, organisms, and terrains that feel like a fever-dream nature trek. Her practice filters the pastoral tradition — long a site of refuge in art history — through a kaleidoscopic lens. The result is painterly visions where Renaissance allegory collides with speculative biology: our sublime relationship to nature, both its horrific urgency and majestic beauty, melting together in unsettling new worlds.
Minnis uses AI as a collaborator to imagine new species, organisms, and terrains that feel like a nature trek fever dream.
"Before AI I had an existing practice in both motion graphics and photography. They are actually quite counter to each other: one a time-based medium with a digital process and aesthetic, the other just one frame rooted in my experiences outdoors. When I first realized how AI worked and what it was capable of I saw a perfect marriage of these two passions of mine. I felt like I had been embodying these two incongruous mediums and suddenly I found a way to express them together."
N MADDY MINNIS’S PRACTICE, THE NATURAL WORLD IS NOT A LANDSCAPE TO BE OBSERVED BUT A CONSCIOUSNESS TO BE REMEMBERED. HER PROCESS OF LOOPING BETWEEN ANALOG AND DIGITAL — WALKING, PHOTOGRAPHING, RESCANNING, AND FEEDING IMAGERY BACK INTO AI — FORMS A RHYTHM THAT MIRRORS THE CYCLICAL PATTERNS OF NATURE ITSELF. THE RESULTING IMAGES FEEL ALIVE, VIBRATING WITH THE TENSION OF REGENERATION AND DECAY
“The faults are so fascinating and really draw me in.”
I am a walking contradiction and my life has been a balance of opposing forces. I went to art school on an athletic scholarship. I transitioned from climbing the corporate ladder to selling firewood in Pennsylvania. I lived on a 135 acre farm in Tennessee, restarted my career with Dolly Parton’s nonprofit, and started falling in love with photography. On a road trip to New Mexico I knew I was home and found a company looking for a photographer. I told them I had never used a camera before but I can provide motion graphics services while I learn. By some grace they agreed and suddenly I was a pro.